The Left Spent Years Blaming Men — Young Democratic Women Got the Message

Young women are more likely than anyone else to say women face serious discrimination in America. The partisan breakdown inside that number is where things get ugly.

The Survey Center on American Life, part of the American Enterprise Institute, published new data last week, showing more than two-thirds of young women believe women face "a lot" of discrimination. Democratic women were much more likely than Republican women to see considerable prejudice against women, but researchers didn't stop there. They asked how much of the challenges women face are due to the behavior or actions of men. 

Among Democratic women ages 18 to 29, 66 percent answered "a great deal." Among Republican women the same age, 18 percent did.

That 48-point gap is the headline number, but the rest of the data isn't much prettier. Among women ages 30 to 49, 54 percent of Democrats put a great deal of women's challenges on men's behavior, compared with 23 percent of Republicans. The numbers were 47 percent and 25 percent for women ages 50 to 64, and 48 percent and 16 percent among women 65 and older. The data comes from the Survey Center's Civility and Morality Survey of 5,451 adults conducted in the summer of 2025. 

Researchers had another question worth asking. What happens when men are asked whether women are responsible for their problems?

"When men were asked whether women were to blame for the troubles men faced, only 16 percent agreed. Republican young men are more likely than Democratic young men to blame women for the challenges that men face, but only 26 percent do."

There are angry young men out there. Nobody needs a survey to discover that. But after years of stories about the manosphere, incels and young men drifting right, the Survey Center found only 16 percent of men putting that much responsibility for their troubles on women. That number was 26 percent among young Republican men.

The 66 percent figure among young Democratic women is harder to explain away.

Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center and a senior fellow at AEI, has spent years studying the growing divide between young men and women. In an interview earlier this month, Cox said the separation isn't confined to politics. Young people are spending more time alone and having fewer shared experiences with the opposite sex, while social media increasingly fills in the blanks.

"Your view of the opposite sex is informed, not by regular social interactions, like doing group projects or playing coed sports, but what you're seeing online. And you're seeing the very worst portrayal of human behaviors because it's meant to agitate and provoke a response, but it also gives us a very skewed view of the world in the process."

Cox said social media has "effectively segregated the formative experiences of young people." 

There's evidence the problem isn't confined to the United States. A British poll earlier this year found just 35 percent of women under 25 held a positive view of men. One young woman interviewed afterward was asked what she thought of the boys she knew.

"I don't care for them. They're not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They'll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic; they don't care about political issues..."

The women with her said they wouldn't date a man with different politics. One wouldn't even be friends with one.

Back in the United States, the Survey Center has put a hard number on a similar divide. This wasn't a question about voting for a Republican, supporting Donald Trump, or disagreeing over abortion. Researchers asked young women how much men's behavior contributed to the challenges women face.

For 66 percent of young Democratic women, the answer was "a great deal." The left spent a decade building that. Congratulations.

Credit:  https://redstate.com/