many possibilities blog: Why are more young women having a negative view of men

A Merlin Strategy poll for New Statesman says 72% of men under 30 had a positive view of women, versus 50% of women under 30 with a positive view of men; among women under 25, only 35% said they viewed men positively. Reporting also said heavier time online was linked with more pessimistic views of the opposite sex. (the-independent.com)

A good way to understand this is: young women and young men are now living in the same society, but not the same social reality. In rich democracies, women have gained formal rights and opportunities, but that does not mean they experience daily life as equally safe, equally respected, or equally low-risk in dating, sex, work, and public space. Surveys across countries continue to find sizeable sex gaps on whether equality has gone far enough; in Ipsos’ 29-country 2026 survey, 52% overall said gender equality had gone far enough in their country, but only 36% of women agreed. (ipsos.com)

Why would this lower women’s warmth toward men specifically?

Women often bear more perceived risk in heterosexual interaction.
For many young women, “men” are not an abstract category; they are the group more associated with sexual pressure, physical threat, coercion, harassment, and social disrespect. Even if most individual men are harmless, repeated cautionary experiences can make the category feel risky. British Social Attitudes data, for example, show sex differences in how men and women judge comments directed at women versus men, with women—especially younger women—more likely to see certain conduct toward women as wrong. (natcen.ac.uk)
Young women are more likely to think young men don’t understand their struggles.
The Survey Center on American Life found that 72% of young women felt young men don’t understand their struggles. If you feel misunderstood by a group, positive feelings toward that group tend to erode. (americansurveycenter.org)
Online culture amplifies the worst examples.
Social media does not show people a representative sample of the opposite sex; it shows the most outrageous, inflammatory, humiliating, or grievance-driven examples. Reporting on this UK polling explicitly tied more time online to more pessimistic opposite-sex views. That means young women may be seeing a nonstop feed of misogyny, mockery, pornified expectations, cheating discourse, or “manosphere” content, while young men may be seeing a different feed. (linkedin.com)
Women and men are diverging politically and morally.
Reporting on the same poll says women aged 18–30 are among the most progressive groups in the UK, while young men are less aligned with them. When people think the other sex is not just different but morally or politically out of step, warmth drops fast. (the-independent.com)
Expectations rose faster than lived reality.
In advanced countries, girls are often raised to expect respect, emotional intelligence, equality, and mutuality. If actual dating culture feels casual, porn-shaped, unserious, or emotionally avoidant, disappointment can become generalized: not “that guy was bad,” but “men are like this.” That doesn’t make the generalization logically perfect, but it helps explain it. This is partly an inference from the survey pattern and surrounding reporting. (linkedin.com)
Men may evaluate women more idealistically than women evaluate men.
Young men often still approach women with admiration, desire, romantic projection, or longing, which can inflate positive responses. Young women may evaluate men less as ideals and more as potential sources of risk, labor, disappointment, or conflict. So the asymmetry is not surprising: one side is rating the opposite sex partly through attraction; the other is rating partly through caution. This is an inference, but it fits the polling gap and broader sex-difference findings. (factually.co)

The under-25 result being the worst is also understandable. Women in that age band came of age amid:

intense social media exposure,
post-#MeToo norms,
pandemic-era social disruption,
growing political polarization,
and algorithmic gender-conflict content.
That combination can make first impressions of men more negative before long real-world experience softens them. Reporting specifically highlighted this youngest female group as the least positive. (the-independent.com)

So the short answer is:

Because “being in an advanced country” does not mean emotionally reconciled between the sexes. In modern countries, women often have more rights and voice, but also more language to name bad treatment, more visibility into male hostility online, and higher expectations of men. When expectations rise, risks stay salient, and online culture magnifies worst-case male behavior, women’s average view of men can become markedly colder than men’s view of women. (linkedin.com)

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In addition:

There’s quite a bit more to say, and I’d divide it into six layers: measurement, lived experience, online culture, economics, politics, and psychology.

1. First: what those numbers do and do not mean

The figures you quoted appear to come from a Merlin Strategy poll of 2,000 British 18- to 30-year-olds conducted for the New Statesman in 2026. The topline reported that 72% of men under 30 had a positive view of women, compared with 50% of women under 30 who had a positive view of men, and among women under 25, that dropped to 35%. (archive.is)

That does not mean “most young women hate men.” It means:

many are ambivalent, not just hostile;
women are less warm toward men than men are toward women;
and the gap is strongest in the youngest female group. (archive.is)

So the real story is not simple hatred. It is erosion of trust, admiration, and optimism.

2. Women often judge men through risk, not abstraction

A major reason for this gap is that women are more likely to experience men as a potential risk category. For many young women, the question “how do you feel about men?” is filtered through concerns about:

sexual pressure,
coercion,
harassment,
disrespect,
emotional unreliability,
and physical safety.

The Survey Center on American Life found that 72% of young women say young men don’t understand their struggles, and one of the center’s summaries explicitly framed young women as feeling “unsafe, heard, or understood” less often than they want. (americansurveycenter.org)

That matters because if a group feels misunderstood and unsafe around another group, positive feeling usually drops even if day-to-day interactions are mixed.

