The Growing Gender Gap in Politics and Dating

The gender gap in American politics is nothing new.  The last election when men and women voted in partisan parity was 1976 when Jimmy Carter won 50-48 among both genders.  Since then, Barack Obama's 1-point margin among men in 2008 was the only time a Democrat has won among male voters and George H.W. Bush, who prevailed by 1 point among female voters in 1988, was the last Republican to win among women.  The divide has grown to a chasm in the new millennium and even more so in the Trump era.  The biggest distinction in the Trump era is that the chasm is now transcending both gender and generational lines.  Among younger voters, both males and females had both voted Democrat for the last quarter century.  It was just a matter of young women voting considerably more Democratic than young men.  As of election 2024, that's no longer the case.

In 2024, men 18-29 officially tipped into Republican territory according to the exit polls, favoring Donald Trump 49-48 while women in the same age range went for Kamala Harris by a 61-38 margin.  The divide was just as lopsided among 30-44 year-old voters, where men went 52-45 Trump and women went 56-41 Harris.  The abortion issue obviously really shined a spotlight on this gender gap, and the Democrats were widely discredited for overplaying their hand on the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling that repealed Roe vs. Wade, concentrating their messaging so lopsidedly on women of fertility age who constitute only 10% of voters.  It wasn't until the last month of the election cycle that they realized how disconnected young male voters were from this message, and even when they did figure it out, their solution was to send Michelle Obama onstage to scold young men for insufficiently prioritizing women's issues.

Just as fascinating as the ongoing gender gap in American elections is that the same gender gap is taking root throughout the world, and in some cases, even more lopsidedly.  South Korea is ground zero on the globe for poisonous gender relations that have manifested themselves into the body politic.  Korean men are both more shy in personal relations with women and more traditional in their views of women's role in society.....while Korean women are looking to be independent of them both personally and financially.  The result:  in last spring's presidential election, 60% of men in their 30s voted for one of the two conservative candidates compared to 40% of women in their 30s.  The gender gap was decidedly worse for Korean voters in their 20s where a whopping 74% of men voted conservative compared to only 36% women in their 20s.

Needless to say, this polarization has hardly been limited to the voting booth.  It's not a coincidence that South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world and is poised to see their population decline by half in another 50 years as a result.  It's all happened quite quickly too.  In 2000, just 19% of South Koreans between the ages of 30 and 34 were unmarried, but today that number is 56%.  The mismatch is breeding an expansion pack cohort of Korean male "incels" who bond together with a shared rage about the "kimchi women", their term for gold diggers who are unwilling to pull their weight while demanding too much from men.

The U.S. hasn't quite sunken to South Korea depths, but it's well on its way.  The gender wars have been raging hot in the toxic contemporary dating scene for several years now, but this summer, men have been indulging in a schadenfreude of female misery that definitely seems like another baby step in South Korea's direction.  A number of videos have gone viral of attractive young women out on the town, publicly disgusted that no men are approaching them.  The response from males has been pretty much universal gloating that women brought this on themselves by trying to have it both ways for too long.

This all strikes me as a perverse overcorrection of the excesses of the #MeToo era, with men wearing it as a badge of honor to snub a demographic of women that, just by nature of being out there and shouting through a megaphone that they're available, probably wasn't responsible for hurt male feelings during #MeToo.  It's not entirely clear if the subculture being portrayed in this gender tug-of-war is representative of the population at large, but there's certainly reason to believe it is.  Alcohol sales and dance club receipts are in precipitous decline, and the birth rate plummets to new lows with each passing year.  Something unsavory and unsettling is definitely going on here.

Unfortunately, it's not exactly a mystery what that something is.  It's known as the Internet.  It took just a little over a generation for the Internet to poison relations between the genders just as deeply as it's poisoned our politics.  And it's not just a matter of online dating making singles simultaneously too selective in choosing a mate and too socially awkward to approach somebody of the opposite sex in the wild.  It's about social media delivering sounding boards for everybody with a grievance from the dating world to find others in their situation and then collectively radicalize one another.

As someone who was too shy to ask girls out during my youth, and as someone who was very active in the early years of online dating, I can relate to the enraged men who are congregating to talk shit about women.  Luckily for me, there were no 4Chan or Reddit groups in my online dating days to seize upon my frustrations and take me down the rabbit hole that I'm seeing from these guys in the You Tube comments sections, where the hatred for females of our species is so visceral that it's clearly come from extended sessions of social media groupthink.

I bowed out of the online dating marketplace right about the time that #MeToo was raging the hottest, and it was indeed a scary time to be a single guy on a date.  I'm not sure how pervasive attitudes of female empowerment in the dating scene remain eight years later, but the #MeToo excesses were clearly born of the same social media poison that are driving the incel backlash today.  Far as I can tell, the frustrations singles are having with the opposite sex in 2025 are structurally the same as they were 20 years and 40 years ago, driven mostly by irrational expectations and self-pity.  The difference is that they're now filtered through an online echo chamber.

Guys who used to get mad when pretty girls shot them down in bars are now getting mad that pretty girls are swiping left on their Tinder profiles.  Girls that used to lament that guys in the bars using them for one-night stands were pigs are now getting played by the attractive guys on dating sites who dominate female attention.  Unattractive guys felt entitled to attractive women while women of all levels of attractiveness expected attractive men to settle down with them instead of playing the field.....irrational expectations then and now.

And then comes the self-pity.  I certainly remember that.  The feelings of brokenness.  The simmering anger that hung heavy and kept you awake at night when one "Miss Right" after another wasn't interested in you.  This feeling is bad enough when left to one's own devices amidst the self-pity.  When you have an online community not only reinforcing it but ascribing sinister motives to the other gender, it's easy to see how self-pity can manifest itself into something far uglier.

Just like everything else broken in this country, it'll be fascinating to see when or if the fever breaks.  It's folly to believe this won't come without catastrophic consequences.  The downstream effects of endemic sexual repression will lead to an endless feedback loop of rage and violence, not to mention a constant rising tide of gender dysphoria confusion.  The downstream effects of population loss will lead to a collapsing economy.  

It's also fascinating to compare the current cultural dilemma with that of a generation ago.  Go back to the early 2000s and those worried about the nation's future were wringing their hands about the catastrophe of cigarette smoking in bars and other public places, all part of a larger platform of puritanical lifestyle enforcement.  Fast forward 20 years and it's astonishing how innocent our fears were back then.  I guess those on the front lines of civilizing away our naughty habits can claim "success".  Studies have shown that among today's generation of 20-somethings, the number of people who have drunk alcohol or smoked a cigarette in the last month has declined by more than 20 points.  Of course, they're behaving themselves today because they're no longer patronizing the venues where sinful behavior used to transpire.....and where males and females used to make the kinds of connections that ultimately perpetuated the species.

In those innocent times of a generation ago, our wellness scolds assured us that the nation faced no challenge as serious as young people smoking cigarettes in bars who might get sick from it by the time they reached Social Security.  Today, the same young people are staying home in their parents' basements hating on the opposite sex in online forums full of equally miserable strangers, baking their brains with every motivation-sapping hit from their now-legalized bong, so beset by anger, confusion, and grief that they're convinced that they are trapped in the wrong body.  Between the collapsing birth rate, the lost economic activity from drug use, and the tenfold increase in the number of people seeking to transition to another gender on the nickel of those sharing a health insurance risk pool with them, I think it's a pretty good bet our physical and mental health care costs aren't going down since the days of smoky bars when young men and young women still got together and procreated.