Fraternising with the enemy

The gender gap isn’t a young people thing, it’s a single people thing

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

Young men have lurched to the Right. We have been told this again and again. What we hear less often is that young women have lurched to the Left.

Take a look at how this graph from the Financial Times frames the issue:

What I see in this graph is that every age and sex group in Britain has become more pro-immigration over the last decade, sometimes by a lot. The proportion of men aged 18-29 who say that “immigration undermines Britain’s cultural life” has dropped from (by eye) about 20% in 2014 to about 16% in 2023. Based on these figures, the FT suggests that young men have not become “much more progressive on race and immigration” when in fact they clearly have! Just not quite as quickly as the FT would like.

This is a consistent pattern in most media and academic commentary: it is young men whose bad behaviour demands an explanation.

But I’m just as interested in the women. Take, for instance, the American iteration of South Korea’s 4B, a movement which demands that women say no to dating, marriage, sex, and childbearing (the ‘Four Nos’) – essentially, a female version of the MGTOW movement. Following the re-election of Trump, 4B has been enjoying a lot of attention on social media, with the movement typically framed by its supporters as an act of resistance against the male voters who brought Trump to power.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I suspect that a big part of the appeal of 4B actually derives from the fact that a lot of women in their 20s and 30s are stuck in hookup misery and in search of an off-ramp. One pretty redhead expresses her allegiance to the 4B cause on TikTok, saying of the dating app Hinge:

I’ve never deleted that app faster in my entire life post-election. Women, we’re done – we’re done dating. I’m not even entertaining it anymore. I’m not even entertaining older men for money and getting free food on dates. That’s over.

Given that a lot of her other TikTok content is concerned with the frustrations of using dating apps while single, I think it’s fair to assume that this woman’s unhappiness – and indeed the unhappiness of many of the other 4B women – is linked to the post-Pill predicament I wrote about in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: a culture of casual sex is much better suited to average male preferences than average female ones, which means that a woman typical of her sex will almost certainly end up bitter and miserable once she’s been “on the apps” for a while.

Young enough and pretty enough women can attract plenty of male attention on apps like Hinge, which offers a self esteem boost and perks like “free food on dates.” Sexually frustrated men regard this as a privilege – given that they would love to have access to an infinite number of casual sex partners, they assume these women are all having a ball.

The problem is that, deep down, the vast majority of women actually aspire to monogamous marriage, but actualising this desire isn’t necessarily easy, particularly if they want to marry up the socioeconomic scale, as most women do. If you’re one of these women entering her 30s and increasingly worried that Mr. Right is not going to come along, it’s much easier to say “I’m joining the 4B movement because I’m part of the anti-Trump resistance” than “why won’t he text me back?”

The 4B image of men is cartoonishly sinister: they all vote Trump, they all oppose abortion, they’re more dangerous than a grizzly bear. The same pretty redhead who has committed to ditching Hinge is also producing TikToks fantasising about male genocide. It’s almost as if these women – many of them very young – have never had a loving and meaningful relationship with a man, or even just an in-depth conversation.

And hey, perhaps they haven’t. The Survey Center on American Life conducted polling in 2024 which found that:

Teens are dating less… only 56 percent of Gen Z adults—and 54 percent of Gen Z men—said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years. This represents a remarkable change from previous generations, where teenage dating was much more common. More than three-quarters of Baby Boomers (78 percent) and Generation Xers (76 percent) report having had a boyfriend or girlfriend as teenagers.

Now pair this with another finding in the 2024 exit polls, as reported by the Washington Examiner:

For all the talk of Trump’s problem with women, Trump actually won married women by three points, 51 to 48. To repeat, Trump won a majority of not just married white women, but a majority of all married women.

Trump also handily won married men 60-38 and he even eked out a victory among unmarried men 49-47. Where Trump got crushed was among unmarried women, who chose Harris (who didn’t get married until age 50, by the way) by a 60-38 margin.

The sex gap among divorced voters is even larger than the sex gap among unmarried ones. From the American Enterprise Institute:

What we see in this graph is that, when people live with a romantic partner, their political outlook is more closely aligned with that of the opposite sex. Married couples are more conservative, and unmarried cohabiting couples are more liberal – hardly surprising – but the sex gap in these categories is quite small. In contrast, the gap between divorced men and divorced women is just as large as the much-publicised gap between young men and young women.

