Are young men and young women radicalizing or returning?
Young men and young women have drastically politically diverged, with women generally turning left—though there’s a sizable contingent of young women who are drifting far-right—and young men generally turning right. This widening gap has triggered five-alarm fires from talking heads across the political aisle. There is no shortage of politicians, religious leaders, and Internet commentators interested in exploiting or healing the rift, and narratives abound, explaining the divide this way or that way, villainizing one group or another.
The everyday people who belong to each group are chiefly divided by a difference in one narrative: is the equality of the sexes an aberration, or the natural order? In other words, are feminist young women drifting away from their natural roles and rights, or are they coming into their own?
Conversely: are young men, who increasingly espouse violent or domineering views towards women and feminists, radicalizing, or are they responding to feminism by returning to their native heath?
Were 1950s families achieving the natural order? What about 1850s families? 1650s?
There are a myriad of views between these two extremes, but today I just want to tackle why these narratives exist and explore some of the data supporting them both. Then, I’d love to hear your feedback—which narrative do you think is more correct, and why? As always, my journalism is meant to reflect lived experiences. It does no good in a vacuum—please help me understand your reality.
Young women are going crazy, while young men sense a need to return to the ‘natural order’
Natural order. In conservative parlance, and especially in Christian spaces, natural order means masculine headship and female submission. In general, this means men in political, religious, and economic leadership while women primarily stay in the home, where they maintain the house and bear and care for children.
That’s the nutshell. Depending on your level of fundamentalism, it can mean a whole lot of other things. If you really believe that women are radicalizing away from the natural order, it compels you to decide when the natural order existed in practice. Were 1950s families achieving the natural order? What about 1850s families? 1650s?
Far-right young women and men tend to have differing views on what the natural order is, though they both agree that feminists have drifted beyond it. Broadly speaking, far-right young women think of the natural order as a mixture of the 1950s and 2000s. They think the natural order looks like:
Women are responsible for maintaining the home, not earning paychecks.
Women do not need their own income; husbands should provide.
Women should have the same financial rights as men (i.e., the ability to take out a loan, own property, etc.), but their husbands’ provision should allow women to avoid needing to rely on these rights.
Women are solely responsible for childcare; husbands don’t need to change diapers, know about doctor’s appointments, prepare food for their children, or drop children off or pick them up from activities.
Women do not need political autonomy; husbands are responsible for staying politically aware enough to cast votes that reflect the whole family’s interest.
Women may obtain divorces, but should resist doing so, even if the burden falls on them to spiritually or socially counsel their husbands.
Women may obtain education, but shouldn’t feel the need to do so, and should not let educational pursuits distract them from the home.
In this situation, modern women are empowered, but should choose to limit themselves to the 1950s lifestyle. Many conservative women, including some women belonging to far-right groups, are careful to point out their agency in choosing this lifestyle. They have rights, but they choose not to exercise them—and women who do are in defiance of the natural order.
Far-right men strip away those unexercised rights. They argue for further limitations:
Women should not receive an education; they are not intelligent enough to interpret history or politics accurately, and should rely on male interpretations of the world.
Women do not need to be reflected politically; husbands should make choices in their own best interest, and women may benefit as a secondary, not primary, product.
Women should not have financial rights or protections; financial empowerment may distract them from their husband and children’s interests.
Women are naturally suited for childbearing and childrearing; they are incapable of properly doing anything other than nurturing, including their husbands, and their rights should reflect that.
It is worth noting that the far-right man’s vision of women’s natural role has almost never been fully reflected in the Western world.. The ‘natural order’ is a misnomer—even in pioneer or colonial times, men and women were economically and socially dependent on one another in ways that the far right does not desire for modern times.
For example, pioneering and colonial families often worked as a single economic unit. The children also labored for the family’s common good. When industrialization untethered men from work in the home or farm, and men received legal labor protections and corporate privileges not available to women working only within the home, the balance of power tilted further in men’s direction—until the feminist movement.
Far-right men want men to retain the power and protections that industrialization gave them, but want women to remain ensconced in the home, divided from their husbands, cut off from modern legal and social lifelines. Far-right women sometimes agree, but are more likely to want those modern legal and social protections—just in case they need them.
Young men are radicalizing, and young women are coming into their own
This is the mirror-image story, and it has the same architecture as the one it opposes. It, too, assumes a natural direction of travel, and it, too, treats deviation from that direction as morally wrong.
Women seeking equality and status is, therefore, a step on the way to the natural order.
In this telling, young men have moved backward:
Gen Z men are more likely than their grandfathers to say feminism has done more harm than good—16% of men aged 16-29 against 13% of men over 60.
More than half of Gen Z men say men are expected to do too much to support gender equality, against 45% of Boomer men.
25% UK men aged 16-29 say it is harder to be a man than a woman today.
And young women have moved forward, into political and economic lives their mothers didn’t have:
Women aged 18-29 identifying as liberal rose from 28 percent in 2001-2007 to 32% in 2008-2016 to 40% in 2017-2024.
In 2023, women in that age group split 40% liberal to 25% conservative.
52% of Gen Z women identify as Democrats, against 30% of Gen Z men.
Across a decade of longitudinal data, young women adopted explicitly anti-patriarchal values, while young men moved toward liberal values more slowly than any other group measured.
Are young women coming into their own? Is the matriarchy—natural? The argument in favor is rooted in the animal kingdom. Think of lions. Prides are centered around lionesses and cubs; males, by contrast, float into and out of prides every few years, killing cubs that don’t belong to them. Or think of bears. Males live alone, while females raise the cubs solely on their own. Or think of almost any animal species—females are the crux of it, the continuity, the protector and the educator—while males are only needed for breeding and are, in fact, unnecessary, and even dangerous, in any other situation.
Because of this, feminists argue that the matriarchy, or a civilization where men and women center around children—much like a lion pride—is the natural state of things. Women seeking equality and status is, therefore, a step on the way to the natural order.
But shouldn’t the natural order feel good for those inhabiting it? Logic might suggest that a woman will feel happier in a society where she isn’t subjugated. But, while women have advanced towards equality in recent decades, they are also growing less happy. Liberal women report greater dissatisfaction than conservative women. 57% of Gen Z high school girls reported persistent sadness and hopelessness in 2021, against 35% of millennial girls polled in 2001.
But correlation does not equal causation. Feminist women may feel less satisfied than conservative women simply because their goalposts are further away. In other words, it is not feminism, or their coming into the ‘natural order,’ that makes them unhappy. It is that the natural order has not yet arrived. Unfortunately, read this way, it’s impossible to determine if the ‘natural order’ that applies to the animal kingdom applies to humans, too. There are few documented instances of egalitarian matriarchies.
Which group is right?
As a Christian, I’m predisposed to argue that there is a right way of being—that there is a ‘natural order’ to gender roles. As a feminist, I’m predisposed to argue that we haven’t yet reached that natural order.
As a journalist, I admit that I really don’t know, and I’d like to know what you think. What’s the natural order? Submission or egalitarianism? Somewhere in-between? And why do you think what you think?