Do you ever fantasise about dropkicking your phone out the window? Because I do, a fair bit these days. But never more so than when I saw new data showing around 56% of millennial and Gen Z men in the UK (and 29 other countries) think we’ve gone ‘too far’ in promoting women’s rights and are actively discriminating against men.
Add in that 60% of Gen Z boys also believe men are ‘expected to do too much’ in the fight for equality, and it officially means the two sexes in that age group are now more divided than any other generation.
Pleasingly for the sake of my bank balance, I spared my phone from my rage-filled fantasy. But as International Women's Day approaches, I’ve not been able to stop thinking (and thinking) about why boys and men are feeling this way.
One side of the story is the very real rise of a doctrine that teaches that men’s empowerment hinges on disempowering women.
As Cosmopolitan’s Features Editor, I’ve had a front row seat as aggression, power and dominion over women are packaged up as paradigms of masculinity and shoved in the faces of young men and boys, through the likes of Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers. This can have dangerous - deadly - consequences.
Just today, news reports say Kyle Clifford, who murdered his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt along with her mother, Carol, and her sister, Hannah, searched out Tate's podcast ahead of his brutal crossbow attack.
Alison Morgan KC, prosecuting Clifford, said his interest in the "widely known misogynist" could go some way towards explaining why he became so "incandescent with rage" after Louise broke up with him (although the judge presiding over the case dismissed Clifford's viewing habits as evidence).
Elsewhere, from those producing thinly veiled ‘self-improvement’ content to the ‘common sense’ patriarchs espousing regressive views about a woman’s worth being tied to her sexuality, I even scroll and see influencers drawing on bogus evolutionary ‘theories’ to prove that women who sleep with multiple people can’t properly ‘pair bond’ with men afterwards and are therefore worthless (based on studies carried out on… voles).
This worldview - that women’s rights and freedoms have gone too far - is cynically and smartly sold as a bumper-sticker, catch-all solution to how young men are feeling right now.
Which according to research is lonely (15% of men today report having no close friends vs 3% back in 1990) and unsure of their role in society or what manhood ought to look like in 2025, as women have fought hard to take up more space.
As to why these views have spread like wildfire, musician Sam Fender recently suggested in an interview that many white working class men “from nowhere towns” are also feeling “shamed” having had a white privilege label slapped on them, when they’re feeling at a huge disadvantage and distinctly lacking in privilege.
This, he argued, could be what’s causing them to turn to content from mega-misogynists, who promise if they just beat their chests a little louder, they’ll reclaim their ‘rightful’ place in the world.
His comments were met with a mixed response online, including some backlash - and it’s important to note that that’s just one part of a tangled story, since research shows men from all economic backgrounds are having misogynistic content rammed down their throats on social media (and buying into it). Also because being white does grant you advantages in life (e.g. you’re seven times less likely than a Black person to die at the hands of the police).
So, what else is happening on the phones belonging to the men and boys in your life right now?
Beyond the manosphere
Said misogynistic content appears even when boys and men aren’t actively seeking it out; many on a quest for wellbeing content are being funnelled through to the dark side.
My boyfriend, for example, boxes and often looks up training exercises on YouTube. After watching a few, the crypto advice videos from ‘alpha’ males will soon slink in, followed by content creators who push the narrative that mental health problems are the cause of failure and that muscles and money are the only true displays of success. Perfect role models who amass millions of views at a time.
Teams at University College London and the University of Kent also found teenage boys who sought out content on masculinity and loneliness on TikTok were quickly presented with four times as many misogynistic videos, featuring objectification, sexual harassment or discrediting women, rising from 13% of recommended videos to 56%.
“Algorithmic processes on TikTok and other social media sites target people’s vulnerabilities – such as loneliness or feelings of loss of control – and gamify harmful content,” principal investigator Dr Kaitlyn Regehr (UCL Information Studies) explained. “As young people microdose on topics like self-harm, or extremism, to them, it feels like entertainment.”
Many men are also being told that women are shallow, fixated only on looks and money (and in fairness – can we really say there’s no smoke without fire on that front? Given we’re out here singing about wanting a man who works in finance and is 6ft 5 and height bias on dating apps is real).
Urgh, anyone else need a paracetamol for this mindfuck right about now?
Anatomy of a divide
Women, on the other hand, are exhausted, frustrated and saddened by the fact that too many men seem utterly disengaged from the ongoing conversations we’re having around being female today.
Be it violence against women and girls and rape culture – did you see many (or any) men posting about the gut-wrenching Gisele Pelicot case? – or the tiring sexual double standards (man sleeps with 10 women = legend, woman does the same = slag and no longer ‘wifey material’).
This is nothing new (Christina Aguilera and Lil’ Kim’s Can’t Hold Us Down came out over 20 years ago), but the sentiment – that a woman’s ‘value’ is intrinsically linked to her past sexual experiences – is yet again being amplified. Something very few men seem to be alarmed by, at least vocally.
This is of course before we even get to motherhood: the penalty of which sees a quarter of mums unwillingly quit the workplace due to the insane cost of childcare.
