When Donald Trump stormed into the White House in 2016, horrified Americans debated, almost endlessly, whether the shocking result was an expression of widespread racism (backlash to a Black president resulting in the election of a birther) or economic anxiety (the industrial Midwest especially feeling abandoned by globalization and the China shock). Each was probably a factor, then, and each strand is still present in the Trump coalition, reflected in tariff wars and efforts to redirect civil rights law on behalf of whites. But in 2025, MAGA seems much more distinctively molded by gender politics. Gender backlash is here, and before we think through the implications for partisan politics, we need to recognize it as a phenomena that goes beyond them.
On the surface, the Trump coalition might appear powered by an unapologetic, rakish U.F.C. party-bro energy — think of the glimpses we’ve gotten of Pete Hegseth’s naked torso or the way his confirmation hearings were meme-ified as a hard-ass man, accused of sexual assault, staring down a hectoring panel of hysterical grandmas. Or for that matter, the time when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, invited her Instagram followers to observe her working out in a sports bra. And there may not be a more representative clip about the vibe shift of 2024 than the comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz explaining his supposed defection from the Democrats by explaining that he liked the dudes that have sex — using a crude term for female anatomy — and say whatever they want.
Of course, in the aftermath of Dobbs, Republicans have pushed further to limit reproductive rights, state by state, and a bill recently introduced in Congress could ban online pornography outright. With a case threatening sites like Pornhub pending at the Supreme Court, 17 states have already instituted pre-emptive blackouts of the site. Questions have risen as to whether the White House intervened to lift travel restrictions on Andrew Tate, who faces rape and human-trafficking charges in Britain and a trafficking and money laundering investigation in Romania. More recently Trump didn’t rule out a pardon for Sean Combs.
“It’s so odd how there are internal contradictions that are explained by ‘powerful men get to do whatever they want with impunity,’ is there a word for this,” the writer Irin Carmon noted sarcastically in December. In case you missed her meaning: “It’s called patriarchy.”
It’s not just in policy or party leadership where you see the shift. In 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men believed the proposition that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” according to the Views of the Electorate Research Survey assessed by a group of political scientists writing for The Times. Two years later, that number was 48 percent. Republican women underwent a similar surge — from 23 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2024. And over the past few years, Democrats, too, have been trending in the wrong direction, though those shifts have been smaller.
Today, the political scientists note, 79 percent of Republican men and 67 percent of Republican women say they believe American society has gotten too “soft and feminine,” with 43 percent of the country overall agreeing. (In 2023, the number got as high as 48 percent.) According to Pew, the share of Republicans who say American society has gotten too accepting of men taking on traditionally female roles — like nurses, presumably, or schoolteachers — has grown by 40 percent since 2017.
To trust the polling, the trends are perhaps more distressing among those still too young to have even dipped their toes into the work force. According to the data analyst David Waldron’s assessment of the world-class Monitoring the Future Survey, run by the University of Michigan, in 2018, 84 percent of eighth- and 10th-grade boys said they agreed either “completely” or “mostly” that women should have the same job opportunities as men. Five years later, the number had fallen to 72 percent. The share who agreed “at all” that men and women should be paid the same money for the same work had fallen from 87 percent to 79 percent. The share who said they agreed “completely” with equal pay for equal work had fallen from 72 percent to 57 percent — just over half.
There’s a reactionary turn outside the workplace, too. There has been a similar drop in surveyed backing for gay rights, with Republican support for marriage equality falling 14 points in three years, according to Gallup, and The Economist/YouGov reporting that nearly two-thirds of Republicans are now in opposition. Nationally, support for marriage equality has declined only slightly, suggesting that a new consensus hasn’t exactly hardened, though belief that same-sex relationships are morally acceptable in 2023 fell seven points from the prior year and support for transgender soldiers in the military has dropped 13 points since 2019.
