This week’s gender war moment, explained.
Internet culture puts us on “teams.” It’s not always that simple.
The gender gap is not overblown. It’s very real. But at this point, it’s literally just the backdrop of young Americans’ lives. It’s our president, the media, celebrities, influencers, and yes, even our parents, and sometimes our teachers, who seem to be fanning the flames of furor, pinning young men and women against one another.
This conversation is playing out front and center this week, reigniting much of the dialogue that perpetuates the same noise and stereotypes that got us here in the first place. It’s not necessarily that the divide is fake, but it’s that internet culture flattens everything into “teams”, and gender is an easy one.
A recent example of this is what’s going on with the Olympic gold-medal winning men and women’s USA hockey teams, which has all sides of the internet up in arms.
Tl;dr, after the men’s team beat Canada, they shared a locker room phone call with President Donald Trump, in which he invited them to the White House and joked that he had to invite the women’s team, too, or risk impeachment. The men laughed at his joke, captured in a now viral video. (The women’s team declined his invitation.) Everyone and their mother — including game-winning goal scorer Jack Hughes’ mom — has a take. And predictably, most of these takes have more to say about the commentator’s politics as they do about the actual dynamics between the teams.
That said, I wrote about mine for The Bulwark, which you can read here.
Young men and women know they have different worldviews. It doesn’t mean they can’t get along, or support one another. At this point, a lot of Gen Z just assumes they’ll disagree on some things, but what they don’t want is for every disagreement to turn into a character indictment. Millennials, especially in Trump’s first term, weren’t always great at that. And Gen Z, especially the youngest amongst us, watched politics turn into a type of moral sorting, and took note.
As women’s hockey icon Kelly Pannek put it:
“Our experiences with the men’s team [were] different, I think. That’s something, we all know being there what it felt like to have their support throughout the tournament, to support them, and how great of a moment it was for everyone that was a fan of both teams to come together and say how great it was that we both won a gold medal for the first time ever. And it really was such a special feeling being there and being able to spend time with them after their win and the respect that they were showing us. And I think the video is what it is. You’d have to ask them their feelings on it. I think there’s also elements to it, with the phone call specifically, it’s not surprising, to be frank. So, I don’t know why we expect differently?”
Also this week, The Atlantic published a great piece by Faith Hill, titled, ‘Young men aren’t the only ones struggling.’ It’s been sent around quite a few of my group chats. My main takeaway is this: we’ve spent years agonizing over young men and their struggles — a discussion that is completely warranted. But the truth is, life is hard for both boys and girls right now. And it shouldn’t be a competition of who has it worse. In fact, our constant banter of which gender is worse off is part of the problem. It pins our boys and girls against each other, without allowing them to be each others’ biggest allies.
Hill writes:
“Young men, as a population, are struggling more than they used to. But sometimes that point gets twisted into a different argument: that young men are struggling more than young women. Women tend to be present only as a comparison; they’re the ones who are more likely to attend college or to lean on close friends, less likely to depend on drugs or alcohol or drop out of high school. They’re symbols of success, used to make a point. The problem is that, in a number of ways, young women are actually doing worse than men. That this fact has been obscured—that women themselves have been obscured in this conversation—says a lot about who gets prioritized in American culture, and how misguided our understanding of human flourishing is in the first place...Hardship shouldn’t be a competition. Well-being is not a zero-sum game for men and women.”
The trouble is that our culture is defaulting to zero-sum thinking. If one group is named as struggling, the other group must be thriving. Or even blamed. Earlier this year, I wrote about the fact that young men and women want out of the gender war.
I write a lot about the youth gender gap. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve had thousands of conversations with young people across the country, and it comes up every single time. It’s one of the biggest phenomenons of our generation. Through listening to Gen Z, I’ve realized the divide is exacerbated by a lack of intervention looking to bring young men and women together, which is already resulting in tangible consequences — lower birth rates being one of them. (In fact, fewer people are pairing up at all.)
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many young men and women are looking for a way out of their full-fledged gender war.
And this is what it boils down to. Much of the divide between young men and women is manufactured by people who benefit from putting a wedge between them, and there are really few stakeholders working to bring them together, even if boys and girls themselves don’t see their opposing political or social viewpoints as detrimental to their ability to get along.
If you don’t believe me, listen to them.
Inside today’s full report
Young adults’ actual pov on the gender gap
What they’re asking for from adults