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Notes -
The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty. The conclusions should be familiar to the Motte's CW crowd and I'll be diving into them in this post. What is striking and, even better, plainly quantitative, is how just how far apart young men and women are on some issues. In several cases, it's 30+ point gaps. Anecdatally, I'm seeing and hearing similar division. That the WSJ is leading with this also shows how it is now firmly in normie discussion circles.
I've always thought that the true risk to American society wasn't a breakdown in race relations, but in
gendersex relations. This is because of the plain fact that you need the opposite sexes to get along to continue families, communities, the nation, society as a whole.I've tried to break it out below.
The Issues
The WSJ highlights the following issues as most divisive to least, first with those issues that women are more in favor of:
Those with the biggest gaps the opposite way, where men approve of the issue moreso than women, are (again, in descending order):
Instead of thinking about these in terms of the issues themselves, I've decided to be a little more cultural war-y (because that's. why. we. are. here!) and interpret these issues thusly;
Now, for the Men:
How We Got Here
That's how the issues stand today. I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask "how we got here" over the past few voting and CW cycles.
For Men, I think much or all of this can be traced first to MeToo and second, to its slightly less witch-hunty successor, DEI. One guy in the article says he feels like there are purity tests on the left that are used to berate men into compliance. The article itself also says that many right-wing men don't talk about their views with women for fear of retaliation or other social consequences.
It's hard to overstate how deeply MeToo hit society. I was working a BigCorp gig at the time and it was very common to hear tips from male coworks at happy hours after work about never having a one-on-one with a female subordinate or, at least, doing it out in the open where other people can see the whole encounter. It was the first time I had heard of the Mike Pence rule. I've always looked at MeToo as a weird attempt at bloodletting by Hollywood that morphed into witch trials. There was nothing in the way of sincere attempts to improve male-female professional relationships, just a lot of virtue signalling and subtle actions taken to guarantee against false accusations (see above). The net result on a lot of men was to, I think, begin to question if "the left" and its various causes were simply new ways of trying to tear men down. Another guy in the article states, "It would seem the white male is the enemy of the Left."
For the young women, their quotes bring up (a) Trump being boorish and gross dating to the 2016 election and (b) Dobbs. Again, the "abortion rights" messaging intentionally conflates a complex issue about the start of human life (which Americans are notoriously conflicted and contradictory on) with a more easy to handle and generically adaptable "women's rights." This is why you see it rebranded as "reproductive rights" most often. If it's about just You versus "they" (who are always all male) it's an ease fight to jump into. If it's about more than that, I think women - being generally intelligent - do stop and think to consider the complexity. The media scored a massive win in portraying Dobbs as "taking away the right to abortion."
Trump's amplification of male boorishness ("Grab her by the pussy", "Only Rosie O'Donnell" etc.) is probably the most generation-centric issue in the article. I'm just elder millenial enough to remember the concepts of "boy talk" and "girl talk" growing up (shout out to Melania). Any guy who's ever been in an all male group outside of a professional one (so, a sports team, military, etc.) knows how gross yet hilarious those conversations can get. That kind of speech, however, doesn't go outside of the invisible walls. Guys speak in such over-the-top ways in locker rooms etc. as a way to signal in-group loyalty and build cohesion, but they understand it can and should only take place in those places. This exactly what Trump was doing on that access Hollywood tape. He was making a goofy gross joke to a fawning idiot who was going to laugh at whatever Trump said. He didn't say it at the Met Gala. I think that the outrage was most acute for younger women shows that a whole generation grew up without any awareness whatsoever that differently sexed styles of language exist.
The article also brings up the Kavanaugh hearings. This is strange to me. I always though the Dr. Ford testimony was both contentless and pretty obviously manufactured in a "repressed memory" pseudo-science way.
Boys and Girls are Different
The issues, and my interpretation of them, point to what should be an obvious truth. Men and Women have physical and cognitive differences across their normal distributions. This manifests in society and social reinforcement and, ultimately, results in different relative rankings of shared values. I believe Men and Women largely share the exact same values but rank them in different orders and with different weights placed on them.
Men still intrinsically respect strength and are suspicious of weakness or incompetence. Biden had to drop out of the race because everyone, but especially men, were thinking "no way can this guy lead the country for another four years. He does know what planet he's on." As soon as there are questions about your competency - you're toast. You can be an asshole (although I believe you shouldn't be) so long as you can get the job done.
The Trump assassination attempt probably solidified some male voters who may have been "holding their nose" in the Trump camp. See Zuckerberg calling it "badass". Trump popping up with blood on his face shouting, "fight, fight, fight" hits most guys right in the Papua-New-Guinea-Kill-The-Neighboring-Tribe lizard brain. It's watching your team spike the football in the endzone times four million raised to the power of NAVY-SEALs-KILLED-BIN-LADEN.
