Opinion: Why many socially liberal young people feel comfortable voting R + gender divide

[ProgressiveModerate]

There are a lot of young people out there who are grew up with diversity, are racially inclusive, strongly support LGBTQ rights, and support many aspects of feminism, yet lean so stubbornly R.

I say this as someone who is young, and currently goes to a generally liberal high school in NYC that has significant pockets of conservative Asians and Jewishs. Everyone basically supports stuff like same sex relationships to the point where people don't really care whether someone is gay or trans, it's just the social norms we grew up with. To many, this sort of makes these social issues seem like non-issues compared to our adult friends who actually lived in times when there were literal sodomy laws in many states. This may be optimistic on my part, but I genuinely feel that by 2030, gay marriage, and transgenderism will largely be a non-issue in our politics. I do suspect the sports debate will actually stick around though because you can def argue it's unfair without directly attacking trans folks, but it will never be a driving factor in our politics.

I think it's similar to the reason that younger black voters support Ds less overwhelmingly than their older counterparts - they never grew up in a society where they faced the same degree of discrimination as their parents and grandparents did. Sure, there is still plenty of racism out there, but it's generally nowhere near the barrier it used to be.

I've said this before, but I think the main driving social factor for political sorting for young people is gender, and specifically feminism, or at least the more extreme end of it. Teenage years is when people develop a sense of gender, and I think a lot of the males I know feel like they're being attacked for presenting any sort of masculinity. You def do have a portion of girls who over-accuse men of sexism such as mansplaining.  I think many of my male peers are also frustrated because it makes dating a lot more frustrating; things previously seen as polite like holding a door open may be a turn off. It's also silly things like girls getting upset about guys being too muscular, too talkative, or too anything associated with masculinity/dominance. On the flip side, I do think you have a significant faction of boys trying to "out-man" each other, and I think it's partially in a response to this culture. This sort of creates a really toxic loop between both genders, and to be clear, I don't think either side is in a "right" or "wrong", but we just have a general cultural issue.

I hope a lot of this is just due to immaturity and hormones, but it's really not great.

[ProgressiveModerate]

There are a lot of young people out there who are grew up with diversity, are racially inclusive, strongly support LGBTQ rights, and support many aspects of feminism, yet lean so stubbornly R.

I say this as someone who is young, and currently goes to a generally liberal high school in NYC that has significant pockets of conservative Asians and Jewishs. Everyone basically supports stuff like same sex relationships to the point where people don't really care whether someone is gay or trans, it's just the social norms we grew up with. To many, this sort of makes these social issues seem like non-issues compared to our adult friends who actually lived in times when there were literal sodomy laws in many states. This may be optimistic on my part, but I genuinely feel that by 2030, gay marriage, and transgenderism will largely be a non-issue in our politics. I do suspect the sports debate will actually stick around though because you can def argue it's unfair without directly attacking trans folks, but it will never be a driving factor in our politics.

I think it's similar to the reason that younger black voters support Ds less overwhelmingly than their older counterparts - they never grew up in a society where they faced the same degree of discrimination as their parents and grandparents did. Sure, there is still plenty of racism out there, but it's generally nowhere near the barrier it used to be.

I've said this before, but I think the main driving social factor for political sorting for young people is gender, and specifically feminism, or at least the more extreme end of it. Teenage years is when people develop a sense of gender, and I think a lot of the males I know feel like they're being attacked for presenting any sort of masculinity. You def do have a portion of girls who over-accuse men of sexism such as mansplaining.  I think many of my male peers are also frustrated because it makes dating a lot more frustrating; things previously seen as polite like holding a door open may be a turn off. It's also silly things like girls getting upset about guys being too muscular, too talkative, or too anything associated with masculinity/dominance. On the flip side, I do think you have a significant faction of boys trying to "out-man" each other, and I think it's partially in a response to this culture. This sort of creates a really toxic loop between both genders, and to be clear, I don't think either side is in a "right" or "wrong", but we just have a general cultural issue.

I hope a lot of this is just due to immaturity and hormones, but it's really not great.

Correct. This is the future divide and it is a funny thing to watch.

Even on Tiktok (Skip to TLDR if you don’t want to hear about what’s going on with Stupid Dance App)
there is a clear difference. I have mainly a very young Gen Z (13-18 theoretically but most kids lie about their age to be older) base and when I look at the differences between my male followers and female followers it’s just astounding.

Politically sure, you have the boys toting American flags and the girls with pronouns/a fist in their bio, but even beyond the political surface it’s two different worlds.

I have been exposed to both and even down to basic mannerisms it’s different. The divide has always been there sure, but nowadays I can tell both the gender and politics of a commenter without even looking. The language is different for goodness sakes. This isn’t just political, it’s a full blown cultural divide perpetuated by algorithms and it seems to be stronger as you get younger.
Sure some of it is hormones and my year did have Shapiro/Milo (and Hunter but he is now left lmfao)
but it feels even bigger and deeper than just a few years ago.

