KATE EMERY: Why a widening gender divide could spell trouble

Break out the Barry Manilow and tequila because a worsening gender divide could mean nothing but bad things for the Western world’s already declining birth rates.

If you’ve never heard of the 4B movement that’s either because you live a rich and fulfilling life offline or because you live in Australia, where it would take more than an election to get us to stop shagging.

But the 4B movement, which started in South Korea as a women’s protest movement, is supposedly gaining traction in the US after Donald Trump’s victory.

The short version is that the 4B movement encourages straight women to refuse to marry, have children, date or have sex with men as a protest against the patriarchy. It’s getting traction among young online Americans as a reaction to more than half of US male voters backing Trump, with his history of problematic behaviour towards women and key role in ending national abortion rights.

I’m not convinced a generation of women are ready to cosplay Lysistrata — the eponymous Greek heroine of Aristophanes’ comedy who stopped the Peloponnesian War by convincing all the women to withhold sex until their husbands stopped fighting. But I do think there’s a possibility the widening political gender divide in western countries will get worse if the language of the online “manosphere”, which helped return Trump to the White House, seeps into mainstream society.

Men and women in their twenties are further apart politically than other generations: young women are moving to the left as men move to the right. This ideological gap appears to exist in the US, UK, Europe and, to a lesser extent, Australia (more on that in a minute).

In the US election, 56 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 voted for Trump, compared to 40 per cent of women. Earlier this year the Financial Times reported similar gender gaps in Germany, the UK and Poland, where last year almost half of men aged 18 to 21 backed a far right party compared to one-sixth of their female counterparts.

People of this generation also appear to be less likely to date someone on the other end of the political spectrum to them. That’s a worry if birth rates are the kind of thing that keep you up at night.

Australia is a bit special, according to research from Flinders University professor Intifar Chowdhury, who found young Aussie women and men were moving towards the progressive end of politics. Even so, she found 34 per cent of male voters in Generation Z — those born between 1997 to 2012, give or take — voted for the centre-right Coalition compared to 20 per cent of women.

She concluded that Australian millennials and Generation Z men were more conservative than women of the same age (but still more progressive than most past generations).

Next year’s Federal election should give us a clearer picture of whether Australians are leaning into the global trend or away from it.

Just what’s driving this divide is more complex and nuanced than is possible to tackle in an 850-word column but here I go anyway.

Part of it is likely a reaction to the #MeToo movement and a perception among some young men that they’re now the ones being discriminated against.

That sentiment is being fuelled by the rise of the manosphere: bro-y male-dominated online communities that can have a tendency to regard women as a separate species rather than fellow human beings with more to offer the world than a vagina and a womb.

Favourites of the alt-right like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan represent the more moderate end of a very dark online world that leads to people like accused rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, a far-right Holocaust-denying numpty who’s been getting his kicks tweeting “your body, my choice, forever” in the wake of Trump’s election win.

A good rule of thumb for figuring out whether you’re in the manosphere is to listen out for the words “red pill”, “alpha male” or “cuck”.

To dismiss every man who finds comfort in the manosphere as incels (“involuntary celibates” who think women are to blame for the fact that nobody wants to date them) is to dismiss every Trump as racist women-haters, rather than merely a healthy portion of them.

Both groups have been seduced by misinformation, whether that’s being convinced that schools are handing out free sex change operations at recess or that women will only look at a man if he’s 6 foot and works for a hedge fund (as though funny-looking short guys haven’t been getting laid forever).

The manosphere is able to reach lonely, disenfranchised and vulnerable men in a way that more moderate voices are not. This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise: it’s really nice to be told that everything bad in your life is someone else’s fault.

But it may also be dragging men to the political right, ironically making it less likely they’ll find a partner, log off and maybe even pop out a kid.