A basic male pattern in groups is to defer to the "natural leader." Interesting how often that correlates to height, perceived physical capability, a deep voice, and an outgoing and kind of domineering personality. Trump is maxed out in all of those non-physical traits and that explains so much of his attraction.
Women value this too (remember what I lead with) but there does come a limit in which the domineering personality becomes overbearing, tone deaf, and, at its worse, abusive. Still - better He tends towards jerk than wimp.
A key quote from the article is “Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline.” Couldn't agree more and half of my comments here have been about the destruction of masculinity models for boys in the West. Female centric views of childhood, safetyism, and "play nice" strips boys of this and has for some time. ADHD or just rambunctious boys are getting classified as special needs.
Rather than try to find some sort of balance, I think it's accurate to say the Left has leaned harder into this. The entire concept of "toxic masculinity" is mostly about finding ways to make male behavior that may be offensive to female sensibilities actually reprehensibly immoral. Returning to Trump's boorish language, I am all for calling it out as unpolite, but making the jump to "advocate for sexual assault" is hyperbolic. And this gets to the core of the issue; the extreme liberal faction of the Democrat party not only looks down on traditional male behavior, they want to make it so beyond the pale as to be effectively criminal. MeToo ended the careers of several men who were guilty of nothing more than being awkward jackasses who didn't understand how to flirt. Is that worth one Harvey Weinstein? Tell me in the comments.
Swinging back to female relative values. I see a sensitivity to the prevention of harm (manifested in fear emotion heavy issues like global warming) as well as an appeal to authority (the state) to strictly guarantee certain highly personal values. This is best captured in the "women's rights" meta-issue. Is this a reference to abortion? voting rights (if so, how)? Non-strictly governmental issues like pay equality? I don't think it matters, I think it's designed to me a flexible mapping point. Whatever you think is the women's rights issue is correct. All you have to agree on is that "They" (white republican Men) are coming for it. There are two quotes from interviewed women that reveal this:
“What we’re worried about is our rights being taken away,”
“If I had to guess why a lot of women are leaning very strongly toward more liberal issues, it’s that we’re afraid.”
Fear. Protection. "Somebody should do something!"
I think this really does women a disservice. It's the same as politicians who essentially use a narrative of emasculation to get men behind them. You've seen this a lot in Trump speeches going back to 2016. "They're taking our jobs" speaks to a hard-wire male perspective on providership. But politicians love an emotionally resonant hack. They won't change tactics anytime soon.
J.D Vance got into some hot water after his "cat lady" comments reappeared. I do think this was an unforced error. "Virgin" is used as an insult to Men and "old hag" and all of its varieties are used to belittle women. Sexual capability is still a big deal and so going after it is a low blow and will trigger a lot of hot resentment even in those not targeted. When a guy is emasculated, all guys feel it even if it isn't happening to them. When a women is targeted for being "the old hag" women can feel how that lands even if they are out of harms way. Vance would do better to focus on something that is tangible to women but not so personally direct - children. "The left wants to indoctrinate your kids" has been winning (see Youngkin in VA).
The above leads us too...
Are We Really Talking About Sex?
"Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men."
I'll pair the above with the fact that both of the women pictured in the WSJ piece are overweight. One, in a green and white dress, is obese.
To what extent are these resentments based in sexual frustration in both directions? I'll offer the opinion, which should be no surprise, that I think it's more about differences in relative value preferences. I don't think we're a nation of genocidal incels and femcels. If anything, I might point the finger more at social media and online spaces creating echo chambers and infinite positive-feedback loops yet divorcing users further and further from normie reality.
Yet, sex is important and young men and young women want it. The politics (literal and figurative) of dating certainly haven't gotten any less complex over the years - and they now definitely involved literal politics. But it's signalling all the way down. Am I really offended that this guy taking me out for a $134 meal is a Trump supporter? No, I'm worried he won't be able to effectively prioritize my emotional needs in the relationship. Am I disgusted that this girl I'm going to SoulCycle with is wearing her Pussy Hat? No, I'm worried she'll hector me to death if I say "retarded" once at home.
I think there’s another reason for the environmental and student loan gap between men and women. It’s the level of interaction with the economy that drives those divisions. For a man his interaction with the economic system is “I have to get a good job or be a failure.” This makes men a lot less willing to slow the economy for the environment, and much more likely to choose economically viable majors. For a woman interaction with the economy isn’t about success and survival, it’s about prestige in some sense. They don’t have to care about the money as much (that’s their husband’s job) so they tend to cluster in aspirational positions and fun arty jobs and so on. Those jobs aren’t needed and aren’t necessarily subject to the constraints of the government. They also don’t pay that well, despite women getting 4-year degrees to qualify for them. So women want out from under the loans, obviously. And because they’re not doing work that would be harmed by the government enforcement of environmental regulations, they don’t need to stop them.