3. Social media is probably making this much worse

This may be the single biggest accelerator.

Recent commentary and reporting around the poll linked young women’s colder views of men to the rise of the “femosphere,” often described as a female counterpart to the manosphere: a cluster of online voices encouraging women to be more suspicious, strategic, cynical, or adversarial toward men. At the same time, Britain has also seen heavy discussion of manosphere content aimed at boys and young men. (independent.co.uk)

The important point is not whether every influencer is extreme. It is that algorithms reward grievance. A woman online is more likely to repeatedly see:

men humiliating girlfriends,
misogynistic street interviews,
bad dating behavior,
pornography-inflected expectations,
cheating stories,
“weaponized incompetence” discourse,
and anti-female rhetoric.

A man online may repeatedly see:

women mocking male vulnerability,
“gold digger” content,
contempt for short men or broke men,
selective dating standards,
and anti-male rhetoric.

So each sex gets an unrepresentative feed of the other sex at its worst. The result is not just disagreement; it is mutual caricature. Reporting on the UK data specifically noted that more time online correlated with more pessimistic views of the opposite sex. (archive.is)

4. Young women and young men are politically diverging

This is another big piece.

The New Statesman’s reporting around the survey framed the pattern as part of a broader gendered political split, with young women moving more leftward. (archive.is)

When politics becomes moral identity, sex relations become harder. Women may increasingly see men not just as different, but as more likely to support:

weaker abortion rights,
less sensitivity to harassment,
more traditional gender roles,
or backlash politics.

Meanwhile, some men feel women now interpret ordinary male behavior through an overly hostile ideological lens.

Once this happens, the opposite sex stops feeling like “potential partner” and starts feeling like political outgroup.

5. Equality can increase expectations faster than it improves experience

This is one of the most important explanations.

In advanced countries, women have more rights, more education, more workplace access, more public voice, and stronger language for naming unfairness. But that can create a paradox: formal equality raises expectations, and if daily life still contains disrespect or burden, disappointment becomes sharper.

Ipsos’ 2026 international gender survey found a clear sex gap in whether equality had “gone far enough”: 52% overall said yes in their country, but only 36% of women agreed. (resources.ipsos.com)

So women may live in a country that is objectively advanced and still feel:

men do not share domestic or emotional labor fairly,
sexual norms still advantage men,
female appearance is over-scrutinized,
and male empathy is weaker than it should be.

In other words: progress does not eliminate resentment if lived expectations still feel unmet.

6. Young women may currently feel less dependent on male approval

This changes attitude a lot.

Historically, women had stronger incentives to think well of men because men controlled more access to:

money,
social status,
protection,
marriageability,
and public legitimacy.

In a richer modern society, a young woman can often imagine a life with:

her own income,
friends,
contraception,
education,
mobility,
and less need to pair early.

That means she can afford to be more critical. The New Statesman reporting also noted that among British 16- to 24-year-olds, women in full-time work outnumbered male counterparts and had higher average earnings in that age band. (archive.is)

That does not mean women no longer want men. It means the cost of openly saying “many men are not good enough” is lower than it used to be.

7. Why men are often still more positive toward women

This asymmetry is also worth explaining.

Men often view women through:

attraction,
idealization,
longing,
romance,
admiration,
and the desire for female approval.

So when men answer “how do you feel about women?” many are partly answering with eros and aspiration, not just social critique.

Women are more likely to answer through:

caution,
pattern recognition,
accumulated irritation,
and concern about consequences.

So men’s view can remain warmer partly because women are still the object of desire, while men are more often evaluated as a source of work, risk, disappointment, or negotiation.

That is an inference, but it fits the direction of the poll and the broader sex-gap evidence. (archive.is)

8. The under-25 result is especially revealing

The youngest women are the least positive. That makes sense because they are the cohort most shaped by:

TikTok/Instagram algorithmic conflict,
post-#MeToo moral framing,
rising mental-health strain,
unstable dating norms,
and online discourse that treats heterosexual relations as a battleground.

They are also often in the most chaotic dating years: low commitment, high ambiguity, heavy app usage, weak social scripts, and lots of comparison. That combination is a very efficient machine for producing pessimism. Reporting on the poll singled out women under 25 as the most negative subgroup. (archive.is)

9. A harder truth: some of this may be overgeneralization

To be balanced, some of women’s negativity is likely based on real repeated experience; some is likely based on availability bias.

If you see 500 clips of bad men, hear 50 horror stories, and have 5 unpleasant experiences, it can start to feel like “men are like this.” But that does not necessarily mean the average real-world man is as bad as the average online male archetype.

So part of the phenomenon is probably:

real grievance, plus
algorithmic distortion, plus
moral polarization, plus
reduced incentive to be charitable.

10. Short version

If I compress the whole thing into one sentence:

Young women in advanced countries often feel colder toward men because they have higher expectations, lower dependence, stronger language for naming mistreatment, and constant online exposure to male bad behavior — while men still tend to view women through attraction and idealization. (archive.is)

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many possibilities blog

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Why are more young women having a negative view of men