For a simple contrast, think back about a decade ago, to 2014, when Laverne Cox famously appeared on the cover of Time, alongside the cover line “The Transgender Tipping Point.” It was, believe it or not, a full year ahead of the Supreme Court’s affirmation of gay marriage, a decision that, when it arrived in June 2015, also seemed to endorse an entire theory of social history, with the pattern of libertarian drift so natural-seeming, you might’ve confused it for progressive cultural autopilot.
We are not living anymore in that world, when you could look back on the previous decades and probably see, below the ups and downs of partisan conflict, the broad strokes of a basic cultural consensus — one that pushed toward a stronger embrace of markets and consumption in the realm of economics and toward more personal autonomy and freedom of choice in the social sphere. Like the just-so story of free markets, the just-so story of reliably expanding civil rights and opportunity looked, at the time, if simplistic, also not inaccurate.
Since Trump’s first election, there’s been a kind of commentators’ war over the first part of that bargain — about what constituted neoliberalism and, perhaps more important, what might come after it. But on the other side of things, the elite consensus is cracking, too. Faith that social progress would be inevitable was always at least a bit naïve, even if it also served as a basic foodstuff of complacent liberalism. But for about a generation, here as elsewhere across the wealthy world, culture seemed to be trending in that direction. You could take issue with the pace of change, but when people talked about the right and wrong side of history, on these matters, it was clear what future was expected. And now?
You can date the backlash in a number of ways: to 2022 and Dobbs, which one might’ve assumed would produce a thermostatic response in the other direction; to the recent half-decade of heated fights over trans rights, which contorted arguments about novel medical treatment and the right to various legal protections for a remarkably small number of Americans into something that looked to many others like triggering debates about the very truth of biology; to 2017, and the peak of Me Too, which might have pushed many alarmed men into a more reactionary posture on gender; or many decades farther back, still, with male resentment growing along the long arc of women’s empowerment and integration into the work force, with all the cultural shifts that both required and produced.
That long era also produced many memorable meditations on the ongoing tumult of gender backlash and is a reminder — if anyone needed it — that none of this is exactly new. Probably, I could have written some version of this column at any point over the past number of years, as many others have. And yet something does seem potentially different now, not just because of Andrew Cuomo’s redemption tour or Tate’s enduring celebrity. It’s notable that in recent surveys, Tate doesn’t seem all that popular among young men — and neither does Joe Rogan, all things considered. But these days, even on the left, you’re somewhat less likely to hear about toxic masculinity than complaints that liberals have overstated the case, alienating young men as a result. We’ve gone from Hanna Rosin’s somewhat triumphant “The End of Men” in 2012 to Richard Reeves’s 2022 lamentation “Of Boys and Men” to a post-2024 Democratic fixation on finding a liberal Rogan who might bring some disaffected men back into the liberal coalition.
There are many shortcomings to that project, which helps explain why it has become such a punchline for Democratic ineptitude. But one problem is simply reducing something this large and consequential to questions of partisan strategy, even if it’s true that Democrats have a problem with young men — rapidly losing nonwhite young men in particular.
But if politics is downstream from culture, as the now-worn cliché goes, sometimes it’s important just to cast your eyes upstream and consider the flow of the current. And if eighth- and 10th-grade boys are rapidly growing less sure that women should be paid equally for equal work, I don’t think we need to process that fact primarily in terms of partisan dynamics — as a challenge for the Democratic Party or the liberal cultural coalition for which it is often asked to answer.
There is an awful lot to chew over about the reactionary turn of young men: the way elite liberalism might have contributed to male alienation, the way that deindustrialization may be to blame, the way that the MAGA dream of reindustrialization may be an effort to reverse those forces and the sexual dynamics that may result. Probably, it’s important to reckon with the international trends, which seem to follow the same pattern and cast arguments over whether American schools are anti-boy, for instance, in a somewhat different light — suggesting social media and app dating may be more important drivers than the supposed wokeness of American curricula or culture. But in rushing to have any of those deeper conversations, I think we may be missing the most important point. As a matter of first principles, I just want to say: The trends are really, really bad.
The post Our Regression on Gender Is a Tragedy, Not Just a Political Problem appeared first on New York Times.
