Happy post-election to my Canadian readers! We move forward in the world with the same Liberal party/new leader, albeit a minority government, and turn our attention to the pressing issue of Canada’s sovereignty and surviving the madman’s shenanigans to the south of us. While I saw a wave of relieved posts from my left-leaning circles, I confess that I didn’t feel an enormous amount of PHEW after the election, mostly because this result buys us some time, but doesn’t deal with the ultimate issue of the growing populist movement in Canada.

This is a good segue into the topic I wanted to write about today, which is wrapped up in issues of populism fueling Canadian polarization.

The CBC published an article the other week, about how young men are changing the face of conservatism in Canada. It documents the rise of male Gen-Zers and young millenials who utilize social media to share their conservative beliefs (the piece didn’t talk about race, but my suspicion is that this is largely a white male phenomenon.)

The article quotes David Coletto, CEO of the polling firm Abacus Data, who says that “The demographic most likely today to say they’re going to vote conservative in our polling are men under the age of 30.” A survey conducted1 by the firm found that 34% of young men (from a sampling of 1,500 people) supported economically progressive policies, like taxing the rich and funding for government-led social services. On the flip side, they were also categorized as “culturally conservative,” meaning they leaned into Trumpy policies like crackdowns on illegal immigrants and opposition to trans people playing in sports.

It was on these cultural questions that responses diverged by gender. Men tended to be anxious about cultural change, whereas women were more likely to embrace a progressive social agenda. In fact, evidence from across the world shows that young women are becoming much more progressive while men stay somewhat stable or head right, according to Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College London quoted in the CBC article. Evans is currently writing a book about the political gender divide (can’t wait for THAT!!)

The explanation offered by the CBC article (and one I’ve heard in much of the commentary on polarization) is that “online tribes” are to blame, where algorithms show us a distorted picture of reality and set us up to live in an echo chamber of our own thoughts and beliefs. Dynamic, right-wing male influencers gather their flocks of young, disenchanted men, who become emboldened by grifty takes on masculinity a-la-Jordan Peterson.

As I typed out that last paragraph, I thought, “Who are the progressive female equivalents of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan?” Glennon Doyle came to mind, and her podcast We Can Do Hard Things with sister Amanda Doyle and wife, Abby Wambach. Doyle’s version of influencing is about pondering Life’s Big Questions, namely, how do we do this thing called “life” in a world that sometimes feels like a massive black hole? How do we face the hard things? The answers Doyle provides are largely centered on compassion and growth mindset, while it feels like the tone of Rogan-ish podcasts are pithy and aggressive, igniting negative emotions but having no less of an impact on listeners’ mobilization.

The manosphere, as much as us progressives hate to admit is, is providing a service to men (mostly white men) by helping them make sense of the helplessness they feel in the face of immense change. It has been a tumultuous decade, from the 2016 presidential election, to #MeToo, a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools, the Israel/Gaza war, climate catastrophe, rising inflation, a housing crisis, and the icing on the cake—another Trump administration.

What some feminists have come to understand and/or call-out is that we have failed in our pursuit of gender equity, despite wave upon wave of feminist movements, and we’ve also failed to fight for the rights of all people who face oppression. Our collective response to this has been a mixed bag, from reflection and truth-seeking to on-the-ground efforts to right our wrongs (and then you have the TERFs, who are dead-set on biological untruths and imagined threats. I see this group in a similar light as the right-wing men fighting to take away trans rights.)

Yet polarization is complicated, and if online tribalism is a contributing factor, it’s certainly not the only one.

Are we responding to helplessness differently?

I saw a post on Threads about the poll results, which showed a visual of the large proportion of young voters casting their ballot for the conservatives. The person argued that the reason for this was that young people feel forgotten and abandoned by the establishment, and so they’ll vote for any kind of change. When I commented on the gender differences in the ballot results, the OP replied to say that it was about how males and females respond differently to helplessness.

