BRIDGING THE GAP

How the very same societal pressures drive young women left and young men right.

By Afua Hirsch

Something is shifting around me. Take my friend Elise. When she married Justin around 15 years ago, it seemed like she’d found her person. They had so much in common: young, Black, working-class Londoners from the same generation—early millennial—who’d done well academically and built promising, creative careers. Elise ran her own small company, and Justin was becoming a talented TV editor. When I met them, we had small children of similar ages. Elise and I would share stories about both the joy of motherhood and the strain it placed on our relationships. So far, so predictable. But then things started to change.

Justin began to deploy what Elise calls “weaponized incompetence.” He would feed their son, but with junk food instead of cooking. He would collect him from nursery, but arrive 30 minutes late. He would promise to be home when she was out late working, but then remember at the last minute that he had to be somewhere too, leaving no childcare arranged and her taking the fall. It got to the point where Elise gave up asking for Justin’s support because he was so bad at giving it.

He was no better at work, either. Maybe he was suffering from depression. Maybe the racism that nearly all Black men in the workplace experience became too much. Instead of asking for help, or planning life changes, he began to pour his energy into resenting Elise. And the more she overcompensated for all the things he wasn’t doing—taking care of domestic work, providing financially, supporting her emotionally—the more he resented her. Things came to a head when she needed to travel for a work trip and he wouldn’t stay home with their son. He had decided to visit a friend abroad, he said.

Justin and Elise separated. But having no money of his own, Justin moved into a flat that Elise owns. She had bought it before they met, for rental income, because as a small business owner, she knew she needed multiple sources. Now inhabited by him, paid for by her, it’s just another on her long list of outgoings. He sees their child occasionally, but not with enough regularity to count as parenting or even childcare. He spends his time in the “manosphere”—the online community where men find common grievances in the way the world no longer seems to serve them.

I think of Justin when I read reports about the “gender divergence” that’s opening up between men and women of the same generation. And those reports are bewildering. In the UK, boys believe “reverse discrimination”—where women’s gains have become their losses—is harming their prospects. This sense of grievance is like a gateway drug to a whole smorgasbord of right-wing politics: anti-immigration and anti-public services, even though many of these same young men have benefited from both those policies. In recent elections in Britain, young men aged 18 to 24 were twice as likely to vote for far-right or right-wing parties. Young women were twice as likely to vote for the progressive Green party.

In the US, after decades of roughly equal gender distributions of liberal and conservative views, it has taken only six years for a stunning gap to open up. American women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. Young American men are voicing their grievance at a perceived—and real—change in status. Although they still far out-earn women, their incomes have fallen in the last 40 years. “Guys who reported that they felt a sense of economic uncertainty of their future were the ones more likely to believe that, you know, feminism had gone too far,” says Equimundo’s president, Gary Barker, whose Center for Masculinities and Social Justice found that more than 40 percent of young men trust one or more misogynistic voices online.

The trend is widespread. Germany also has a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18 to 21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

In South Korea, groups like Man on Solidarity, which have large social media followings and organize street protests, taunt women for having “masculine” hair and bodies, and shout, “Out with man-haters! Feminism is a mental illness!” Their views are beginning to be assimilated by mainstream politicians, unwilling to alienate a young, male voter base.

“In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women,” a recent piece in the Financial Times reported. “Gen Z is two generations, not one,” writes the leading researcher on the “Great Gender Divergence,” Alice Evans.

Seeking to understand how one generation could be so divided along gender lines, I watched videos in the UK where thoughtful young men were interviewed alongside their female friends. “Women [are] more rational, whereas young men [are] more influenced by what others think,” said one. His girlfriend agreed: “We are more strong-minded these days and more independent… I don’t think a lot of men like that.”

