November 30, 2023 - 11:45am
A few months ago, a Zoomer friend of mine observed that the American political landscape had been slowly evolving into a gender war. It isn’t simply that Americans are polarised, she noted, it’s that the polarisation was linked to sex. Young men in her circle were more likely to be Right-wing; whereas women were more likely to be Left-wing.
New data published in the Washington Post backs up her observation, suggesting that the growing polarisation along gender lines could be contributing to lower marriage rates among heterosexual Zoomers. Maybe they’re right: two cultures are forming, separated by sex, and we’re priming ourselves for a Japan-ified future, in which both men and women increasingly choose to “Go Their Own Way”.
But it seems this same polarisation has snuck into the fantasies of the fetish community, where “MAGA doms”, and “libtard subs” rule the roost (or in simpler terms, Left-wingers want to be sexually dominated by Right-wingers). Perhaps dominatrixes adopting a “MAGA” persona isn’t so surprising when you consider how fetish communities often mirror societal taboos: post-World War II saw the emergence of Nazi fetishism while ex-Mormons produce pornography about the Church.
Today, in online political fandoms, people behind enemy lines are often seen as potential sexual conquests: Right-wing men want the liberal “art hoe”, whereas some Leftist women lust after the “Right-wing anon”. It’s hard to pin down discourse like this sometimes, but this trend is also substantiated in studies about the dating patterns of progressive women.
In this context, it’s easier to understand why there has been this blurring between the political and the sexual. For one, downstream of the well-documented erasure of gendered spaces has come the attempted dissolution of sex differences. We’re living in a world where there are fewer and fewer men- or women-only spaces. What it means to be a man or woman have both been thoroughly attacked.
This gender segregation feels like a return to the Fifties mean. But while it is possible to police same-sex social clubs or specific organisations, it’s more difficult to impose these same norms on decentralised, often digitally-based, political communities. Segregation is baked into the ideology: for instance, very few women might be interested in joining a Discord server that seriously discusses figures like Andrew Tate. Of course, there are exceptions, but ultimately, making “Right-wing” synonymous with “male” re-establishes a long-standing boundary — one that people probably miss a great deal, whether they know it or not. It doesn’t only facilitate same-sex socialisation, but also reimagines the concept of sexual dimorphism, especially in the social dimension, where it’s been lost.
The second issue is that while the extent of political polarisation challenges the idea that we no longer have a unified culture, it also doesn’t imply complete unity within each side of the political spectrum. Concepts like “intersectionality” have also created their own kind of division. There’s a growing array of identity-based groups, each with its own conflicting objectives and messages, leading to a sense of cultural exhaustion. Uniting based on gender might be an attempt to simplify and correct this fragmentation — even if ultimately misguided.
In an ironic way, political polarisation along gender lines is actually more inclusive. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, or AAPI — the primary distinction becomes whether you’re a man or a woman. Even more important than an inclusive political landscape, it may also fix some of our sex problems, rather than encouraging them. In a world where everything is for everyone, this could be the one way we return to signalling older notions of what it means to be a man or woman. For some people, this will rise to the level of a fetish, but for most, it might just re-balance the dating market.
Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.
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SubscribeCould it be that women are looking for protection and support in a world they feel to be hostile. They lean left politically for state support and protection, but right sexually for mate support and protection.
Meanwhile, men who are looking for support and protection, whether socially or sexually, are a bit of a turn off.
I think you hit the nail on the head here, David.
I’m a white male who always considered himself on the ‘Left.’ I supported Bernie Sanders in both primaries. Now myself and all my friends have a distinct ‘rightward’ bend, culturally. Everything about the ‘Left’ today speaks to a hatred of us, and we know it. We are sick of it.
And it is a cultural turn. Not sure how you feel in the States, but growing up working class in the U.K. I never liked the left wing habit of bundling the working class in with the “weak”.
There’s advice as old as time: All you have to do is f.ck her brutally and everything will fall into place
I think a lot of women are fed up with them also. I know I am fed up with the lot of them – the over dramatization of all things now. Can’t say that I’m particularly fond of the Right either. Actually I have to train myself not to grow exasperated by the whole lot of these shouting warring identities.
I wonder if ”çommonsenseical” will be an identity? Hard to say.
Perhaps case in point.
Good article though.
Perhaps the over-used term “far Right” should be replaced with “the hard Right”
Or “the correct”.
So embarrassing when you publicly fail to get a joke isn’t it. 🙂
It was just a typo he meant to write ‘erect’
It is odd, isn’t it that there’s such a thing as “soft Left”, but the equivalent on the Right is either “moderate” or “centre-right”?
We might be onto something here that explains what the article fails to explain.
Yes, we’re onto something, and it is that there is no such thing as left and right. Individuals align with the tribe that reflects their interests. My wife is staunchly pro-Israel, pro-capitalism, and has a fundamentally unique relationship with Christ and yet identifies as (an American) liberal. I share her stand on the above and have a bleeding heart, an artist’s disposition and a tendency toward anarchy, and yet I am a firm western traditionalist.
The “politically erect”.
Or anything right of Lucifer.
Oh, I get it! HA HA HA HAHAHA!
“‘No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.” – P.J. O’Rourke
Not for the first time I am moved to express my gratitude that I came up in an era before social media became young people’s primary means of interacting with the world.