I think the education-industrial-complex is probably the driver of the vast majority of these gaps. The male experience in school has become increasingly miserable. And their opinions of the opinions of the overwhelmingly female/feminine teacher class is reflecting a rebellion from those views. Whereas school is now the ultimate feminized environment where traditional female status games are the primary ones that are allowed to exist and are directly encouraged by authority figures.
Compounding this, the specific choices men and women make of which area of education they pursue and what economic prospects those have select women to be more burdened by debt.
And women are vastly overrepresented in the "social work" jobs eligible for loan forgiveness, which in retrospect was obviously a "free college for party members" giveaway.
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Agree, but that is probably also a subset of the issue I am trying to highlight. School is not fun for boys. Thus, only the high achieving boys, or those with a specific interest elect to continue with it. School for girls is like being in water for fish. They can just kind of mindlessly continue through the system with no real goal. So some major, any major, serves the purpose of them getting an organized sit and talk session.
I mean, the actual reality here is it turns out, women are actually much better at the type of schooling initially dominated by boy's for decades - aka, sit at a desk and listen to a teacher for hours upon hours, which even with whatever changes to pedagogy there have been, still seems to be the prominent way education is done, except maybe now there's a few more computer screens.
It's interesting how there wasn't there criticism of this type of schooling when men were 70% of college students - no, the boys were just told to sit down and listen instead of being given excuses by conservatives.
Back when men were 70% of college students, the men who actually made it there were also the kinds of men who were actually high achievers and would benefit from that.
College was far from mandatory for any job- you could quit at Grade 10 (or earlier, in some cases) and still expect to make a reasonably decent living. Men (and women) for whom additional schooling would not help could just... leave, and be a full-fledged adult at 16 (which gives them far greater time to achieve their goals and become more mature). Now we have grade inflation and people now need a college degree to receive government-mandated UBI (i.e. workers employed in the education-managerial complex) because high school graduation rates became a target and thus ceased to be a good measure of graduate competence.
My dad did this (in the late 70s) and was able to support a family of five (in the 80s and 90s) on just his single income.
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Start making evaluation of students at school track objective measures of learning instead of whether the teacher vibes with the kid, and maybe you'd have a point. As it stands, boys significantly outperform girls on standardized tests, particularly at the top end. It's likely the abandonment of objective standards that students can fairly compete over is a major part of why boys are disengaging (and also explains the collapse of the college wage premium). It's not surprising that when you turn school into a question of who can flatter a teacher and
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Boys still score higher than girls on standardized tests and other objective measures. They just do worse when you include subjective assessments of their abilities.
Is homework a subjective measure? IIRC girls, especially teenagers, do a lot better at getting their homework done and turning in assignments on time. Granted, a typical middle school homework assignment is not some tough test of intelligence- it's more like "read a chapter of the book, then write a paragraph of plot summary to prove that you did actually read it." But then, that's what a lot of real-life work assignments are like too- "do what i tell you, get it done, don't complain about being bored."
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Except the systems and the goals are completely different. In the old days, yes, the boys were told to sit their asses down and listen, for the period of time that class was. But class was shorter, intermissions longer, and rough play was allowed during the intermissions. In addition, a GOAL of the old system was kicking kids out. A huge attrition rate is desirable because only a small % of people were expected to continue on with school. It would be a waste for Jimmy to keep going to school forever when he's going to work on the farm anyways.
In many ways, the failure of our current system is the lack of attrition, particularly among the girls. But I'd think halving the number of boys currently in university and cutting girls to about that number would be a huge improvement.
But if the system says attrition is bad, it should look at the causes of attrition.
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There's lots of arguments you could make there as to the content and framework of education. Things didn't used to be this dominated by administrative minutiae and social games. Men thrive in straightforwardly competitive environments, which used to be provided for in schooling and was specifically de-emphasized through reform.
You can't really deny cultural changes so mainstream that they get Simpsons episodes made about them.
But who cares for this pointless score keeping anyhow. It used to work for men, and now it doesn't. Why and how do we fix it? Mocking them isn't helping answer that question.
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This is exactly the sort of reflexive sneering that shows there's no argument to justify your position beyond "haha you have no power to stop us hurting your children, and we do it because it's funny to us".
Nor is there any concern for "fairness", which was just tactical rhetoric until you were in a position to jeer at the kids your policies hurt.
All those arguments about "implicit bias" go right out the window when studies show teachers are biased against a group you want to torture for fun, because your "concerns" about bias were only ever an excuse for power to hurt people.
The experience of interacting with leftists and learning about how they behave has been horrific. Like hearing a voice crying for help in the woods, only to come face to face with a giant spider mimicking human speech to ambush prey.
Is there even any motivation to the entire ideology beyond sheer pointless malice?
As I said last thread, he's doing you the service of taking the mask off. They know what they're going to do, they're going to do it, and if you won't accept their thinly-veiled justifications, they'll just use force; they are in no way scrupulous about that.
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