November 9, 2023 - 7:00pm
Since the Hamas attack a month ago, videos of protestors tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children have been circulating all over social media platform X. Disturbingly, this has been happening across cities such as London, New York, and Melbourne. Whatâs particularly strange about it is something several commentators have picked up on: why do so many of these protestors seem to be female?Â
One explanation is that this reflects a wider political shift among young women, who are more likely to be progressive than young men and potentially see this as an act of solidarity with Palestine. In the US, 44% of young women identified as liberal in 2021 compared to 25% of young men, a significant shift from a decade ago, when the corresponding figures were 30% and 27%.Â
As young women lean further Left, they appear to be adopting the worldview of a new progressive orthodoxy that divides the world into strict oppressor-oppressed categories, and which often justifies illiberal tactics in the pursuit of social justice. In the UK, for example, young women are less tolerant of differing views than young men, and are more likely to support measures like restrictions on free speech. They might therefore see tearing down these posters as a form of resistance against oppression, especially as many protestors are declaring âThis is for Palestine!â
Another explanation is the echo chambers of our educational institutions. Women now outnumber men at universities, and are more likely to study social sciences and humanities subjects, where professors are more likely to lean Left than those in other fields. This academic environment may subject young women to a singular perspective on the conflict, and in some cases extreme stances from activist professors. Academics at top universities across the UK and US have struggled to condemn Hamas, framing them as part of an oppressed group and defending their actions as a form of âdecolonisationâ. Some have even celebrated Hamas and torn down posters themselves.
Social media, particularly platforms like TikTok, may also play a part. Over 55% of all TikTok users are young women, and the platform has seen a recent surge in pro-Hamas content. Over the past two weeks, posts tagged #StandwithPalestine have received nearly four times more views than those using #StandwithIsrael. According to TikTokâs data 87% of those viewing #StandwithPalestine posts are under the age of 35.Â
Personality differences may contribute too. The current social justice culture seems to align with traits more common among women than men. The urge towards censorship, for example, can be seen as a form of social exclusion and reputation destruction, strategies often associated with female antisocial behaviour. Tearing down posters in pursuit of social justice could be interpreted as a form of indirect aggression favoured by female activists.Â
This shift towards illiberalism not only impacts our culture and institutions, but also young women themselves. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in The Coddling of the American Mind, warn that this new progressive worldview contradicts the core principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy by promoting cognitive distortions and catastrophising. What’s more, Haidtâs research reveals that among all demographics, the group most likely to report poor mental health outcomes is white liberal females, with 56% having received a mental illness diagnosis. Liberal teenage girls are also the group most likely to say they spend five or more hours a day on social media, as Jean Twenge notes in her book Generations.Â
Several factors seem to be converging, then. Young women are likely more receptive to a social justice movement which cloaks itself in the language of compassion and progressivism, but is often illiberal in its tactics. This is reinforced within liberal educational environments and amplified by their personalised social media algorithms, which prioritise divisive and extreme content to boost engagement. The Israeli children on those posters barely factor into the equation.
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SubscribeEnlightenment liberalism is dead. A strictly value-neutral state (which was Locke’s novel invention) ends in the majority of normies held hostage by the outrageous demands of the smallest and most demented minority.
The Left has adopted the oppressor/oppressed matrix of wokeness, an explicitly value laden proposition. It’s past time for the Right to adopt the same Manichean tactics. Instead our “conservative” leaders, having failed to conserve anything useful while the Left destroyed every institution we have over the last 50 years, are still clinging to zombie Thatcher/Reagan-ism.
It’s time to move on. Post-liberalism is here to stay, and if the current Tory/Republican establishment can’t figure that out, they will be replaced. Likely by someone must less friendly. To paraphrase Ross Douthat: “if you thought the Christian right was bad, wait until you meet his nasty younger brother, the non-Christian right.”
is there a source pls for that Douthat quip? Thx.
A young woman recently said to me that there probably wouldnât be any wars or conflict in the world if women were in charge.
When I mentioned the decisive actions taken by Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, as two female leaders that even she had heard of, she responded that âThey werenât real women.â
Such is female logic. Her statement was true because she excludes anyone who doesnât fit the description.
Has there ever been a more misinformed generation?
Reminds me of the Bolsheviks. They had a firm belief that if the working class would be in charge there would be no reason for wars. They held onto that belief so much so that immediately after the revolution they dissolved the army which at the time was fighting against the dying Ottoman Empire in Anatolia (and winning). They expected the other labour movements to join them in revolution and dissolving their armies.
In the end, Ottomans were saved from destruction, and as the above didn’t happen they eventually had to reconstitute an army. Then, of course, they went ahead to set up one of the most murderous totalitarian regimes history has ever seen – a fact which, by the way, American progressives refused to acknowledge for as long as they could.
If only that was true. What passes for conservatism is just regulate-tax-and-spend Blue Blairism. The people actually running the Tory Party circa 2023 believe in the magic money tree just as much as the Left do.
One should of course be careful about taking single vox pops as indicative of wider positions, but I was struck yesterday by a clip which came up on my feed of two young British women at a Free Palestine demonstration.
In response to a question about the rape and murder of Israeli women by Hamas, their replies were “They didn’t do that did they?” and “I need to educate myself on the whole situation.”
Leaving aside all personal and political feelings about the situation, what’s fascinating is how they epitomise something very scary: a combination of vociferous activism with a complete lack of intellectual curiosity about the very subject which they are protesting about.
Such people could be persuaded to protest about literally anything, so long as they can be convinced by their social media bubble that whatever it is is the “right side of history”.
Thereâs a vid of a breathtakingly stupid young woman doing the rounds, in which she claims âHamas would comfort me. Israel would kill meâ.
