Sam Boland: Time for men to listen to women, and learn from them

Amid a new global gender divide, men could mark International Women’s Day by taking responsibility for the way they behave

Taylor Swift makes it clear that men who behave badly can take a hike. And look at her current beau, American football star Travis Kelce: The responsibility he takes for his behaviour is a world away from the toxic masculinity beguiling a generation of lonely young men. Picture: Brynn Anderson/AP

It's on November 19, lads.

In an increasingly tedious joke, the only time men care about International Men’s Day is in the lead-up to International Women’s Day. But there’s growing evidence that, especially for our younger men, we should be taking our issues more seriously.

Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch recently wrote: “A new global gender divide is emerging.” 

In older age cohorts all round the world, Burn-Murdoch explained, the political attitudes of the sexes on the progressive-conservative spectrum are within a couple percentage points of each other, whether a society is progressive, conservative, or somewhere in between, though women always trend as being couple of points more progressive than men.

This makes sense, Burn-Murdoch wrote, because age peers “share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time, and intermingle in the same spaces”, regardless of gender.

Until now, that is.

In the US, Germany, and Britain, women under 30 are now 25-30 percentage points more progressive than male counterparts, Burn-Murdoch writes. 

In recent elections in Poland and South Korea, young men heavily favoured hard-right parties, while young women skewed equally towards liberals. The Gen Z gender gap is observable in China and Tunisia as well.

“This shift,” Burn-Murdoch warned, “could leave ripples for generations to come.”

NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.

I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.com/kG4qQReqfT

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 26, 2024

The reaction to his dire predictions came in three main strands. 

The most endearing came from the statisticians who, as they do in response to his articles every week, nerded out on methodology, pros and cons of statistical models, and so on. The least endearing, but most predictable, reaction was the hundreds of faceless, nameless social media accounts calling women sluts and feminazis.

Young women are going their own way

The most interesting strand of reaction, though, was not so much to the content of the article itself but to Burn-Murdoch’s suggestion that the way to close the gap between two genders with nothing in common was for young women to meet young men halfway, to which women’s answer was a resounding “no”.

Boiled down, their argument is that women have not made the progress of the last century by compromising with those men who want them chained to the kitchen sink, barefoot and pregnant. What does that compromise look like anyway? A longer chain, one shoe, and a limited number of pregnancies? Now women under 30 are saying, men’s bad behaviour is men’s problem to solve. 

Young women are going their own way. There is already a ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ movement, predominantly based online, members of which say that women are too much trouble to be dealing with, what with their hysterical demands to be treated as equals, paid the same as men, and so on. Fine, women respond, what would we want with men like that?

However, the shoe is on the other foot when women go their own way. By any metric — physical or mental health, career success, life expectancy — heterosexual men do better when in relationships with women. The inverse is not true. 

Single women report higher happiness levels, have better friendships, and travel more than married women. Starkly, married women have shorter life expectancies, and not just because the person most likely to kill them is their intimate partner. Stress, self-neglect, and unequal domestic workloads are also major factors in married women dying younger.

So now, young women are taking the radical step their mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t take and saying: “No, we shouldn’t have to shorten our lives to prolong men’s lives.”

To return to South Korea, there is a movement known there as 4B. It is essentially a sex strike, and marriage and birth rates have fallen to such a degree that the government has declared a national crisis (as well it might, with the population on trend to fall by 30% in 50 years).

The cost of living and scant societal resources are also factors, but here, too, the gender faultlines are clear, as women refuse to pick up the care and domestic labour shortfall for men, as well as work to pay the bills.

Just look at Taylor Swift...

Meanwhile, whether she is creating or responding to a zeitgeist, the global queen of women going their own way is Taylor Swift.

Swift is a billionaire, which makes going your own way a lot easier. And what has made Swift a billionaire is her take on the break-up song. Traditionally, a defining characteristic of the break-up song is not being able to survive without your former lover — Etta James’ ‘I Would Rather Go Blind’, for example. 

