Boys will be boys, female rage burns—and Gen Z splits in two.
Among young voters, women favored Harris by 26 points more than men—a political gender gap even wider than our generational divide with Boomers, according to the 2024 NBC News Exit Polls.
In South Korea, the divide is even starker, with an ideological separation between young men and women over 50 points, according to a Jan. 26 Financial Times article.
South Korean radical feminists have launched the “4B” movement in response to this rise in misogyny, rejecting marriage, “bihon;” childbirth, “bichulsan;” dating men, “biyeonae;” and having sex with men, “bisekseu,” according to a Nov. 13 CNN article.
Google trends show that 4B peaked in search volume immediately following the U.S. election.
South Korea now has the lowest global birth rate at 0.78 births per mother, according to a March 19, 2023 NPR article.
Before the 2024 Election, the U.S. seemed unlikely to replicate this movement. In 2016 and 2020, late-Millennial and Gen Z men seemed to be turning into staunch progressives, locking arms with our peers in mass school walkouts for climate justice and against gun violence.
In 2024, however, Trump effectively targeted the alternative media landscape of Gen Z men to propose policies geared towards them—no tax on Zyns—all while conducting interviews with figures like Adin Ross, Logan Paul, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys, according to an Aug. 5 NBC article.
Many of these internet personalities live stream on Kick, a site with a nearly 75% male audience, with almost 40% of users being under 24, according to Similarweb’s October Website Traffic Analytics Information.
The Harris campaign’s attempt to convert moderate Republicans—evident in their “Country over Party” messaging and promise to give them a seat at the table—completely and utterly failed as Harris courted even less of the conservative vote than Biden in 2020, according to the 2024 NBC News Exit Poll.
Hindsight might end up being 20/24: it’s clear the Harris campaign focused too much on rallies with Liz Cheney and too little on young people—especially young men—other than a few platitudes about loving Gen Z and our impatience.
Brat messaging? Cringe. “We Are Not Going Back?” Too radical. Joe Rogan interview? Too risky.
Joe Rogan’s three interviews with Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk respectively have garnered a combined total of over 80 million views.
Out of the 10 most watched live streamers who covered the election, nine of them were conservative, including the likes of Steven Crowder, Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson; only prominent leftist Hasan Piker stood out with a different perspective, according to a Nov. 6 StreamCharts article.
Part of this trend of gender polarization is due to the rise of the “manosphere:” a right-wing collection of online communities promoting mostly-toxic masculinity and spreading incel ideology, according to a Feb. 1 Business Insider article.
“Incels,” short for involuntary celibates, form an online subculture of mostly young, white men that believe that the male loneliness epidemic is a result of the advancement of women through feminism, according to a Mar. 16, 2023 CNN article.
They also believe that all women are vapid self-obsessed wenches attracted to status, wealth and physique, all of which they, the incels, were genetically predisposed not to have.
The popularization of Gen Z slang like “chads,” “sigma males,” “mogging,” “mewing” and “looksmaxxing” have their origins in incel forum boards on 4chan.
Some incels take the “blackpill:” they accept they will never find true love because they have a weak chin, or a poor canthal tilt or whatever. Social media matches these vulnerable men with communities full of like-minded individuals—the perfect anti-feminist echo chamber.
Blackpilling is not a joke though: in 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 in an act of misogynistic terrorism, according to a Apr. 25, 2018 BBC article.
A large part of his 141-page manifesto was dedicated to his hatred of women that he ascribed to involuntary celibacy.
Where other people celebrate women getting more college degrees than men for the first time, or out-earning young men in certain cities, incels see considerable proof of a misandrist society that has forgotten and abandoned them.
Most young Trump-supporting men are not incels, but many have bought into his promise of a future where young white men like them are always celebrated and never denigrated.
As a Gen Z man who watched this transformation firsthand, I can tell you it didn’t happen overnight. It happened podcast by podcast, stream by stream, meme by meme, all while Democrats stayed stuck in traditional media and ineffective messaging.
A common manosphere proverb is that bad times make strong men, who make good times which create weak men, who bring about the bad times all over again.
I fear the Trump-supporting men are the weak ones for putting the price of eggs over the well-being of their mothers, sisters and daughters.
With many women horrified at the potential loss of bodily autonomy faced under another Trump administration, incels jumped on the opportunity for some trolling.
White nationalist and incel Nick Fuentes, who publicly had dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West in 2022, celebrated the results of the election by tweeting “Your body, my choice. Forever,” according to a Nov. 5 Tweet with 96 million impressions.
Middle school boys are already taunting their female classmates with this slogan, according to a Nov. 13 CNN article. There’s no doubt many of them are avid Andrew Tate watchers, too.
Democrats can’t just write off young men as lost to the right.
They need a strategy that speaks to male anxieties without feeding into misogyny—one that offers economic hope and social belonging without scapegoating women or other marginalized communities.