We may not have had easy hook ups via Tinder, but life felt simpler when we met potential sexual partners/soul-mates/spouses in pubs, clubs, lectures and other places where drunk young people gathered to talk nonsense.
It all seems like such a minefield now.
Massive generalisation of course but western leftist men lack masculine traits and aren’t attractive. I say ‘western’ because if you look at old Soviet and CCP propagandists posters the men looked like strapping masculine industrial workers, farm workers or soldiers. In the west the left have basically defined anything masculine as default right-wing. They can’t just cancel biology out of existence though and so no wonder women are attracted to right -wing men even when the women in question have otherwise left-wing views.
Like a lot of modern trends, none of this feels particularly new, there’s just new vocabulary to describe longstanding, normal behavior. Conservatism is marked by self-sufficiency, protection against threats, and cold pragmatism, aka stereotypical male behaviors. Progressivism, on the other hand, is characterized by compassion, cooperation, and reckless levels of generosity, or typical female behaviors.
I’m focusing on the more positive aspects of both sides, although we all know how each can grow into their own monsters if left unchecked.
Is it really a new phenomenon for women to seek masculine men, or for men to seek feminine women? We’ve created new barriers to such thinking with belittling women who want to be mothers and using terms like “toxic masculinity”, but our biology hasn’t changed enough for that to have permanent influence.
OK – but look at the history.
Votes for women were held up in the U.K. because liberals, though in favour in principal, expected, rightly, that women would tend to conservatism.
In other places women were given the vote as a conservative balance to the influx of largely male, left wing immigrants.
Historically working class men were more radical than working class women etc
So it’s not eternal and natural in that sense – it is a response to the current situation.
WOW—women voters conservative?? What planet was that on?
In the U.S., married women tend to lean conservative historically. The issue with many women today is a good many are not getting married for all sorts of reasons. Once married and with children, the stakes get redefined and societal risks of ‘supporting the left’ become obvious.
The ‘Corbyn on the streets, Mosley in the sheets’ phenomenon definitely has some truth to it.
The common element being, of course, the antisemitism.
This article is either mostly nonsense or is written as some sort of joke.
The only observation I’d make as a generalisation is that if a gender split is emerging aligning with traditional left/right politics, it’s almost certainly because women increasingly populate the political class and public sector generally, and therefore simply support big expensive government on principle. Men, typically over-represented in the salaried and small-business private sector, don’t want to be the mugs paying for it.
In other words it’s a reframing of the traditional domestic tensions in which the wife won’t turn down the heating or stop hammering the credit card, while hubby goes quietly insane at the realisation that he can do nothing about this if he wants a quiet life.
Women admire competence, gravitating toward men who can fix things and help organize their messy lives.
This is a provocative and thought-provoking essay. And I find it curious that few women have joined the discussion. But that’s a side point.
Efforts to blur or erase sexual difference go back some years now. Shulamith Firestone was popular around the time I was in college (mid-1970s) and is the earliest I recall who proposed a unisex society as the solution to modern male-female conflict. Which is often labeled ‘the patriarchy’ but has more to do with industrialization and its displacement of traditional male and female roles than with men dominating women. Yes, men are bigger and physically stronger, but women have other strengths and physical powers and in pre-industrial societies they tend to balance out. Industrialization threw everything into a cocked hat.
Shulamith Firestone dreamed of a world in which male and female differences were erased or suppressed. Biology dreams otherwise, and Mother Nature always bats last (and she swings a heavy bat).
Today we are at or near the peak of the latest anti-difference revolt, and what Ms. Dee describes is nature’s way of restoring a recognizable social correlate to the irrevocable biological difference between men and women. Or, if you prefer psychology, we are watching the archetypal distinctions re-emerge. Men and women are different, have different desires, different abilities, different needs. And, most importantly, they need each other.
It’s been this way since the emergence of multicellular animals in the pre-Cambrian era. It’s become trite to say that this or that behavior is written in our DNA. But sex, absolutely, is in our DNA. Mating is a long dance. Don’t fight it, step in and join it.
The idea has been with us at least since the ‘60s. As a child I remember reading newsmagazine articles about society moving toward “Unisex” and seeing illustrations (and probably photos) of “unisex” people. Like so many other fad ideas of the sixties, its noxious fruit has ripened in the second millennium producing the social chaos we see today.
‘Human nature’ is a thing, that many leftists to their detriment deny.
I personally don’t recognise the trope that men are more right wing and women more left wing.
My take is that when politics and society, and individuals more generally, become extreme and polarised – people end up projecting their suppressed and rejected ‘other half’. That which which you suppress you attract to you, and you will be destined to keep confronting/attracting it.
Women used to more likely to vote Conservative in the U.K., but in recent years they have tilted left. Not sure why …
Women aren’t getting married like they used to…married women historically voted more conservatively, at least in the USA.
There are no left wing “men”. Only left wing biological males.
Left wing men are squishy is so many ways. Think ‘Berger’ in ‘Sex and the City’.
Real men don’t watch sex in the city! 🙂
Real men have sex in the city.
Looks like this article is too complicated for me
I have always been opinionated and conservative. As a young person my experience was that even women who were vocal public left wingers would immediately drop their politics in private if they were interested in you.
Or they could just get out more! I’m just joking, stay in and make things up, relish your evolutionary cul de sac .
btw, shouldn’t this be a weekend essay?