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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male?

The assumption that this is a starkly gender divided issues always struck me as strange. The most extreme pro-life people I've met, and I was raised catholic with plenty of outside of mass church crowd interactions, have always been women. Now maybe women are just more hot on the subject on both sides and women skew democrat while men skew republican so there could be a gender skew just from that but there are definitely rabidly pro-life women that these ads could be trying to reach.

At least in polling, it's been pretty consistent since the 60's or 70's that the percent of men/women for/against abortion have been pretty close. In the most recent polling from Pew women are 5% more likely to be pro-choice/5% less likely to be pro-lifr, but this has fluctuated over the years/depending on the poll and has even been reversed at times.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/#h-views-on-abortion-by-gender-2022

The assumption that this is a starkly gender divided issues always struck me as strange

Not when you consider that the chief rhetorical tactic of the side that has cultural hegemony is to insist that being anti-abortion is a male predilection (tied to power or some more malicious patriarchal goal).

Hear it enough and it has an impact.

It seems strange to me that people with access to good quality polling take their own medicine on the idea.

Now maybe women are just more hot on the subject on both sides and women skew democrat while men skew republican so there could be a gender skew just from that but there are definitely rabidly pro-life women that these ads could be trying to reach.

From the discussions of long-term polling I've seen, this is right. There's not much of a split between men and women on the object level issue--women are slightly more pro-abortion than men, but only slightly--but there is a measurable intensity difference. Women are more likely to land in the "strongly [pro-/anti-] abortion" category than men.

(I think this might be a polling artifact, though. One of the major cultural arguments made is "this is a women's issue; men should sit in a corner," and it's plausible that would impact expressed-intensity to pollsters.)