It’s possible that that there’s some third factor at play here – perhaps people who never couple up, or who get divorced, are also more attracted to political extremes. But my strong suspicion is that cohabiting couples really do come to think of themselves more as a unit, and to vote accordingly.

This longitudinal study supports that hypothesis, since it found that marital longevity correlated with political concordance – i.e. the longer a couple had been together, the more they agreed on. The authors speculate that this is a consequence of shared experiences and conversations:

After marriage each partner is exposed to an enormous number of common experiences, all the way from living in the same neighborhood, and sharing the same children, to being exposed to the same media entering the household. These similarities of exposure would be expected to push the partners closer together, other things being equal… the increasing volume of shared experiences and interactions with each other could be expected to elevate concordance. Marital partners talk to each other, often in fragments, side comments, and casual observations as well as in more sustained conversations. Spouses in fact tend to be the major discussion partner for matters in general and for politics in particular.

This rings true for me. Over time, my husband and I have developed political outlooks that are not only very similar, but are also more sympathetic to the interests of the opposite sex. For instance, I care more about the ways that DEI impacts men because I’ve seen the effects on my husband, and he cares more about crime making the streets unsafe for women because he’s seen the effects on me.

You might hope that single people would reach the same conclusions all on their own. But one of the things we’ve learnt from the post-sexual revolution attempt at gender egalitarianism is that men and women do not intuitively understand each other. There are all sorts of ways in which men and women psychologically differ on average, and people in other times and places seem to have no trouble understanding that. But our elite commitment to the blank slate relies on a big, bizarre lie about men and women.

A lot of us know full well that it’s a lie. But, given that the truth about sex differences remains taboo in progressive circles, anyone raised in these circles can only learn this truth through (as they say) lived experience. They need to spend a lot of time with members of the opposite sex in order to realise that the sexes are psychologically different, and then they need to have lasting and loving relationships with the opposite sex in order to realise that these differences are mostly benign.

My husband is psychologically typical of his sex in most ways, as am I. We joke that ours is a mixed marriage, i.e. a heterosexual one. I’ve lived with my husband since the age of 22 – more than a decade now – and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked him “what do men think about this?” only to be met with a really quite surprising reply – a reply that is invariably backed up by academic studies when I go looking for them. He knows a lot more than I do, not only because he’s a man, but also because he’s spent so much more time with men than I have – including, crucially, in all-male settings that I’ll never have access to.

(While writing this essay, I asked my husband what he’d learnt from a decade of cohabitation with me. His reply: “just because a woman says she’s fine doesn’t mean that she is.” Which is true!)

There are some psychological sex differences that we need to take very seriously – those concerning sexual violence, for instance – but most of them are trivial, and often funny. In other areas of TikTok, married couples are happily making fun of their spouses’ foibles without catastrophising about them. Women freak out when the car in front of them brakes and their husbands don’t immediately slow down (I do this). Men will scrabble around looking for a lost item which is right in front of their faces (my husband does this). Gentle teasing is essential to a happy marriage, and you can find plenty of it on wholesome areas of social media.

But the 4B women aren’t inclined to laugh at the battle of the sexes, and nor are their MGTOW counterparts. The internet abounds with unhappy and chronically single people who massively overestimate their ability to understand the opposite sex and then reach a very grim and confident conclusion: men/women [delete as appropriate] are evil.

On my latest appearance on the Free Press podcast – a Valentine’s Day special – Bari ended by asking me if there’s any advice I’d offer to men and women looking for love. I always find this kind of question awkward to answer, because there are so many factors that can make a person unhappily single, some of which are outside of that person’s control. But I had a small thought, and I hope it might be helpful to at least one reader or listener: there is a lot to be gained from taking a cheerful and friendly attitude towards sex differences. They’re real, and sometimes quite large. But, more often than not, they’re interesting rather than sinister. Understanding the opposite sex doesn’t come naturally to any of us. But Henry Kissinger was right when he joked that the battle of the sexes would forever be undermined by “too much fraternising with the enemy.” One way or another, men and women will always find a way of getting along. Happy Valentine’s Day.