Democratic women have sussed out the root cause of life’s troubles: men.
Two-thirds of Democratic women ages 18-29 say "the challenges that women face in American society are in a great deal due to the behavior or actions of men,” according to a recent poll from the Survey Center on American Life. Older Democratic women agree in smaller but still substantial numbers, ranging between 47% to 54%.
What are the challenges that women face in American society? A woman's vote is equal to a man's. No job is barred to her based on her sex. She may own property, sign contracts, marry whom she pleases and initiate divorce unilaterally.
In many areas of American life, women fare better than men. Women are frequently favored in custody disputes. Women and girls
earn higher grade point averages, on average, than men and boys. In 1995, about a quarter of both men and women ages 25-34 held a bachelor's degree. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 47% for women and 37% for men. Women accounted for 98% of the 162,000 jobs added in August, according to a CNBC analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
So what, exactly, are women complaining about? Here’s a theory: As patriarchy has diminished in reality, it has grown in explanatory appeal.
Are American women 'treated with respect and dignity'?
Democratic women might counter that the United States has never had a female president, that women hold a minority of seats in Congress, and that men dominate senior management. These facts are true, though disparities in outcome do not indicate sex-based discrimination.
"Health care access" remains a top-of-mind issue for most Democratic women, which frequently means “abortion access.” Some claim that women were largely excluded from clinical trials prior to 1993, but this does not appear to be the case.
Women have grievances that are harder to quantify. In 2011, about 75% of female respondents ages 15-44 in a Gallup poll believed that women in the United States were “treated with respect and dignity.” By 2024, only about 40% said the same. Other complaints relate to dating and the specter of “toxic masculinity.”
What is to blame for our frayed relations?
The answer is likely education.
How TV shows, movies and social media portray patriarchy
An American education begins, after some initial instruction from mom and dad, with television and movies. Film is rife with storylines about sexism, sometimes central to the plot, as in "Hidden Figures" or "Brave," sometimes deployed as a marketing hook, as with the "girl power" branding around Disney's "Captain Marvel" and its live-action "Snow White" remake.
Social media is the principal educator of Americans older than 7 or so. It is, especially short-form video, a “speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium,” as Neil Postman once wrote of television.
Emotional agitation is one of the most reliable ways to keep the user present-focused. A woman who feels mistreated at work or by her husband may turn to TikTok and find a deluge of videos confirming her suspicion that men are out to get her.
Consider the lyrics of a recently TikTok-viral song called “Labour” (often used as a soundtrack to videos made in support of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother whose trial for killing her three children ended in a mistrial Sept. 4 after jurors deadlocked over her postpartum psychosis defense).
Singer Paris Paloma whines that women must assume the roles of “therapist, mother, maid, nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant” for men.
Women are “just an appendage” who “live to attend him, so that he never lifts a finger,” according to Paloma.
Calling on a viewer to “fight the man” is an excellent way to agitate her emotions. It casts her as the underdog struggling for justice, in the manner of David versus Goliath or “Rocky.”
Take it from Ms. magazine editor and influential feminist activist Robin Morgan, who once declared: “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act.”
'Man-hating' as a path to high status
In other words, "man-hating" is a path to status. A high-status woman wields outsize influence over her social world through the respect of her peers. A low-status woman does not, and suffers the stress of being held in low esteem. If a woman accepts that she is engaged in an existential struggle against men, she has found a higher cause. She is given permission to be morally indignant and therefore superior.
Tom Wolfe once observed that the “intellectual” is defined by his indignation: “It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority.”
Wolfe argues that the destruction left by the World Wars gifted European intellectuals fodder for social commentary. American intellectuals tried to copy that haughtiness, but ran into a problem: The United States had emerged from World War II in a position of economic dominance, its homefront essentially untouched.
So, the intellectuals invented windmills to tilt at: "local fascism," "preventive fascism," "latent fascism," "cultural genocide."
Certain women today play the same game. There is misogyny everywhere – internalized, institutional, benevolent – for those whose feeling of moral superiority depends on condemning misogyny.
Stock phrases like "I hate men" signal belonging to the leftist in-group. Democratic women are not oppressed by tyrannous men, but by their own anxiety about status and belonging.
Democratic women may sense that being a wife and mother is not, in and of itself, high status in their social world. Academia and medicine are high-prestige fields, but they’re competitive and require years of training.
Activism is the natural solution for the person seeking prestige from the couch. Anyone can fire off a post on social media or record a rant on their phone. It takes little effort to disparage men, or any other group assumed to hold outsize power, and the social reward for doing so can be considerable. That incentive, over time, may push relations between men and women toward a breaking point.
Natalie Sandoval is an opinion fellow with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. She graduated from Columbia University in 2024 with a degree in English. Prior to this role, she worked as an opinion columnist at the Daily Caller, where she focused on politics and cultural commentary.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democratic women aren't oppressed, but they keep blaming men | Opinion
