The Great Gender Divergence

We have gotten beyond the thigh gap. If you do not know what that is, you are not old enough to be reading this column.

For Gen Z, the important thing is an ideological gap. John Burn-Murdoch chronicled it in the Financial Times on January 27-- link not available. 

Apparently, the younger generation is suffering a marked split between progressives and conservatives. It is suffering an ideological gap. Since the split corresponds to the division of the sexes, we can call it a “great gender divergence.” 

It is so bad that serious thinkers despair at the possibility that Gen Z men and women will ever be able to get along.

Gen Z men and women have fewer and fewer beliefs in common. They see each other as members of warring camps, destined to engage in constant struggle over ideas. 

How did it happen? Didn’t feminism teach us that men and women are fundamentally the same. If we recognize differences between the sexes or if we see different levels of competence in different areas, some righteous feminist will denounce us for being sexist. Heaven forfend. Any perception of a difference will be discredited as a function of the omnipresent and omnipotent patriarchy. 

How did it happen? How did the genders diverge so radically? On the one side, as we noted yesterday, women who succeed in men’s worlds are seen as not having earned their plaudits. 

But, women who succeed in the business world or the marketplace are often less likely to find male partners. If you ask the average male what he is looking for in a female partner, he will very likely not put business success very high on the list. And he will certainly not put feminist on the list either.

Dare we say, this is not what feminism promised. From the time of Friedrich Engels women have been told that being financially independent will translate into being loved for oneself, not for one’s yellow hair.

Of course, women were lied to, but sadly, when they discover it they conclude that men are at fault-- for not loving them for themselves.

Evidently, this aggravates the ideological gap, because women who suffer from male inattention are likely to become more wedded to their ideologies, especially to ideologies that blame men for rejecting them. And they are more likely to be drawn to factions and cults that offer comfort and consolation for their loss and for their victim status. 

And then there is the sex. We recall that feminists told young women to have sex like men, to have random sexual encounters with near-strangers. That is, to hook up. 

We hate to have to mention it, but hooking up seems indigenous to male human beings. According to Donald Symons, in his book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, the masters of hooking up are male homosexuals. When they do not need to accommodate females, males are more likely to hook up.

Female homosexuals prefer relationship bonding over random, anonymous sexual encounters. Women might hook up to accommodate frat boys, but, truth be told, left to their druthers, they prefer relationships.

If this is news, you are not old enough to be reading this column. 

So, what happens when women feel obliged, thanks to peer pressure by feminists, to hook up? They might claim to enjoy the experience, but they also become resentful and angry. They feel that they have been used and they do not like it. Can you blame them?

And they resent men because men can more easily walk away from the consequences of a hookup, especially the emotional consequences. One aspect of the abortion issue, the issue that most clearly radicalizes young women, is that abortion on demand allows women to walk away from the consequences of a hookup, almost as easily as a man can.

This induces more than a few young women to become feminists. They learn to blame their feeling of being used sexually on the patriarchy while joining groups where they are defined by their grievances.

Coleman Hughes wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. I reported on it on July 30, 2o23. He argued, persuasively, I believe, that the #MeToo movement, in its attack on men for sexual assault and harassment shows one of the consequences of hookup culture. 

If a man does not want to get to know his hookup, the woman feels, not just that she has been used, but that she has been deceived, even lied to and abused. Hughes explained:

The real issue was a culture that not only sanctioned but encouraged young people to have sex without any expectation of courtesy, follow-through or commitment——particularly from the male side. While they couldn’t get mad at young men for participating in hookup culture, which was supposedly a feminist and progressive innovation, women could direct their anger at young men on the issue of sexual assault.

Of course, women can solve this problem by ceasing to hook up with random, anonymous males, but that would be sexually repressive. Besides, many women believe that they will never find male partners if they do not hook up.

And, of course, when it comes to pregnancy, a welcome or unwelcome side effect of sexual congress, the truth remains that women do most of the work. In many parts of the world, women are deciding that they do not want to have children, because they do not want the responsibility, responsibility that most men are loath to share. Obviously gestation and labor preclude male participation. Exception given for couvade.

But then, strangely, the problem is aggravated by the expectation that women will not only bear and raise children, but that they will also hold down important jobs. Again, this represents the feminist life plan and it tells young women that if they do not advance up the corporate ladder and become serious executives they have betrayed feminism.

Add to that the culture’s constant attacks on men for failing to do their fair share of housework and you create a situation where men and women belong to hostile warring camps. 

Would it all be solved if men became feminists, if they did half of the housework and changed half the diapers. Surely, this scenario belongs to the feminist plan. The problem is, when women find such accommodating men, they do not want them,

When women become feminists they imagine that they are thinking for themselves, even defending their dignity. In truth, they are parroting feminist talking points and indulging in one or another form of misandry. If men are the enemy, the ideological gap between men and women becomes a chasm.

So, men and women are in conflict. This produces heat of the sexual variety. It does not produce much light. We end up with lots of hooking up but a radical inability of the two sexes to get along with each other.

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