Mars, Venus and Planet Earth

I have written several times over the years about the strong liberal leanings that are evident in the voting patterns of young, single women in the United States.

This liberal bias is even more pronounced when comparing women to men among the college educated.

Single, young white females typically vote Democrat at least 2/3 of the time according to most exit polls in recent years.

Unmarried women of all ages and races voted 68%-31% for the Democrat in House races in 2022.

Married women overall voted 56%-42% for Republicans.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/national-results/house

I came across an interesting article by John Burn-Murdoch in The Financial Times recently that looks at the gender divide issue from a wider global perspective.

It seems that the United States is not the only country that is seeing a widening gap between increasingly liberal political views among its young women compared to its men.

There is no country that this gap is larger than in South Korea.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998

The data also seems to suggest that as the young women in a society move to the left politically the young men are moving to the right.

What is also interesting is that this ideological gap has almost totally come about within the last 10-15 years.

This divergence in views based on gender is something we have never seen before.  Shifts in political ideology have historically moved generationally as all members of a generation share the same general formative experiences and reach significant milestones at the same stages of life. 

John Gray did not know how right he was when he wrote his best selling book over 20 years ago.

Young men and women truly seem as if they are living on different planets today.

However, what is now causing young men and women of the same generation, who have grown up together, gone to school together and now work together have such diametrically opposed political views?

In previous blog posts I hypothesized that young, single women in the United States have become more liberal politically than their male counterparts due to two factors.

1) an innate need for security that pushes them to support large government safety net programs

2) a need to belong that is provided by the large number of "causes" that make up the progressive agenda

It can be argued that both of these are the result of the fact that there are now more young, unmarried women than we have ever had in history.

In fact, the most recent Census Bureau data indicates that 29% of all mid-life adults today(age 30-49) have never been married.

That is almost twice what it was in the year 2000 and over four times what it was in 1970.

Source: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/marino-geographic-variation-percentage-mid-life-never-marrried-adults-2021-fp-23-13.html

The numbers are even higher for those under age 35.

And higher still for college educated, young women who vastly outnumber college educated, young men making it even more challenging to find a marriage partner.

During the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests of 2020 I made the observation that a large percentage of the protestors were young, white, single women.

In fact, they vastly outnumbered the protestors who were Black.

It defied logic.

How was defunding the police or emptying prisons going to make single women feel more secure?

The same can be said for several more of the larger liberal, progressive causes of today.

How is allowing a biological male to use a women's restroom going to make her feel safer?

How does allowing biological males to compete with females in athletics advance the opportunities for women?

Is there any group today that feels more lonely, is more misunderstood and wants to belong than young, single, college-educated white women? 

Many have no man in their life. There are no children or likely prospects that marriage or children will occur soon due to the imbalance between male and female college graduates. They live in rental apartments in large cities leading hectic, anonymous lives with little sense of community and huge sums of student loan debt.

They have no family of their own or children they belong with. They can belong with a "cause".

On the other side of the planet, what is driving the enormous ideological political chasm between young men and women in South Korea?

It appears to involve an explosion of young, single women in that country.

42.5% of people in their 30's in South Korea are unmarried. That is up 13.3 percentage points compared to just 10 years ago.

Most troubling in South Korea is that the institution of marriage does not seem to be of much interest to either men or women anymore. Only one-third have a positive view of marriage.

Source: https://www.wionews.com/world/south-koreans-losing-interest-in-marriage-report-finds-630642

Of those who still look at marriage positively, the majority are men.

Only 28% of women viewed marriage positively in South Korea.

The attitudes on marriage have even given rise to a new word in Korean---"bihon"---which describes someone who has willingly chosen to be single.

A subset of young South Korean women have taken it a step further and started a women's movement based on four NO's. (Hat tip to Alex Berenson for pointing me to this info).

NO to dating

NO to sex with men

NO to marriage

NO to childbirth

What could go wrong?

In a country in which cultural norms do not look kindly on out of wedlock births, the effect of what is going on in South Korea on that nation's birth rate is predictable.'

Fewer marriages means there are fewer babies being born in South Korea.

South Korea now has the lowest birth rate in the world.

The total fertility rate (TFR) is .72 and is expected to go even lower. A 2.1 rate is considered necessary to maintain a stable population meaning each woman would, on average, give birth to 2.1 children during her lifetime. 

North Korea's TFR is estimated at 1.79, still below replacement, but well more than double that of the South. 

North Korean leader Kim Jung Un recently told women in that country that it is their national duty to have more children to strengthen its national power.

The reality is that if the North's birth rate goes up, and the South's continues to fall, Kim Jung Un's heirs might conquer the South without firing a single shot or missile. After all, demography is destiny.

My theory is that the same fundamentals that I believe are behind the move to liberalism in the United States also applies to young women in South Korea.

High rates of young, unmarried women drives an innate desire for security that they see as being provided by big government and the lack of a mate and children means there is a need to "belong" to something. That includes belonging to a movement based on NO's.

However, what explains the apparent movement of young men to conservatism?

On his Twitter feed, John Burn-Murdoch, offers two theories.

The first is that young men are just reacting negatively to the "wokeism" in young women.

He calls it "negative polarisation".

"If you are going to be woke, I am going to be anti-woke."

This ideological polarization that Burn-Murdoch describes is not a positive sign when it comes to getting more men and women together in marriage either.'

A study done in 2020 that was reported in The Hill found that only 3.6% of marriages in the United States included a Democrat and a Republican. That is less than half the number of mixed race marriages in the United States! It is pretty incredible to think that it is more likely to have a mixed race marriage than to find a Republican and Democrat married to each other today.

Only about 17% of marriages have a Democrat or Republican and an Independent. In other words, about 80% of marriages involve partners who have similar political views. (Hat tip again to Alex Berenson for referencing this study in a recent Substack).

Burn-Murdoch's second theory is that this ideological divide is caused by social media  where young women and men increasingly inhabit different parts of that world and rarely are exposed to each other.and any divergent views.

We really have created a Mars and Venus without leaving planet Earth.

What is my take from all of this?

I wrote the following words exactly one year ago today in a blog post titled "The Natural Order Has Become Disordered". that was looking at the political divide between young men and women and single and married women in the United States.

There is one fundamental truth that underlies all of this.

Women who are married and those with children are much happier than those who are single or who do not have children.

One final factoid that gets us back to where we started.

Women who are married are much, much happier than women who are single.

Women who have had children are also happier than those who are childless. 

Contrast the percentage of women who say they are "very happy" at all ages between those married with children and those unmarried and childless.

Why is it a problem that there are so many single people in the United States today?

Why is it a problem that the birth rates have been dropping for years?

These are both having the effect of further destabilizing our society by interfering with the necessary social and relationship infrastructure.

Human beings are social animals.

They need meaningful human connections and relationships in their lives to thrive.

In families. In friendships. In day to day life.

God established a natural order in his design for humans to live happy and fulfilled lives

Men and Women each bringing their unique gifts to society.

Marriage and commitment between men and women.

Children born of those unions.

Families supporting each other.

Supportive friends and communities built on a bedrock of values, beliefs and faith.

Do you want to know why everything seems off these days?

The natural order has become unordered.

Don't take my word for it.

What do the facts and data say about it?

It does not matter if it is the United States, South Korea or some other place else on Planet Earth.

There is a natural order and it has become disordered.

The disorder has affected single, young women the most.

However, the effects have the potential to erode the most fundamental underpinnings of society.

There are those that think the greatest risk to Planet Earth is climate change.

Think again.