It has long been the case that American women are generally more liberal than American men. But among young Americans, this gender gap has widened into an enormous rift: According to recent Gallup polling, there is aĀ 30-point differencebetween the number of women age 18ā30 who self-identify as liberal and the number of men in that demographic who do the same.
Thatās largely because young women have gottenĀ muchĀ more liberal, while young men have stayed ideologically more consistentāor, according to other analyses, become more conservativeĀ and anti-feminist. (Of course, not every person identifies as a man or woman. But gender roles still play a big part in shaping our lives and politics, and in the context of this column, I am focusing mostly on the vastĀ majority of AmericansĀ who identify as one or the other.) Itās not happening just here either; the political divide between the sexes is a trend thatĀ researchers are observingĀ in some other countries too.
Thatās the point, it doesnāt. But popular discourse pretends that it does in the inverse, that talking about abused men somehow weakens womenās rights.
As the culture war goes, the right tells men they get to become either a head of a happy family with a loving wife and kids who give meaning to your blood sweat and tears in your hard work, or they tell you that you get to become a hedonistic macho guy using and abusing all that male privilege.
What does the left tell you? For women, they have the āsuccessful single girlbossā trope to aspire to, or even the āhardworking single momā thing. As a man who is supposed to catch on to the liberal side of the culture war, what is my role in society?
Even the term ātoxic masculinityā sucks as a lot of people misunderstand it as āsocietal woes caused by menā, using it as a cudgel telling men that they are the cause for whatever way society sucks.
Look, thatās exactly the problem. It is only okay to help men as a byproduct of something that helps women. Just look at domestic violence again. Letās say that the rates at which men experience domestic violence as a victim is not underreported for various reasons. There are still men out there being victimized. Are there any shelters out there for men?
I didnāt bring it up, the article did. What I came away with was that both sides sucked they both are abusers, but a lot of media either only covers one side or the other, depending on what they want to say. My point is that they brought up the case, and they took a side, and they took the side of an abuser. If they took the opposite side, that would still be taking the side of an abuser.
I was watching a video about the phenomenon of men getting more conservative - which is happening globally - and one of the men who is doing a lot of work on improving it said that men can take on roles of caretakers and househusbands because those are possible now.
To me, that rings a bit hollow because for decades women have been struggling to get out of those roles because theyāre not respected by society regardless of who does them. Saying that men now have the option to take them on doesnāt feel like a solid argument.
They made a lot of interesting points and covered a lot of reasons why men and boys are falling behind, especially in education, but that part felt like he hadnāt thought it the whole way through.