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Bill Ackman quote-tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.
Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.
Before getting into the mechanism, something important: this pattern isn’t only American. It’s global.
The Financial Times documented last year that the gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.
South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.
Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can’t hunt pregnant. You can’t fight nursing. Survival required the tribe’s acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as a serious threat.
Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.
This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt’s work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren’t huge, but they’re consistent across every culture studied.
Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.
But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.
Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it’s everyone you’ve ever met, plus a world of strangers watching.
And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone was launched in June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly, social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.
Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008.
The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.
This machine wasn’t designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.
Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.
Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it’s socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.
Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn’t “believe this or face social death.” It was “here’s an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real.”
Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.
The answer isn’t “women are emotional” and it isn’t “social media bad.” The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.
We’re watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines are moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.
Source: Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane | ZeroHedge
Surely this is so stereotypically unintelligent, lacking in any intellectual depth or analysis or critique – accepting without question the ‘findings’. And it is a bit ‘salad speak’, too. The theory (sic) that underpins (sic) all this is the ‘hunter’ vs ‘stay-at-home-caring-for-babies’ proposition. But the realit is that all men were not hunters, and the hunt-period of human life is overtaken by the growing of crops etc – which was not a distinction between men-hunter, woman-gatherer, and it was not just crops that came in the ‘gathering’ development: what about keeping animals for food – no need for the wild huntsman there. Then take the proposition (there’s an entire paragraph on this) contending that men are ‘more tolerant’ (sic) of disagreement and conflict – oh, what, so from whence does war come?
And how does the study contend with Australia’s most recent federal election where the results and analysis show that both young women and young men rejected the Dutton ‘he man’ (sic) approach – young women more so, but the trend for both were the same way – against the rightwing push and toward the leftwing.
Of course no one would discount the impact of online media, the incel business, the tates of this world, the misogyny on and pornogrification of the globe through the internet. Statistics from 2019 indicate that on average US teenagers spend 6 hours per day on their mobile phones accessing ‘information’ and exchanging with friends/internet users.
Yet please – this article is a throwback to whenever – Iron John of the 1970s, EO Wilson and ‘sociobiology’ etc etc … It is laziness pretending to be academic inquiry, and yet another example of ‘thinking’ going in cycles … (and probably circles!) …
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This is the paragraph that is ‘salad’ speak:
‘This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt’s work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren’t huge, but they’re consistent across every culture studied,’
Higher tolerance for ‘disagreement and social conflict’? What does that mean? That men have a higher tolerance for fighting, wars, killing, destruction? Well, that’s not really ‘tolerance’ is it? Isn’t it ‘propensity’? And it’s pretty much blanket thinking: what about the conscientious objectors – present perennially in the male ranks. And why is ‘sensitivity to negative stimuli’ etc ‘neuroticism’? So what, all women are neurotic or bordering on it? Of course being ‘agreeable’ for the sake of it, or being pushed into it under implicit or explicit threat of violence is not good, but it is not ‘neurotic’: surely those who force the agreeableness are the ones who requiring negative labelling?
This article is just more of the same and, as noted in previous post, regurgitating ‘scholarship’ that has its origins in the long distant past. The 1970s and 1980s versions of all this were, yet again, recaps of past assertions as to hunters and gatherers et al.