Which of course took me to PubMed in a search for research on sex or gender differences in helplessness. I came across this really interesting rat study from 2008, which compared the behaviour of males and females exposed to controllable and uncontrollable stress (footshocks) and then trained on how to escape the stressors. The results found that most males did not learn to escape the stress test and were deemed helpless. In contrast, “most females did learn to escape on the more difficult escape task, irrespective of whether they had been exposed to controllable or uncontrollable stress.” The researchers went a step further to find out whether sex hormones had anything to do with these differences, and lo and behold, they did not. More/less testosterone or estrogen did not change the results.

In the discussion, the authors suggest that learned helplessness could be a genetic, rather than hormonal, trait, and that these “inherited characteristics presumably interact with developmental experience and stressful life experiences to achieve a threshold for the expression of abnormal behavior.” Meaning, if we think about humans now instead of rats: maybe our sadness, anxiety, and anger in the face of stress are not just about genes. Our social world, life experience, and past trauma all provide clues to our behaviour.

I realize this is one rat study from 15 years ago and it’s quite a stretch to tie this to political polarization. However, there are likely both sex and gender differences that influence how people respond to intense cultural change. Could it be that people socialized as women are more likely reach out, make connections, and learn how to tackle these issues collectively, while people socialized as men are more likely to stay in a state of learned helplessness? (Side note: there’s evidence that this was the case during the pandemic. Women experienced higher levels of anxiety/depression but were also more successful at taking action to deal with their emotional stress.)

I might then surmise that online manospheres are so successful at drawing men in because someone is seeing their helplessness, acknowledging their pain, and then offering them a way out (even if the “way out” is to trample on everyone else’s rights because they are the reason I feel so helpless and angry.)

None of this means that we have an obligation to hand-hold racist and misogynist man-babies because they’re feeling hurt or helpless. I am suggesting that there are many complex factors that play a role in the gendered response to social change, and to ignore those would be detrimental to our vision of a more united future.

In conversation with my own Gen-Z progeny (who is not of voting age yet,) I uncovered a lack of patience with conservative, straight men. We may or may not have batted around our vision for an all-lesbian future where men are imprisoned as sperm donors and women rule the world, an idea which my husband did not appear very amused by. But I felt empathetic with her illogical musings, because underneath that I suspect there is anger, which has been growing in my own self. It is anger born from exhaustion with the ongoing violence and destruction committed (or at least led by) mostly men.

If women go left and men go right, how do we meet in the middle?

This is the billion-dollar question (seriously, how do we deal with all these tech billionaires trying to destroy democracy and our planet?)

I feel strongly that we can’t solve gendered polarization online. The online world is a tricky place for all of us, on the left or right, because we are unable and unwilling to step into the one another’s spheres, and what we see from the “other side” often entrenches us even further in our beliefs. That’s not to say social media couldn’t be used to bridge the divide, but it wouldn’t be very effective without significant changes to the way social platforms function (i.e. the algorithm.)

This article from the Greater Good Foundation offers some ideas, which involve many levels and include individuals, social groups, corporations, and governments:

1. Intergroup contact: we have to meet each other face-to-face, and we have to meet more than one person from the other side AND spend enough time with them to see them as human.

2. Perspective taking: putting yourself in another person’s shoes. This is most effectively done through storytelling, including literature. This is why book bans are so dangerous to the future of democracy.

3. Superordinate goals: we need a larger sense of ourselves that is able to bridge smaller differences. So rather than “Make America Great Again,” the slogan would be “Make Humanity Great Again”—a universalist mentality.

4. Proportional voting: I was so happy to see this one listed, especially as this last election moved Canada into two-party territory. There is evidence that more proportional voting systems (i.e. if a party gets 40% of the popular vote, they will receive 40% of the seats in a given house of representatives) have higher levels of voter turnout, and citizens feel that their vote actually counts.

5. Voting for policies, not parties: Hold direct referendums on specific issues. I’m not so sure about this one, but the article makes a good case for it. When done right, referendums can cut across partisan lines. When done poorly (ahem, Brexit) referendums can create new fault lines, so this one requires some further thought!

However we go about this “meeting in the middle,” it’s going to take time and a whole lotta patience. But if we want to stop the slide toward fascism, I think we have little choice but to reach across the divide.

From my heart to yours,

Misty