This graph terrifies me. High school boys are now identifying as conservative in record numbers. Here is the graph for women to compare:
The more dismal statistic is not that boys have rapidly grown in conservatism it is that liberalism among men has significantly dropped. While conservatism among women has stayed relatively the same. Granted the largest percentage of respondents stated they did not know or had not yet made up their mind. Either way, the Republican share of men is rising, while Democrats have recruited young women in droves. If you have been paying attention to American culture in the past 5 years you might have an idea of why this is.
The causes of this depend on your analysis of the situation, but here are my two cents. To start with the obvious I do not think that a bunch of high school boys became passionate about small government, fiscal responsibility, or cutting foreign aid. I believe the cause lies in a sociocultural response to the rhetoric displayed by both parties within the last 10 or so years. The left has been a champion of feminist issues such as; challenging traditional gender roles, spotlighting sexual assault, fighting for reproductive rights, and battling toxic masculinity. As a feminist myself, I believe that all of these things are essential to bettering societal health. However, I am convinced that the rhetoric used by the left was too narrow in scope, and eventually gave rise to alternative right-wing media figures online. These figures expressly recruited men to their audiences, leading to the results that we see above.
First I have to explain my frustration with the left to show how they are largely responsible for driving men to conservatism. Rhetoric is defined by Aristotle as the study of all available means of persuasion. So how did the feminist left seek to convince society at large that it needed to pay attention to these important issues? The short answer is that they did nothing really. I mean there were posters created, facts were assembled, Instagram posts made, and marches were held, but I never saw the left reach out to those who disagreed with them or even those who weren’t feminists. It is not that the arguments were bad, many of them I agree with, but rather there was no room for argument. The opposition was painted as being sexist or misogynist, and positions quickly became absolute. You were either for or against the movement there was no acceptable middle ground.
When your movement becomes based on absolutes the need for effective rhetoric disappears. Your target audience becomes people that already agree with you because the people that disagree are evil. The argument and debate within the movement cease to be productive as well because it becomes people repeating arguments that they agree with to others who will agree with them. If everyone just agrees with each other there is no intellectual debate surrounding truth and it quickly becomes a virtue-signaling competition. People might be rewarded for making bad arguments that show they believe in the cause. Dissent from the dogma of the movement might be met with swift social punishment. This atmosphere where ideas become weaker opens up holes that will be exploited by people who disagree with your aims. I’m going to come back to this in a bit but I need to talk about young men.
It was in 2017 when all of these issues came to the forefront of American culture centering around the #MeToo movement. It was widely embraced at the time with women coming forward from a variety of backgrounds and voicing their support. They wanted to change the culture by centering women’s voices and that is a noble cause, but they forgot one critical thing. To bring men on board. As much as we can suck men do make up around half of the adult population in the united states. Men also play a critical role in sexual assault seeing as the majority of perpetrators are men. If any change is going to occur culturally around sexual assault it is going to have to involve a majority of men and women. A minority of men came out in support but in nowhere near the same fashion that women did. The feminist movement did not take the time to educate young men about how these issues that affected them.
Issues like challenging traditional masculinity were never presented to young men as something that they could gain from. Men were never told that masculinity limits the number of emotions that are acceptable to feel. Men were never told that masculine dismissal of raw feelings has been linked to suicide. Men were never told that a traditional masculine presentation can negatively affect school performance, substance abuse problems, or a higher likelihood of violence. The research that I have read shows that we need to change the way that men interact with society. It is frustrating that a movement that wanted these societal changes so poorly interacted with men. Instead of showing men a brighter positive masculinity the feminist movement only told men what they were doing wrong. Additionally, some feminists explicitly wrote about hating men, some claiming it is logical.
I completely understand the feelings that underly these messages that men have sucked for a long time. Honestly, I agree we do often suck, but the large majority of men will never change if they are constantly attacked for being men. This is the reason why we have seen the rise of Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, and Jordan Peterson. All of these people explicitly appeal to men to tell them that they are doing nothing wrong and it’s all the fault of the feminist. (We sometimes make that true by not denouncing the crazier arguments.) Ben Shapiro rose to internet fame through his many feminist-wrecked compilations. Many of the ideas that he argued against were strawman positions but many were arguments that lacked basic logic. Young men then saw these crazy arguments and believed that all feminists were out to get them. By not explicitly targeting men and working with them towards progress we open the doors for people that seek to profit off the anxiety of men.
So what do we need to do moving forward? I have no clue but I know that the conversation needs to include men. I believe in an open, honest, and lengthy discussion about serious issues. With time and patience, we might be able to actualize monumental change, as we move away from the worst parts of ourselves. I sympathize with women because even now when they are so close to becoming equal they still have to consider men’s feelings. Something that women have been doing for way too long. The way forward for women is tied to the way forward for men and the way forward for men relies on supporting women. If we are able to come together as a people and truly listen to each other beautiful things will happen.