Democrats and Republicans alike can’t resist an opportunity to dissect the crises supposedly afflicting young men: porn, video games, unmade beds, laziness, loneliness, alienation, radicalization.
Let’s talk about young women.
NBC News’ exit polls from Tuesday’s elections reveal an overwhelming preference for Democratic candidates among women aged 18 to 29.
In Virginia, 81% of young female voters backed Abigail Spanberger for governor.
In New Jersey, 81% of young female voters backed Mikie Sherrill for governor.
In New York City, 84% of young female voters backed Zohran Mamdani for mayor.
Note that these numbers include young women of all races. Gen Z is the least white American cohort to date. Non-whites tend to lean Democrat. Non-white women even more so. New York City has a total non-hispanic white population of about 31%, according to the 2020 census.
Regardless, the ideological gap between men and women is an international phenomenon. The Financial Times reports that American women aged 18 to 30 are “30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries,” a gap which appeared in the course of six years. Germany boasts a 30-point-gap, the UK a 25-point-gap, and South Korea a 50-ish-point gap.
The Financial Times’ analysis begins in the 1990s for Western countries, when men and women reported roughly equal views, on average. In the United States and Germany, women claimed to be more conservative than did men. (RELATED: Poll Shows Liberal Women Are On A Crash Course With The Dating Hell They Created)
What happened?
Men generally grew more conservative at a moderate rate, with some exceptions. South Korean men plunged rightwards around 2015; British men grew more liberal, but are less liberal than their female counterparts. Women everywhere grew radically more liberal.
One explanation, courtesy of 1984’s Winston Smith: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
crazy that there’s basically zero overlap pic.twitter.com/xpXwOw086n
— snuppydogg (@snuppydogg) November 5, 2025
Recent data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) supports Smith’s analysis. Women of all ideological stripes have a lower tolerance for free speech than men of all ideological stripes. With the exception of men who “haven’t thought much about [free speech],” who cluster among women.
Men are “over 3.5 times more likely than women to be ‘perfectly tolerant’ of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker,” writes Chapin Lenthall-Cleary for FIRE.
Accepting that women tend to be more censorious than men, and more left-wing than men, the question remains, why?
Consider the crucial difference between males and females: Differing reproductive potential.
A Russian peasant holds the Guinness World Record for most children born to one mother, supposedly birthing 69 children over 40 years. (Her husband still fared better in terms of pure reproduction, having another 18 children by a second wife).
Genghis Khan spawned an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 kids.
From this basic difference emerges sexual dimorphism in the mind and body. Men are larger and stronger than women, helpful traits if you’re competing for access to a woman’s limited egg supply. Not to mention a 9-month gestation and lengthy infancy in which the mother devotes most of her energy to her child.
Men, being larger and stronger, are better suited to physical conflict. Women are probably better suited to social aggression.
Censorship and strict enforcement of orthodoxy is a form of social aggression. It is punishing those who threaten social harmony. When applied to childrearing, this looks something like, “Stop arguing with your brother. Why? Because I said so.”
CNN Virginia attorney General exit poll by gender
Men:
🔴 Miyares: 58% (+18)
🔵 Jones: 40%Woman:
🔵 Jones: 55% (+12)
🔴 Miyares: 43% pic.twitter.com/sjJpOjMEU8— OSZ (@OpenSourceZone) November 5, 2025
Women are more sensitive to emotional feedback than men, noticing and adjusting their behavior in response to subtle facial cues.
Recall that the Salem Witch Trials were spurred by the testimony of four young women. Elizabeth Hubbard, one of the original accusers, testified against 29 people by the end of the panic, 13 of whom were hanged.
Hubbard “was able to manipulate both people and the court into believing her. One way she and the other girls did this was through their outrageous fits in the courtroom,” according to professor Amy Nichols.
Women tend to be moved by the cries of the vulnerable, an instinct exploited by the left’s emphasis on “empathy” for supposedly marginalized groups. Women tend to place a greater emphasis on group cohesion and consensus, and are sensitive to minute changes in status. Think of the business card scene in American Psycho, a film which was successful, and funny, because it portrayed men acting like catty teenage girls. (RELATED: Feminist Filmmaker Can’t Figure Out Why Young Men Like Her Movie)
This isn’t to say the female sex is uniquely malevolent. It is to say women have a unique psychology predisposed to certain goods and certain evils.
If social media algorithms route boys towards pornographic material, they initiate girls into a global community. A young girl no longer has to be the best in her class. She has to compete with millions of women who are better looking than herself, funnier, wealthier, etc. Her ear is now bent to the opinions of her social media feed. When leftism is ascendant, as it was for decades, women gain status by out-doing the leftism of their peers. And by demanding conformity from the non compliant.
It serves to remember that a huge majority of women vote Democrat because their phone told them that voting Republican is low class. That is the sum total of their belief system. https://t.co/1d9vLiSFy2
— Upstate Federalist (@upstatefederlst) November 5, 2025
These effects are multiplied by the fact that women have never enjoyed quite so much direct power as they now do.
As commentator Helen Andrews notes, “Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.”
Now for a complication. Plenty of young men voted Democrat in Tuesday’s election, too. Referring to the same NBC Exit Polls:
- In Virginia, 58% of young male voters supported Spanberger
- In New Jersey, 57% of young male voters supported Sherrill
- In New York City, 67% of young male voters supported Mamdani
Again, these are young male voters of all races, and the same racial caveat applies.
One hypothesis: You don’t have to be a woman to exhibit feminine patterns of behavior. Especially when most Western countries have been swept by the “great feminization,” as Andrews puts it. (RELATED: ROOKE: The Boys Will Be Alright, But What About Our Young Women?)
“Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control,” Andrews wonders.
It might look something like Tuesday night.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC
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