One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others? The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up
I don’t think this is surprising. The Western left has not presented an attractive, or even a coherent and well-articulated vision of what further leftwards social progress would look like for non-LGBT men as a group. I don’t think it’s irrational for someone to favor a defined present or past over an unknown future.
Speaking with some of the younger and unmarried members of my male peer group, many of them are confused and disillusioned with the rules and expectations around social interactions shifting arbitrarily around them and being forced to navigate them without much guidance or support. Moreover, we’ve now identified many social ills that men are victims of but those seem to be slower to be addressed. For example, men are something like 1/3rd of domestic violence victims but the vast majority of support structures and discourse around domestic violence address female victims.
I think we as leftists need to at least present some sort of coherent and well thought out idea of what it will mean to be a man in a socialist future. We don’t have to pander to them, or promise them concessionary preservation of patriarchal elements, but we’d win a lot more men over to our cause if we could tell them what their lives would look like in a socialist future.
like… what western left…
and like what do cishet men want that other people don’t want? a big tiddy dommy mommy goth gf? their childish fixations to be validated? sorry gavin, there’s a new hot free to play game on steam and it’s called Being an Adult. how about you form your politics around hope for the future existence of this planet, a decent standard of living for all, building power in your workplace, and an ecstatic liberation of desire unmediated by the spectacle?
my real, compassionate advice to Men writ large is stop conceiving of yourself as someone who is destined to suffer. no one was meant to live like this, not even you. and paint your fucking nails for once in your life.
Schrodinger’s left. We exist when we argue that people and politicians should listen to us, but don’t exist when it’s time to hear criticism.
Well I’m an Asian cis man living in the West so from my own experience it’d be really nice if media and pop culture stopped portraying us as inflexible patriarchal traditionalists on the one hand and desexualized enuchs on the other. It’d also be really cool if “no Asians” (in relation to Asian men exclusively) was not apparently an acceptable thing for women and gay men to write on their dating profiles and express in public. I’m sure other cis men also have some issues specific to them and their existence as men that they would like to be addressed which I’m not privy to because I’m not them.
I’m not saying that addressing women’s issues and LGBT issues isn’t a priority but the kind of pointless hostility that you expressed in your post is likely a material reason why some young men reject leftist political and social thought.
Edit:
I just want to add that “grow the fuck up” and “man up and deal with it” are expressions of toxic masculinity which are used to crush men trying to express their feelings and develop actual emotional maturity that isn’t just bottling it up until it explodes. If we are against toxic masculinity (as we all should be) I don’t think it’s good to turn around and use it’s tools and language when it happens to suit us.
like i understand how the default neurosis now is “oooh, men are trash so everyone is gonna hate more for being one” but like that is not rational and isn’t something that you will actually encounter. you can just talk to women. be nice to them. that’s the main thing. you can talk to other men too. practice doing that, and not just in a way where you’re trying to impress them with how you are also a man.