I was raised by women who were products of second-wave feminism. They married, worked, and had children. They insisted you could “have it all,” and my generation watched as they paid the price in exhaustion, striving to excel at work while still remaining primary carers at home. Personally, I became skeptical that the career grind was the most fulfilling aspiration for anyone, but I still shared my mother and her generation’s confidence that gender equality was a forward march of progress. That generation read The Handmaid’s Tale—Margaret Atwood’s story of women in red robes and white bonnets who lived as commoditized, walking wombs, controlled by men—as pure fiction. They did not imagine that in 2018 those same outfits would become the real-life uniform of political activists, protesting the election of Donald Trump and his plans to roll back reproductive rights.

As a result, my ideas about relationships have been founded on two pillars. The first: feminism. Contrary to what anti-feminists claim, I don’t see this as a desire to be more “masculine,” or an assertion that people of all genders are exactly the same. Instead, my feminism regards male and female traits as having equal merit and value. The second: a belief in love. I am a romantic and unapologetic about it; I think it is possible to have a relationship founded on connection, trust, friendship, and intimacy. I still believe in those ideas, but I’m feeling more conspicuous in holding them as my world shifts around me.

When Elise and Justin’s relationship fell apart, Elise was heartbroken. She grieved the life she thought they would have, the two-parent family she hoped to create for their son, the vision of growing old together as lovers and friends.

Eventually, she moved on. Really moved on.

“Men are useless,” she tells me, and I’m shocked to hear her generalize in that way. “If I ever marry again, he’s going to be rich,” she adds. “I’m tired, sis. If I can’t find someone who will have my back and be a genuine partner, then at least he can pay for me to have that soft life.”

That soft life. Who doesn’t want it? “Soft Life” culture—the idea that we should deprioritize the rat race and focus instead on wellness, self-love, and self-respect—gets a bad rap. But it’s been foundational to women’s struggles for generations. The abolitionist Sojourner Truth is often quoted for her early, iconic, intersectional feminism, but she was a soft-life advocate, too: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!” she decried. “And ain’t I a woman?”

The end of formal enslavement, segregation, and racial oppression has made Black women look more deeply at the ways society has for generations demanded our bodies, our labor, our grind and exhaustion in exchange for social approval. In Summer Walker’s song “Hardlife”—one of my favorites—she tells Black women to “Be strong, sista,” but she knows we are tired of being strong too:

Tired of seeing all these… white bitches living their soft life
With they feet kicked up and they glass in hand
Bills is paid, thanks to the man
Knows how to lead and he got a plan
Faithful and help ’round the house and with the kid
Could it be a reality? For me and my…
Women who look like me
When will we get what we need?

The thing about the soft life, though, is that someone has to fund it. Whether that’s women moving back home with their parents or grandparents, looking for a “provider man,” or prioritizing “high value dating”—the latter two trends popular with women on TikTok, who showcase luxurious properties, lavish vacations, and expensive wardrobes, all within reach with a rich enough partner.

Here, too, is a regression of ideas about female agency. And one that seems profoundly circular. As Elise said, if men are rejecting the kind of equal partnership that would improve a woman’s life, they can make up for it by offering the cash that improves her life instead. And this approach to finding a partner only fuels men’s perception that women are out to use them, in terms of power they intend to dictate. Both parties see each other in terms of value—a transaction from which both extract something of benefit in material terms.

The irony of this is really exposed when you look at what’s causing this gender divergence in the first place: economic hardship. Men are making less money than their fathers and grandfathers for the first time ever. Social inequality is at record levels. All developed countries are facing such apathy towards having children that they fall below the replacement rate, and are not reproducing enough to sustain their population.

When women are asked why they aren’t having more children, they often respond that they don’t have enough sup-port. Our yearning for the soft life is a response to this feeling of being expected to offer our bodies for society’s demographic needs, or of our life mission being reduced to productivity headlines and the requirements of our nation’s GDP. But it’s leading us to bring the logic of capitalism into what should be our most sacred connections, when it’s that same capitalism causing such malaise in the first place.

We are more unified than we realize—regardless of gender, we are all becoming seduced by false prophets, who fixate us on the symptoms, not the causes, of our problems. It’s not the unity we dream of. But if we could see it more clearly, it would be a start.