The Left-wing radicalisation of young women should alarm us all

For young people today, finding a partner of the opposite sex must be dreadfully hard. But this isn’t because of the pressure to look like an Instagram gym buff, or the horrors of dating apps, or the fact that no one under the age of 30 seems to drink alcohol anymore.

It’s because these days, young men and women have got absolutely nothing in common.

Seriously. All of a sudden, they appear to have developed completely different values. It’s unprecedented.

In the past, the two sexes tended to hold roughly similar views on politics. But research compiled over the past five years shows that in Britain – and indeed other Western countries – young women have become more progressive, while young men have become more conservative. And the resulting ideological gap is now staggeringly vast.

Alice Evans, an academic at King’s College London, is writing a book on this phenomenon, titled The Great Gender Divergence. She says it’s been caused by a variety of factors, including “social media bubbles” and “economic resentment”.

Whatever the reasons for it, though, I think there is a vital point we’re in danger of missing. Which is that only one of the two sexes is strictly responsible.

Recently, the Financial Times published some charts illustrating how the gulf between young men and women has grown in each Western country.

And in every chart, there is an unmistakable pattern. The political views of young men haven’t actually altered all that much. Their drift to the Right has been really quite gentle. The political views of young women, however, have changed dramatically. Their move to the Left has been abrupt and profound.

In truth, then, this cavernous ideological divide is almost entirely attributable to them.

Which is curious. Because, whenever the divide is discussed by politicians and commentators, they make it sound as if the problem is young men. They fret endlessly about how young men today are being “radicalised” by nasty Right-wing YouTubers such as Andrew Tate, or horrid Right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump.

Yet they never apply this word “radicalised” to young women. Why not? I suspect it’s because these politicians and commentators tend to be progressive themselves.

Therefore, they see no problem with young women becoming drastically more progressive. In their view, the more progressive someone is, the better. So the fault lies entirely with young men, for failing to emulate young women’s lurch to the Left.

Personally, though, I think this lurch Left-wards should alarm us all. The future of Western civilisation is already threatened by our collapsing birth rates. And this sudden ideological chasm between the sexes is only going to make the crisis worse.

No one’s going to be forming couples at all anymore, if, on every first date, the woman asks, “What do you think of Gramsci?”, and the man replies, “He’s the type of striker Man Utd are crying out for.”

It’s a chilling thought. So clearly something must be done. Politicians must spend less time obsessing over the radicalisation of young men, and start paying attention to the radicalisation of young women, instead.

As it happens, the Labour Party has announced that, when it’s in power, it will help to combat the influence that Andrew Tate has on boys. Surely it would make more sense to help combat the influence The Guardian has on girls.

Otherwise, the only way young men are going to get a girlfriend is by frantically boning up on George Monbiot and Owen Jones. And if that’s what the future has to hold, perhaps Western civilisation isn’t worth saving, after all.

Andrew Tate’s influence on boys is less of a worry than The Guardian’s influence on girls