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Sunday, March 10, 2024

NY Times: Men Are From Mercury, Women Are From Neptune

New York Times Op-Ed:  Men Are From Mercury, Women Are From Neptune, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a chapel talk at Asbury University, a Christian college in a charming small town outside of Lexington, Ky. The theme of my talk was constructive Christian engagement in the public square. But in the student forum that followed my speech, I received a question somewhat out of left field. “Studies are showing that Gen Z men and women are getting further apart politically,” one student asked. “Why is that? Why are we different from other generations?”

He was referring to a recent Gallup poll showing an immense political gender gap between 18- to 29-year-old women and men, driven mainly by young women turning sharply left. ...

Galluo Men Women

[T]he answer I offered my student questioner focused on culture more than politics. It’s not that current political controversies are irrelevant, of course. It’s that they’re less relevant than a series of seismic cultural changes that have led young men and young women to live increasingly separate lives — and the more they do so, the more they’ll have separate experiences and develop separate beliefs. Worse, the longer they live separate lives, the greater the differences will grow, and the harder it will be to ultimately form the relationships — up to and very much including marriage and parenthood — that our society needs to prosper.

In many ways, the world Generation Z confronts represents the unfortunate culmination of a number of trends that began before they were born. These trends both shape our politics and transcend our politics, and they’re extremely difficult to combat.

Generation Z has landed in a culture that is increasingly atomized and isolated. Robert Putnam’s oft-cited 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” remains one of the most important and prescient explanations of these trends. One could almost argue that we are now living in the “Bowling Alone” world. Civic engagement has declined. Church affiliation has declined. The number of friendships has declined, and most Americans report a sense of non-belonging in their workplace, in their community and in the nation.

And isolation isn’t just manifested in declining church membership or shrinking Rotary Clubs. As Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic, Americans simply hang out with one another less, with young adults showing the greatest decrease in socializing. “Teens are dating less,” Thompson writes, “playing fewer youth sports, spending less time with their friends, and making fewer friends to begin with.” ...

The cultural trends that separate men and women predate social media, but social media has undoubtedly made that separation much worse. Young men fall into the online orbit of male-centric celebrities, influencers and communities, and young women gravitate toward female-centric ones. As my colleague Lydia Polgreen noted on an excellent episode of the Times podcast Matter of Opinion, this self-segregation extends even to platforms: Women are disproportionately on TikTok, and men are on YouTube.

Against this backdrop, the rise of “workism” makes a degree of intuitive sense. Let’s return to Derek Thompson, who coined the phrase in a 2019 Atlantic piece. Thompson defined workism as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.” In a 2023 Pew poll, 71 percent of Americans said that “having a job or career they enjoy” is extremely or very important for people to live a “fulfilling life.” Only 23 percent said the same thing about being married. Given the widening cultural gap between the sexes and the declining rates of marriage, you may never meet someone who truly loves you. But you can work hard. You can make money.

Marriage can be a great blessing, and I lament workism. But the more I learn about the deep trends shaping our culture, the more I understand why men and women are alienated from each other, and why so many of us pour our hearts into our jobs. A career can feel like something that’s more in our tangible grasp than a romantic relationship. And though we may long to make deep and profound human connections, we often no longer know how.

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Other op-eds by David French:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/03/men-conservative-women-liberal-politics-culture.html

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