Angry young women: the toxic femosphere. By Emily Lawford at The New Statesman.
While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere have been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are nearly as extreme — just on the other side of the political spectrum.
The “femosphere” spans a range of tones: there are misandrist dating coaches who urge women to reject men altogether, and more explicitly progressive content creators who cover global and domestic politics.
Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. … Gen Z women are more likely to support causes such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism than young men. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.
It all feels impossibly bleak:
I spent the last few months in search of the new left-wing young women. It wasn’t difficult — they were everywhere. But it all felt impossibly bleak. They weren’t excited about their futures. They didn’t like the men they knew, or the idea of those they didn’t.
Men were just a threat who had the potential to harm or trap them. This will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them.
Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. Young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. And it’s getting worse. Women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.
Examples:
It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. I asked how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. …
I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different political views. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.”
Women have never been freer, more prosperous, or more independent, they’ve never been safer, they’ve never enjoyed more support and validation, they’ve never had more power and opportunity, and they are absolutely furious about all of it.
The men in their lives, proportional to their elevated independent material prosperity, have never had less comparative independent material prosperity and, most crucially, status.
They’re right to be miserable: wherever they look, they see a million broken men for each Adonis.
Here are some facts about leftism, the brain, and women to conclude. Leftists have been shown to have smaller amygdalae than conservatives. The amygdala is a region of the brain associated with threat perception. Differences in threat perception go a surprisingly long way toward explaining fundamental differences between left- and right-wingers — between seeing a fighting-age Syrian man in a boat as a poor refugee to be welcomed with open arms or as a dangerous invader to be kept out with force if necessary. Research has shown that just three months on hormonal contraception can change the structure and function of a woman’s amygdala. About 14 percent of girls aged 15–19 are on hormonal contraception in the US, and nearly 17 percent aged 20–29. …
Women’s worsening mental health is caused in large part by the massive toxic burden of the modern world, from the low-quality food we eat and the harmful chemicals that are everywhere—herbicides, pesticides, plastic chemicals, nonstick coatings, fire retardants, and pharmaceuticals—to our addiction to screens and chronic exposure to blue light and electromagnetic radiation. …
Not only are women significantly more likely to be mentally ill than men—this is well established—but mental illness is robustly associated with being a leftist. I’d be inclined to say leftism is itself a form of mental illness, but we can park that stronger claim for now and just deal with the association. …
Studies have shown, variously, that left-wingers are more mentally ill than conservatives, that they’re unhappier, that they’re more neurotic and emotionally unstable. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with “anti-hierarchical aggression” — i.e., the leftist desire to destroy society — and Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predict “virtuous victimhood signaling,” meaning the kind of claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview.