Over at Kiwiblog the other day DPF had a post linked to an article about the growing ideological divide between men and women in Australia with women becoming more Left-wing and men becoming more Right-wing. I didn’t think the article, let alone the graph, was very good.
There’s a better one here from an article in the Financial Times published in late 2023, and according to them it’s a global phenomena.
I wasn’t too impressed either with DPF’s final point in his post:
The big challenge for the CR is how to talk to younger women.
How about the challenge of the Centre Left (CL) in how to talk to younger men?
Oh right, the Left never think along those lines. Also, you almost never hear a Labour politician talk about appealing to the centre of politics (even as they’re cursed as LINO by the True Believers). And so…
- This sounds familiar
So you see a repeating pattern to American politics: There isn’t a true back-and-forth. Instead, Democrats change the country a lot while they’re in power. Then Republicans hold power and push the pause button. There’s no rollback that a new executive order can’t undo. - The Precious Midpoint
It’s a truism of politics that you win the centre to gain and hold political power. But there’s a difference between acting on that and worshipping it as a religious principle that requires politicians to do nothing but sniff the winds and bend accordingly to what they detect.
Politicians and political parties that do that are doomed to accomplish nothing in power beyond managing the status quo until they tire and are voted out in favour of the next new, shiny thing. And if enough time goes by and the status quo breaks down, such a party will simply be left on the side of the road. - Advice from the Peanut Gallery (see also the comments made in 1980 by fellow Republicans about Reagan’s “extremism”)
“The result of this style of accommodationist politics, as my colleague Keith Joseph complained, was that post-war politics became a ‘socialist ratchet’ — Labour moved Britain towards more statism; the Tories stood pat; and the next Labour Government moved the country a little further left. The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.“
As to why this is happening, the FT suggest the explosion in recent years of things like the #MeToo movement that has galvanised feminism. Given the hypocrisy on display with feminist support of creatures like Joe “Bad Fingers” Biden I’d say that movement has almost collapsed, and in any case, as the FT notes, this divide exists across multiple societal issues.
To me the real trigger has been the explosion of smart phones and apps like X-Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and now TikTok, which has switched socialisation from the physical sphere into The Matrix of the Interwebby. Young men and women used to physically socialise a lot more and they knocked the hard edges off eachother.
Nowadays, those hard edges are amplified and anything attempting to soften or sand them down is explicitly rejected from the “room”.
No Minister 
I’m not sure this is a new thing. It was noticable in 2020 that females would not hear a word said that didn’t praise the communist c$%#.
Their male partners were open to discussion but, with no exceptions, talked quietly so their spouses didn’t hear.
Many (well, at least a couple) of commentators noted it was losing the brain-dead-sheila vote that cost Labour the election in 2023.
I suspect as far back as Muldoon, pre-’82, the same thing occurred. Sheilas loved Muldoon to the point they rebelled and, in the privacy of the voting booth, refused to do what they were told to do.
More reason why, despite the invention and innovation, the early 20th Century was not a good time for humanity. The Swiss (outside of towell-head territory – but that’s another story) were the last hold-outs and now even they’re gone (and their economy tracks downhill like the rest of the Western World).
DPF just about summed up my contempt for him in one sentence there. And for establishment Nats in general. There are many lessons to learn from this growing divergence, but that’s definitely not one of them.
How one gets a majority in a democracy is largely irrelevant. If 90% of one’s voters are men, that’s only a problem if they don’t constitute 50%+1.
Young, childless, unmarried women are breaking Left, because society and culture increasingly and consistently lie to them about who they are and what their place in the world is. And they don’t have the life experience to understand it’s all bullshit. And telling them otherwise is just mansplaining. That’s the unfortunate reality of where we are in 2024, and the last thing on earth that needs to happen is for politicians to pander to young women under these delusions. That’s not leadership, it’s surrender. Farrar and the Nats just don’t seem to understand this, and I despair of them ever figuring it out.
saw a really interesting piece on Twitter suggesting it relates to the decline in organised religion and the use of birth control pills driving women to become more empathetic because their bodies hormones are telling them they are with an infertile spouse despite all the sex. There is an inbuilt mammalian need to reproduce. It is a primary purpose of life.
that diagnosis is terrifying.