“Why are men moving to the right?” is a question that seems to be on everyone’s lips. With men and women diverging so much on politics in much-publicized polls, the question makes sense. But it’s still somewhat misguided. Whether it’s issues of sexuality, abortion, climate change, or gun rights, both men and women have largely moved leftward—women have simply moved left much further and faster. Article after article may try to explain the radicalization of young men, but they miss the larger picture, because men aren’t primarily the ones changing their views. They’re just not moving leftward as fast as women.
If we want to understand and try to resolve the political and gender divide in this country, what we really need to understand is women’s extreme move to the left.
As a film and culture critic, I believe three of this year’s Oscar nominees—Emilia Pérez, Wicked, and Anora—offer something of an explanation. Art often reveals things about where we’re at that people would rather not admit straight out. Ideology may make us say the right things, but in our art we reveal something about our experiences that may go against our ideology but feels true to express. And these movies do just that.
Emilia Pérez
Emilia Pérez follows an ambitious lawyer named Rita Castro, held back in her career by sexism and racism, until a drug lord hires her to facilitate his sex change to a woman named Emilia Pérez.
When Rita first asks what he wants her to do, the drug lord replies he won’t tell her unless she first agrees to do what he wants. “To listen is to accept,” he says. Rita later says the same thing to a doctor whom she wants to perform the operation, with a pause of dramatic weight that makes it clear this phrase has a secondary thematic meaning.
“To listen is to accept” might be called the defining mantra of millennials and Gen Z. Articles like “That’s It. You’re Dead to Me.” and “A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement” have noted the rise in a generational redefinition of what it means to be loved by others: uncritical approval. This causes younger generations continually to cut off friends who are “toxic” when friends simply want to hold them accountable for bad or unhealthy behavior. It also causes them to have the highest rates of cutting off contact with their parents, even though parental-abuse rates have not been going up.
We see this kind of distorted reality all over Emilia Pérez. The drug lord Manitas wants to be able to get a sex change without telling his wife and kids, keep the money he got from his illegal deeds and murders without paying for his crimes, and still have a relationship with his former wife and kids even though they think he’s dead—and control whom his ex-wife dates. And the movie seems to assume that we should be rooting for him.
What’s causing this change in attitudes? A big part is played by social media, which is built on algorithms that affirm whatever you believe and give you increasingly extreme versions of same. As Gen Z culture critic Freya India explains:
Algorithms act like conveyor belts. Show even the slightest interest, fear, or insecurity about anything—hover over it for half a second—and you will be drawn in deeper. Little by little, the algorithm learns what keeps you watching.
Why is this affecting young women more than men? The answer is boringly simple: Girls use social media more than boys do, as Jonathan Haidt points out in The Anxious Generation. Consequently, the radicalizing nature of social media is going to show up in women’s attitudes more than it does in men’s. (In the same way that the effects of porn are going to show up more in men than in women.)
As views that affirm you are constantly reaffirmed, and people who disagree with you are demonized, the tendency is to pull away from moderate positions to more extreme ones. And since young girls are already more liberal to begin with, that means going further left.
Wicked
Popular YouTuber Grace Randolph gushed about the new Wicked movie when it came out. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a classic story about a young girl of unconditional appearance shunned by society but who nevertheless learns to use her power wisely and stand up for herself against evil. But there’s an added element that Randolph loved: “I find it quite touching and powerful that witches—a real life, centuries-long negative & harmful depiction of women—is being claimed and turned into an incredible and uplifting positive.”
Witchcraft is indeed being reclaimed by women. As social media algorithms pull people into their own customized beliefs and communities, traditional religion is one of the primary casualties. As Dr. Jean M. Twenge points out, organized religion is not compatible with an individualistic mindset that encourages you to customize your beliefs and communities to fit your preferences. But as Tara Isabella Burton wrote in her 2020 book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, this is not primarily causing a rise in atheism, but rather an embrace of cafeteria-style spirituality that can be mixed and matched to anyone’s liking.
This is particularly true among women. Among the reasons that women have always been more spiritual than men is that they tend to trust their intuition more. People who trust their intuition tend to believe in concepts and phenomena like ghosts, magic, fate, karma, and, yes, God. If their head says, “There is no scientific evidence for God,” but their heart says, “There must be something more than just this,” they are more likely to listen to the latter than the former.