Outside of the graphs and pie charts, this chasm is plain to see in other ways: fertility rates have dropped to a new low in England and Wales, partly due to wannabe parents being unable to afford a child, but also because we have a dating crisis on our hands. In fact, four in ten women without children say a lack of suitable partner is the reason why.
The most extreme manifestation of this has seen the 4B movement – a feminist mentality that rejects sex, dating, marrying or having children with men – pick up pace in South Korea following Trump’s re-election, sparking the government to desperately try and incentivise the population to have children by offering tax cuts to those who marry.
Unsurprisingly, the 4B principles were trending online in the wake of the US election, when the gender politics of the President’s fans among the manosphere and online right were unmasked, as they posted ‘your body, my choice’.
Together, again?
That the algorithm is funnelling us further down different paths is deeply ironic when so many of the issues facing humanity right now are a shared struggle.
We face rising bills, soaring rent and house prices. A climate emergency that has been roundly deprioritised by multiple global leaders (and which oil and gas firms are no longer even pretending to consider in their quest for profit). Millions of displaced people are seeking refuge. Not to mention new talks of a world war, its flames fanned by aspiring ‘strong men’ leaders.
Will this, I wonder, underscore that same hyper masculine manosphere message that ‘real men fight’? That they just take what they want, when they want, and give no fucks about who they hurt in the process?
Being a ‘strong’ man in some circles now apparently means being the loudest and brashest in the room, rather than defending the weak or being considerate listeners, open to nuanced discussions. It’s an abrasive masculinity that will no doubt only serve to deepen the divide.
Language has become frayed too and words are being bent out of shape to further political arguments and further fracture society. Consider the way ‘feminism’ is now code, in certain spaces, for women being totally against men and their interests, no questions asked – espoused by caricatures who don’t like sex or having a laugh.
But feminism is quite literally just about making things better for everybody. The word simply means you believe in equality between the sexes, that’s it – but it seems like that’s been forgotten. (Or had its meaning marred by loud, distracting arguments about ‘what makes a woman’.)
Maybe it’s that we just can’t agree what equality looks or feels like in 2025, when we’re all spectacularly miserable and looking for reasons why?
Bridging the divide
Beneath our rage we likely all have more in common than we think. And it’s deeply depressing that we can’t figure out how to talk about it.
Is it because we’re too busy fighting the exhaustion of working harder and picking up side gigs (almost two-thirds of Gen Z and millennials either have, or are planning, a side hustle) to cope with escalating housing and living costs, while salaries over the last 14 years have seen the worst wage growth since the early 1800s?
This is also set to a backdrop in which many places where conversations between people of opposing views may naturally occur - pubs, clubs, other so-called third spaces - are being shuttered as we choose (if that’s even the right word) to save our limited cash at home, glued to the echo chambers inside our phones instead.
This is a problem to which I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that women shouldn’t be left shouldering the burden – and banging the drum – alone for all the issues impacting us.
Be they the high rates of violence against women at the hands of men (only this week MP Jess Phillips read out the names of all the women killed by a man in the last twelve months: it took over four minutes), abysmally low rape conviction rates or the epidemic of intimate image abuse.
But nor should big issues among men – suicide rates are at their highest since 1999 with male deaths accounting for 75% of the numbers, and for the first time girls are now outperforming boys at all levels of education – be left up to them to advocate for alone, either.
This is not me saying women aren’t doing enough. Far from it. Or being all ‘what about iNtErNaTiOnAl MeN’s DaY!!’ on IWD.
But if these latest numbers that paint such a gloomy indication of the state of gender relations among young people have done anything, it’s reinforced that it’s probably unhelpful when we say – or post – ‘all men are trash’ without having a follow up thought on the consequences.
How can we reach a place where both sides are putting in equal effort to finding solutions for one another, and how can we turn our rage at the lack of progress into something less isolating for ‘the other side’?
Ultimately, we need to change how we’re having these conversations, about the gendered experience on either side of the coin. (As well as listening to the folks who fall somewhere between the binary.)
Otherwise we risk pushing each other further away – and that benefits absolutely nobody. Truly, it’s never been more crucial for us to stick together.
Jennifer Savin is Cosmopolitan UK's multiple award-winning Features Editor, who was crowned Digital Journalist of the Year for her work tackling the issues most important to young women. She regularly covers breaking news, cultural trends, health, the royals and more, using her esteemed connections to access the best experts along the way. She's grilled everyone from high-profile politicians to A-list celebrities, and has sensitively interviewed hundreds of people about their real life stories. In addition to this, Jennifer is widely known for her own undercover investigations and campaign work, which includes successfully petitioning the government for change around topics like abortion rights and image-based sexual abuse. Jennifer is also a published author, documentary consultant (helping to create BBC’s Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?) and a patron for Y.E.S. (a youth services charity). Alongside Cosmopolitan, Jennifer has written for The Times, Women’s Health, ELLE and numerous other publications, appeared on podcasts, and spoken on (and hosted) panels for the Women of the World Festival, the University of Manchester and more. In her spare time, Jennifer is a big fan of lipstick, leopard print and over-ordering at dinner. Follow Jennifer on Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
