David Quinn
Photo: iStock. We hear an awful lot about the ‘manosphere’, that is, online discussions that sometimes tell young men to treat women in sexist, exploitative ways. There was a huge public debate about ‘toxic masculinity’ last year when a series called Adolescence was aired. The central character was a 13-year-old boy who murdered a girl who went to the same school as him because he felt humiliated by her. It transpired that he had turned into a boiling cauldron of anger without his parents having the slightest clue this was happening. Up in his bedroom, he was being influenced by the ‘manosphere’ to hate women.
But is there a ‘femosphere’? Is there something called ‘toxic femininity’? Are some young women being taught to dislike men? The answer is, most certainly.
Revealed
The New Statesman is a UK-based centre-left magazine. It has just carried an article called ‘Revealed: the new radicalism among young women’. Based on polling data, it shows that there is a growing gender divide between men and women under the age of 30. The sexes are becoming more suspicious and hostile towards one another.
One young woman interviewed for the piece is asked how she felt about the young men she and her group of female friends knew. “I don’t care for them,” she said. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.”
She is also suspicious of the young men who seem to have ‘progressive’ views. She thinks this is often a tactic for getting young women to have sex with them.
This same group of young women, who all belong to the feminist society at Leeds University, declared they would never date a man with different political views from their own. One said: “I don’t think I could even be friends with one”.
Only one of the seven even admitted to having male friends.
The poll conducted on behalf of the New Statesman confirmed the finding of other, similar polls, namely that young women on average are much more left-wing than young men. Among other things, this means they are more likely to reject ‘traditional’ values such as a belief in getting married and having children. They tend to value personal autonomy very highly. ‘Choice’ is almost a sacred value and the legal right to have an abortion is extremely important to them.
We live in a very individualistic society, full stop, in which so much value is attached to personal autonomy”
This is having predictable, knock-on effects on fertility rates. The more liberal or left-wing a woman is, the less likely she is to have children, while women with more conservative, or religious or traditional values is more likely to have children. Long-term, we can see where the future lies, and it is not with those who don’t want children.
Not wanting to date or even be friends with someone who doesn’t share your values can be a form of sectarianism, on a par with the time when Catholics and Protestants rarely mixed or got married.
Of course, there is nothing ‘toxic’ per se about not wanting to marry or have children, and plenty of men are in the same boat. We live in a very individualistic society, full stop, in which so much value is attached to personal autonomy that many people now indefinitely put off the major commitments in life such as marrying and having children.
But it does become toxic when the sexes learn to hate each other. In South Korea, for example, there is something called the ‘4B’ movement (‘bi’ in Korean means ‘no’). It encourages women to say no to marrying men, no to dating them, no to having sex with them, and no to having children with them. What could be more bleak or nihilistic?
In China a similar movement exists. Only a small minority subscribe to their demands. All the same, if this is not ‘toxic femininity’, then what is?
And when women who are not as extreme as the ‘4B’ movement still don’t care for men very much, that is, the kind of young women interviewed by the New Statesman, then we have a problem.
These women will say they are responding to sexist attitudes among men, and there is surely some truth in that. But I think there is something else going on as well, which is that the sex revolution has helped to harden the attitude of the sexes towards each other.
Sex revolution
The sex revolution says that you ought to be able to have sex with anyone you want, when you want, so long as there is consent, and no relationship need exist. But a lot of women in this sort of environment, despite their commitment to the ‘ideals’ of the sex revolution, still end up feeling used by a man who doesn’t care a bit about her. Men can end up feeling the same. This creates resentment and some men feel the resentment and then return it. Mutual suspicion between the sexes grows.
The trouble is that if you say you should get to know, trust and love each other first, and ideally marry (which is what Christians are supposed to believe), then you will be accused of wanting to return to the ‘bad old days’ of sexual repression. But isn’t it very odd how suggesting people should get to know, love and trust each other before having sex is deemed ‘repressive’?
In any case, it puts both men and women in a difficult bind. They desire total freedom, yet they also want love. But when pursuing freedom means refusing to commit to anyone throughout your 20s and well into your 30s, you may end up delaying getting married for too long. Eventually, you may find that your commitment-free experiences with the opposite sex have left you feeling resentful and angry toward the opposite sex in general.
This can then lead you into the ‘manosphere’ or ‘femosphere’ where men are encouraged to think the worst of women and vice versa and this mutual suspicion means a growing ‘war of the sexes’.
Antidote
Some men are turning to Christianity as an antidote. A new Gallup poll from America shows much more openness to religion among young men than young women. Young women are more likely to have been taught by feminism that Christianity is irredeemably sexist.
I don’t really know where this leaves us. You just have to hope that enough members of both sexes can somehow muddle through and fall in love, get married, have children, and stay married anyway. Unfortunately, all sorts of currents in modern societies are reducing the odds of this happening, including the ‘manosphere’ and ‘femosphere’.