Swift’s twist is that she won’t tolerate men who treat her badly: ‘Karma is [her] boyfriend’ — bad boys will get what’s coming to them; she’s going to shake off the haters, heartbreakers, and fakers; she won’t pretend to like acid rock to impress a man. It’s a message of empowerment that resonates from South Korea to West Cork.

So where does this leave men, who still face their own, very real problems?

The male loneliness epidemic is global and widespread. Loneliness significantly increases the risk of premature death, almost to the extent of smoking and obesity. And while we hear a lot about elders’ loneliness, this newspaper reported recently that the loneliest people in the world are men aged 16 to 24. 

In their loneliness, young men turn to social media, which is no longer the benign community-building project it was in its infancy but now a monetised rage machine which sows division rather than cohesion. You get a lot more clicks by encouraging blame and victimhood than empathy and accountability — not a situation that will bring young men and women together.

Fortunately, Swift has the answer for us men too. It’s not that she and the Swiftie generation, in going their own way, are rejecting their male peers entirely, or at all. 

Just don’t be a hater, heartbreaker, or faker is the message. 

...and look at Travis Kelce

Just in case young men still can’t grasp this, in a world where social media algorithms push Gollum-on-steroids pimp Andrew Tate into their brains, Swift gives us a real-life example — her current beau, Travis Kelce.

At first glance, the American football star is just the kind of jock you’d expect Swift and co to avoid like the plague. At 34 years old, he gambols around the pitch like someone half his age, bumping chests and butting helmets with friend and foe alike. He unironically adopted the Beastie Boys’ pastiche of meatheads, ‘you gotta fight for your right to party’, as his rallying cry this season. He speaks entirely in sports cliches. I may have imagined that he calls beers ‘brewskis’, but it’s not hard to imagine. And yet, on his podcast with older brother Jason, also an NFL star until his tearful retirement, he presents an evolution of jock masculinity.

A world away from toxic masculinity

Barely an episode goes by without them expressing mutual love and support, particularly when they faced off in 2023’s Super Bowl. These good ole boys lift up their mother at every opportunity, with ‘Mama Kelce’ now a star in her own right. A recent documentary shows Travis nervously cradling Jason’s newborn, a doting, blubbering uncle.

They are full of encouragement for younger players, including one who fumbled away a touchdown that would have knocked Travis’s team out of this year’s Super Bowl. They do significant charity work. Travis was the highest-profile white player to ‘take the knee’ against police brutality, and continues to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Supportive, socially conscious, not afraid to cry, eager to laugh and love — the Kelces are almost a different species from the Andrew Tates of this world.

Listening to women as equals

And the data bears out female endorsement of this type of masculinity. The Kelces’ podcast was always popular, but since the Swifties started tuning in, it has become the most-listened-to podcast in North America — incidentally bumping off the toxic Joe Rogan Experience along the way.

It’s also an answer to the manosphere’s claim that feminists won’t date ‘real’ men, just ‘cucks’ and ‘betas’. You can be a superstar athlete or a poet, women want someone who listens to them as equals, washes their own underpants, and maybe makes them laugh.

There’s no guarantee that Burn-Murdoch’s dire predictions will come to pass — the weakness of data journalism is it is a snapshot of a moving target and so can’t accommodate changing circumstances, such as current lawsuits against dating sites Tinder and Hinge that might change algorithm-driven social media for the better — but the stakes are such that we can’t be blasé about it.

If the Gen-Z gender gap can be narrowed, and the male loneliness epidemic eased with it, positive role models have to come in all shapes and forms, whether it’s the goofy, unreconstructed Kelces or Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal’s ‘don’t call it a bromance’ friendship that has graced award ceremonies around the world recently. But it’s something we have to do for ourselves, particularly for our sons and grandsons.

And it can’t just be on International Men’s Day. 

So what better way to celebrate International Women’s Day than to start doing the work we’ve left to women for too long?