At the end of last year, the government announced a programme designed to tackle the radicalisation of young men in schools. Teachers will be trained in how to spot misogyny in the classroom and children deemed to be at fault sent on ‘toxic masculinity’ courses – an attempt to ‘re-educate’ white working-class boys that’s guaranteed to spawn 1,000 memes. It was billed as a key component of the government’s strategy to halve violence against women and girls by 2035. Don’t worry about the grooming gangs – the real predators are the knuckle-dragging teenagers, as per Adolescence, which was festooned with Golden Globes by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association last week.
But does Britain really have a problem with young men drifting into the arms of dangerous, far-right influencers such as Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson? The survey data suggests that a far bigger issue is young women being radicalised by the far-left. We’re all familiar with the dinner party talking point that men and women’s political views are becoming increasingly divergent. But the reason for this is not, as is commonly supposed, because men are turning right.
According to an analysis by the FT, in the 1990s the political ideology of 18- to 29-year-old men and women was more or less the same, with both, on average, mildly liberal. Fast-forward to 2024 and men had become a little bit more liberal – not more conservative – while women had become significantly more so. That is to say, vast swaths of young women have become advocates of the ‘omnicause’ – trans rights, climate justice, open borders, anti-racism and the plight of the Palestinians. The intersectional hierarchy of oppression – and fighting ‘white supremacy’ – is their lodestar.
The same pattern is observable in France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, with young men’s views barely changing over the past 25 years and women veering sharply to the left. Admittedly, they tend to return to the centre when they get married and have kids, but that’s happening less and less, because woke women don’t want to date non-woke men. As a rule, the more divergent men and women’s political ideology is, the worse the fertility crisis, with South Korea scoring high (or rather low) on both metrics. China isn’t far behind, with the lowest birth rate on record.
What accounts for the radicalisation of young women? The consensus among social scientists is that it has something to do with the rise of social media, which is also a cause of their deteriorating mental health – and the two may be connected. When it comes to the five big personality dimensions, women score on average higher than men for ‘agreeableness’ and ‘neuroticism’, and that desire to fit in and fear of social rejection makes them more likely to go along with the prevailing ideological orthodoxy – which on social media is left-wing. George Orwell cottoned on to this, which is why he made young women some of the most zealous party members in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We saw the same thing during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Vast swaths of young women have become passionate advocates of the ‘omnicause’
Apart from the downward pressure on birth rates, are there other reasons to be concerned about ‘toxic femininity’? Yes, according to the conservative commentator Helen Andrews, who warned in an essay for Compact that as institutions and professions become majority-female, they are infected by radical progressive ideology and part company with those values that made them successful. The most obvious casualties are universities, which now prioritise social justice over the pursuit of truth, but it has also had a negative effect on journalism, where the line between reporting and political activism has become blurred. Yet the area Andrews is most worried about is the feminisation of the law, with favoured groups being allowed to evade punishment and disfavoured groups being vigorously penalised. This ‘two tier’ justice will have catastrophic consequences as men lose confidence in the system.
Can anything be done to arrest this trend? The FT cautions against optimism, pointing out that the ideological gap is growing, with men beginning to shift rightwards. Our best hope might be to focus on adolescent girls, with teachers trained to spot misandry and sufferers being shipped off to play darts and given a crash course in banter.
But what chance is there of the government getting behind an initiative like that? I fear we’re doomed to live in an increasingly totalitarian society, with the only consolation being the human race will die out within a couple of generations.
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