I wouldn’t say the driver is feminism so much as it is just basic culture at this point. It’s not even some political issue wedge, most of the self identifying homophobic and racist boys support gay marriage and have diverse friend groups. It’s a matter of identity and culture at this point.

TLDR: ProgMod is correct and in online spaces it’s even more pronounced. There really does seem to be two different stories of the younger cohort of Gen Z. It’s a cool trend to talk about…but the consequences are dire long term.

This is what worries me the most about our society from a social standpoint long term, especially since men and women kinda need to be able to coexist for the world to function.

Social media def perpetuates it, and it seems like people use social media to show off to their friends, especially given it's so photo/video centric, (who are usually largely of the same gender) to be seen as "one of the girls" or "one of the boys". In person though, no one is trying to stage their every move and stuff because that's literally not possible, and plus you have general standards of basic respect IRL. If most of your friends are of the same gender, chances are on social media you're only really going to exposed to content and communicate with that gender whereas before people would come across people of both genders just chilling outside of school. It's like male and female echo chambers.

I think there are a lot of underlying and complex reasons we have ended up with this cultural problems today. I don't think feminism is the primary driver, but certain toxic aspects of it that have spilled over and play a role, specifically when it gets to the point of looking down upon men for anything masculine. I think you also have a lot of cultural problems with boys/men that are equally as significant in creating this greater cultural problem. And ofc social media just perpetuates everything like 10 times more.

...most of the self identifying homophobic and racist boys support gay marriage and have diverse friend groups. It’s a matter of identity and culture at this point.

This is literally facts. You also see it with girls to a lesser degree, but usually the ones who talk all about inclusion are some of the least inclusive people irl, maybe not along racial lines, but along other social lines. It's also weird cause both with males and females, it's like pretending to be homosexual half-jokingly with your friends is seen as cool.

Another thing I've noticed is there's a huge number of kids identifying as "asexual", and I wonder if it stems from this, people just don't want to put up with the other gender. I think some it also comes as "self-justification" for being a virgin (which is another insane thing too, I'm in Senior year, and 95% of people are still virgins or so they claim which is interesting)

I think this issue can be hard to explain to older folks because around this age, friend groups today and historically are often all of one gender or another. The problem is the underlying toxicity between the genders is bad.



_____________

This is slightly unrelated, but another problem with social media is all the frankly naive social activism for the sake of it. I rmbr there was one far-left well-off white girl at my school who started making Instagram stories telling people to *not* call that police if a black person needs help because the police are racist. In her mind, she genuinely believed this was the right thing to do to support the black community, even though it's kind of dangerous if people take her words to heart. Stuff like that honestly gets me a bit angry because everyone wants to be seen as socially tolerant to the point where it's become a dumb competition, not genuine discussion over what we can do to make everyone feel included in our society.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I say this as someone who is young, and currently goes to a generally liberal high school in NYC that has significant pockets of conservative Asians and Jewishs. Everyone basically supports stuff like same sex relationships to the point where people don't really care whether someone is gay or trans, it's just the social norms we grew up with. To many, this sort of makes these social issues seem like non-issues compared to our adult friends who actually lived in times when there were literal sodomy laws in many states. This may be optimistic on my part, but I genuinely feel that by 2030, gay marriage, and transgenderism will largely be a non-issue in our politics. I do suspect the sports debate will actually stick around though because you can def argue it's unfair without directly attacking trans folks, but it will never be a driving factor in our politics.

As a Southerner, this sort of thing really reminds me how far we still have to go. I grew up in Atlanta, obviously quite liberal relative to most of the South, and I still remember my health teacher heavily implying that AIDS was a divine punishment for homosexuality in middle school. I'm only 20, but I definitely remember a time when overt homophobia was not just accepted but the norm. We've genuinely made great strides since then, and I imagine that a healthy majority now support gay rights, but that homophobia is 100% still latent, especially relative to what you describe.

Come to think of it, I'd be interested to know the partisan leanings of LGBT people by age and by region. Queer Republicans have always confused and angered me because growing up it was always very apparent that most conservatives thought queer people were going to hell and some were happy to send them there early; maybe many queer people in NYC, for example, never experienced that level of antipathy and are therefore more willing to consider voting Republican.

Yeah I think your reasoning is correct as to why. When people feel like they’re actively being attacked/oppressed, they are going to behave different politically than it if they feel “fine”.

I think the main issue with the issue of homosexuality in my school is that while it’s near universally accepted, people always talk about it through the lens of sex or something sexual making it like a joke, and still “othering” it, rather than acknowledging some people are just attracted to people or the same gender end of story.