Intuition can be a positive thing. But absolute trust in intuition comes with downsides. Our intuitions are shaped by the feedback loop of our communities and environments. And if we trust our intuitions too much, we will have low “cognitive reflection,” i.e., we will believe these things even when facts contradict them. This is why many people believe they can control life outcomes by “manifesting” them or through astrology, even though study after study shows that’s simply not true. This also explains why so many people continue to support failed political policies.
Such people see themselves as Elphaba in Wicked: virtuous and unfairly maligned by society. When they leave institutions or push away friends, it’s as if they were “defying gravity,” coming into their own power, and leaving behind oppressive power structures. And because they trust how things feel to them, it’s almost impossible to push back with “facts and logic.”
But all this is terrible for one’s mental health and life outcomes. If you can’t tell that the tarot cards you rely on don’t, in fact, predict the future, you’ll continue to face negative consequences but never know why. Anyone who tries to satisfy spiritual longings within personally tailored beliefs will end up miserable because they’ve cut themselves off from the vital mental health benefits of traditional religion’s community bonds. Twenge argues that this is the single biggest factor in the rising rates of depression. As she quips: The Amish have no mental health crisis.
Anora
What reliably decreases political polarization? Funnily enough, marriage. Single women and married women have the biggest gap within a sex. Single women tend to vote far left, but when they get married, they move much further to the center. This makes sense. If our intuitions are shaped by our communities, then when our primary community switches from online same-sex peer groups to an in-person opposite-sex marriage partner, we will be changed. Ross Douthat of The New York Times argues for a similar solution to the phenomenon of radicalized men, and he’s right. But the effect is typically more profound for women.
On the face of it, this should be pretty easy. After all, the majority of people who’ve never been married want to get married. But despite this, marriage rates continue to fall, both in America and around the developed world. Why?
Anora gives us a surprisingly good picture of the problem. Anora is a stripper and sex worker (aka prostitute) who gets a marriage proposal from the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch. Although she claims she’s happy with her life, she trips over herself to accept the proposal, despite a bunch of red flags. As it turns out, she wants to be in an exclusive relationship as a stay-at-home wife.
But the marriage falls apart because the husband’s family barges in and insists they annul the marriage since she’s a former sex worker. Throughout the movie, she fights for their marriage and insists that he will as well. But he abandons her—when caught by Anora and his family while hiding at a strip club—and gives in to his family’s demands without a struggle. Anora wanted to embrace her role as a housewife to a protector and a provider, but as it turned out, he was unwilling to accept either role.
In the real world, too, this appears to be a primary reason for the decline in marriage: men’s inability to live up to the protector/provider role. As Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson points out, one of the apparent biggest drivers in prolonged singleness is women’s growing economic gains and men’s dramatically steep economic drop-off: “Coupling is declining in the U.S. and around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall.” Analyses of things that turn women off show that too many men are either effeminate/feminine or misogynists—which is to say, they’re either incapable of fighting off threats or they’re a threat themselves.
In other words, men are losing their ability to be protectors and providers just as women are becoming capable of providing for themselves. But that doesn’t make women open to someone they have to provide for. According to the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which analyzes human sexuality through porn searches, when women started making economic gains, their romance novels turned from poor women marrying rich men to rich women marrying even richer men.
Yet it would be a mistake to place the blame solely on the young men themselves. As academics like Richard Reeves and Nancy Pearcey have pointed out in books like Of Boys and Men and The Toxic War on Masculinity, men grow up to be virtuous and productive by having appropriate male role models. The problem is that men today are primarily raised and taught by women, both their moms and female teachers. For example, the American Psychological Association argues that one big reason boys are falling behind academically is that schools are geared toward girls’ learning styles.
This is a challenge to both the left and the right. The left wants to believe society will be better when men have less power and they abandon traditional gender roles. The right wants to believe that the leftward drift of women is because of liberal propaganda (such as social media)—or worse, women’s economic advancement itself—rather than their own failures to provide an alternative.
Yet movies like Emilia Pérez, Wicked, and Anora expose the limits of these perspectives. In all these stories, the heroes are people who desperately want to be part of the mainstream. Rita wants to climb the corporate ladder and be married. All Elphaba wants is to be the Wizard’s right-hand woman, until he Wizard is exposed as a fraud. Anora leaps at the chance to abandon her career to be a stay-at-home wife. They only work against traditional societal expectations when they are rejected or those societal norms prove to be phony.
One solution to American political polarization is to invest a lot more into male mentorship for young men. The good news is there’s progress on that front. Men are seeking out the kind of male mentorship they need online and at church. In the long run, this can only help them live up to the roles women want for them and from them—and what they often want for themselves. And that sounds like a win for everyone.
