The Feminine Wound: The Radicalization of Young Women Is about More than the Internet and Social Media

Are women okay? The answer, clearly, is no. Women are not okay. The young ones, especially.

This week, Britain’s New Statesman introduced us to “the Angry Young Women,” an expanding coven of radical, unstable, men-hating, activist women. This is maybe the first time a mainstream outlet in the UK has acknowledged the precipitous leftward drift of young women and the major effects it’s having on British society: on politics, culture, relations between the sexes—pretty much everything you can think of, really.

Whether it’s Israel’s war in Gaza, the “Climate Crisis,” the Patriarchy, racism, or the prospect of a Reform government forcing them out of the workforce and back into the home, there to be tethered to the stove and the marital bed for the rest of their days, Britain’s Angry Young Women are “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack” at any moment.

They talk about how their “bones ache” at the thought of all the suffering in the world. They use portentous, largely meaningless phrases like “the viscerality of the feminine wound” to describe the pain and “trauma” of being a woman today, which includes, prominently, dealing with men who value them only as sex objects and have repellent views about immigrants, carbon emissions, and the rights of transgender people. The Angry Young Women say they want “revolution”: “systematic change.” Racked by chronic fatigue and endometriosis, they find satisfaction in protest, nonbinary comedy evenings, and pursuing “moral missions.” But even then, that satisfaction is fleeting. “You’ve got to be pessimistic,” one young woman says. The point isn’t to be happy; it’s about being angry and engaged.

It is, as The New Statesman puts it, “impossibly bleak.” Women aged 18–30 are head and shoulders the most progressive demographic in Britain today, and also the most downbeat about their future and everybody else’s. The more objectively better a young woman’s circumstances—the higher her social class and earnings—the more likely she is to believe the odds are stacked against her. Young middle-class white women are more likely than minorities to believe British society is “systemically racist.”

We’re accustomed to hearing about the impossible bleakness of the lives of young men today—gooners, dropouts, incels led astray by the Pied Piping of influencers like Andrew Tate, looksmaxxers, and Twitter trolls—but to hear that young women are suffering just as much, are just as detached from reality, and are just as hopelessly embroiled in surrogate activities is something of a revelation. For anybody on the ground, in the trenches of this new reality—a man in his 30s like me, for example—it’s quite clear that young women are, well, f–ked up in a way that young women weren’t f–ked up 20, 15, or even 10 years ago. But this reality has taken a long time to coalesce in the media and popular consciousness. For helping that to happen in a country that’s still as hopelessly captured by leftism as Britain is, The New Statesman deserves some credit.

This isn’t a problem that’s confined to the UK. Numerous polls and studies show young women in the US have moved significantly to the Left over the last 10–15 years, and that the much-vaunted “polarization” that’s taking place in American politics is being driven almost entirely by women. Men are staying pretty much where they were before, somewhere to the right of center.

Gallup polls, for example, show that liberal self-identification among women aged 18–29 has risen from 28 percent between 2001 and 2007 to 40 percent between 2017 and 2024. Women are embracing hardline, even extreme, positions with gusto. A study from this year by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University found women were 21 percent more likely than men to justify the murder of a political figure they didn’t like.

If you paid attention to the murder of Charlie Kirk and what came after, you’ll be well aware that so many of the worst responses were from women. Just ordinary women: students, schoolteachers, academics, yoga instructors on Instagram, and civil servants—all gloating about the cold-blooded slaughter of a husband and father who simply happened to have political views they didn’t like.

The real question is why this is happening. It’s easy enough, once the problem has been identified, to think about and predict the effects, few of which are likely to be good. What we really want to know, or should want to know, is what’s driving this change, so we can do our best to stop it.

As with today’s problems with men, the main culprit that’s usually fingered is the internet and social media. It’s obviously true that the ubiquity of the internet and social media is playing a serious role in driving people further away from the center, on both sides, but this doesn’t explain why women are coming off so much worse than men. Social media may very well grip and play with women in different ways than it does with men—women generally care more about social comparison than men, for example, and about being judged against their peers for social approval—but other factors are clearly at work as well.

One consistent theme throughout The New Statesman article, although it’s never treated as a cause, is mental illness. Not only are women significantly more likely to be mentally ill than men—this is well established—but mental illness is robustly associated with being a leftist. I’d be inclined to say leftism is itself a form of mental illness, but we can park that stronger claim for now and just deal with the association.

Recent surveys from the US have shown that 26.4 percent of females reported a mental illness in the last year, compared to 19.7 percent of men. Just over 7 percent of women reported serious mental illness in the last year, compared to 4.8 percent of males. Women consistently display higher rates of “internalizing” mental disorders—anxiety, depression, PTSD—than men.

Studies have shown, variously, that left-wingers are more mentally ill than conservatives, that they’re unhappier, that they’re more neurotic and emotionally unstable. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with “anti-hierarchical aggression”—i.e., the leftist desire to destroy society—and Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predict “virtuous victimhood signaling,” meaning the kind of claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview.

In my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, I link male hormonal changes, and specifically a civilizational decline in testosterone, to the parlous state of masculinity and of politics, which refuses to satisfy fundamental male urges and relegates men to the status of second-class citizens. Similar havoc is being played with women’s hormones for similar reasons, with no less dramatic effects. Women’s worsening mental health is caused in large part by the massive toxic burden of the modern world, from the low-quality food we eat and the harmful chemicals that are everywhere—herbicides, pesticides, plastic chemicals, nonstick coatings, fire retardants, and pharmaceuticals—to our addiction to screens and chronic exposure to blue light and electromagnetic radiation.

Here are some facts about leftism, the brain, and women to conclude. Leftists have been shown to have smaller amygdalae than conservatives. The amygdala is a region of the brain associated with threat perception. Differences in threat perception go a surprisingly long way toward explaining fundamental differences between left- and right-wingers—between seeing a fighting-age Syrian man in a boat as a poor refugee to be welcomed with open arms or as a dangerous invader to be kept out with force if necessary. Research has shown that just three months on hormonal contraception can change the structure and function of a woman’s amygdala. About 14 percent of girls aged 15–19 are on hormonal contraception in the US, and nearly 17 percent aged 20–29.

I’m not saying that birth control is causing young women to spiral out of control and become rabid leftists. Or, rather, I’m not saying it’s the only thing that’s doing it. What I am saying is that we need to take the biological roots of our present crisis much more seriously, for men and women. For us all.

Raw Egg Nationalist writes extensively on nutrition, exercise, and masculinity. He is the author of the Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook and the editor of Man's World.

Women made themselves into merely sex objects.

100% true. They wanted the sexual freedom that they perceived men having and they got it. In the process they destroyed those things that made them special and priceless as women. They became merely whores. Male attitudes in female bodies. And few men want to marry that. Have sex with it, yes (because it is easy), but marry it, no.

"Studies have shown, variously, that left-wingers are more mentally ill than conservatives, that they’re unhappier, that they’re more neurotic and emotionally unstable. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with 'anti-hierarchical aggression'—i.e., the leftist desire to destroy society—and Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predict 'virtuous victimhood signaling,' meaning the kind of claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview."

Not only are there more young women on birth control… they start it at ever younger ages. And they were sold on it not so much for the purposes of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, but because taking The Pill is a convenience, a way around that gross monthly period. So women and girls awho aren’t even sexually actuve are taking the things now.

And these days, I wonder if these pills are all sourced out of China, or the Bekaa Valley.

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