I suggest she put that theory to the test immediately. I will buy her a ticket, one-way, to Gaza and straight into the “loving” embrace of Hamas. It would be money well spent.
There is a deep-seated need in women, stronger than in men, to be part of a group and accepted in a group. It goes back to evolutionary pressures since women, particularly when pregnant or having small children, needed the protection offered by a group. Men, not so much.
Perhaps, but men will often have had to work in teams where their lives depended on other men taking risks. So you would expect a need for strong team cohesion.
Also while women do seem to feel the pressure to conform more than men do, there also seem to be forces at work which break down female social cohesion. Women seem very ready to turn on each other.
Perhaps men are just more able to put their differences aside for the sake of team cohesion – without actually having to suppress those differences. Perhaps having multiple viewpoints was important for male activities.
“…you only thought the world would be better if it was run by women if you didnât actually know many women. Or old women, at least. Take the whole thing about the dimity scarves. Women had to cover their hair on Fridays, but there was nothing about this in the Book, which was pretty darâpretty damn rigorous about most things. It was just a custom. It was done because it had always been done. And if you forgot, or didnât want to, the old women got you. They had eyes like hawks. They could practically see through walls. And the men took notice, because no man wanted to cross the crones in case they started watching him, so half-hearted punishment would be dealt out. Whenever there was an execution, and especially when there was a whipping, you always found the grannies in the front row, sucking on peppermints.”
–Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosersâout of unorthodoxy.
1984
Interesting to see the awful behaviours of toxic femininity, not just toxic masculinity.
These toxic female behaviours can only exist in a weakened patriarchy. Face it, guys. You dropped the ball.
Nathaniel Hawthorne aptly described this phenomenon in his novel The Scarlet Letter. When the Puritan judges are deciding what punishment to mete out to Hester (the adulteress), it is the other women, housewives and old maids, who condemn her the most.
I miss Terry Pratchett.
Iâve said it many times before, but women are best in the company of men. Get three of us together and soon it will be two against one.
Quite right, Allison.
By the way, the obvious but impermissible answer to Ms. Indiaâs question â âWhy are young women tearing down Israeli hostage posters?â â is because their real (or hoped-for) Muslim boyfriends want them to.
Jordan Peterson has reported that his research shows that the three biggest predictors of support for left-wing authoritarianism are 1) low verbal intelligence, 2) being female, 3) have a “female” temperment, in addition to your sex. Seems like it checks out.
Dumb women, and feminized men are the curse of our societies. Good news is that if it comes to the barricades, they’ll all run away very quickly.
Unless they are the ones actually defending the barricades of course, like in Israel …
They are not the dumb ones.
Do you have a link for this?
Might we agree to use âprogressiveâ in inverted commas, since the behaviour it typically describes in news articles is anything but?
It’s like the “Democratic” Republic of [North] Korea.
Woke is a wolf in sheeps’ clothes. Those clothes are more appealing to the left than the right (“social justice” #bekind), I wonder how many can see the wolf lurking under them and how many are just useful idiots like the young ladies described in this article?
The label and the contents don’t necessarily match. Quite the contrary: the more emphasis there is on the label, the more certain one can be that the contents are not what is described.
Often the way Katya.
Funny thing: I got slagged off in Leeds city centre today by some vituperative b*&*h who then accused be of being ‘very rude’, and (naturally) ‘aggressive’ while all the time looking like a slapped arâŹe who’d swallowed a bottle of vinegar.
I’m an ex bra-burner from the 70’s myself but the scales have lately fallen from my eyes.
Golly, Mike. Whatever had you done wrong?
Hmm, reminds me of this video I saw by chance the other day when some of these young folks didn’t even know about the recent Hamas atrocities.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12729893/students-protest-palestinians-not-seen-proof-hamas-invasion-israel-october.html
I have often said, and I believe I even wrote it on Unherd.com, that the defining criterion of many of today’s young people is incredible ignorance. The knowledge gaps are so wide that one could easily park several lorries. However, that doesn’t stop them from having lots of opinions which naturally have little to no foundation in facts.
I believe it was Kant who said:
Though few men think, yet all will have opinions.
Conformism is something the article misses.
I.e Nasty ignorant toxic New Red Guards
Social media undoubtedly causing polarisation and dumbing down of ‘political discourse’.
Similar to 2016, when liberals tried to argue rationally against the supposed ‘policies’ of Presidential candidate Donald.
No point trying to argue rationally with people who appear to have an utterly simplistic and distorted understanding of what is happening in the world around them, as described in this article.
Arguably these people are more dangerous than Donald, as they believe that they have virtue on their side.
Donald’s policies turned out to be much less radical than slightly more conservative than the norm. And they were very successful in most areas.
In summary, young women tend to see things emotionally rather than rationally, in black and white terms, are easily influenced, and lack critical intelligence.
Iâm not sure this conclusion is true, and obviously itâs a big generalisation – but a bit depressing if, after years of feminism, we come to the same conclusion our Victorian forbears considered self- evident.
Perhaps a few Tik Toks of Muslim rape gangs operating in this country alongside the rapes on 7 Oct might be a suitable antidote for these “progressive” young ladies.
Failing that a few LGBT beheadings might do the trick or maybe some stonings of women who have transgressed sharia law.
That will only cause them to dig in deeper. They will go to great length to avoid cognitive dissonance, and all the evidence we present will be dismissed as propaganda and lies. The only solution may be to send them over there in person, and assist with cleaning up the horrific aftermath. I have been advocating for this approach for a while now. Experiencing is believing.
Not sure leans left is an appropriate way to describe a group who routinely publish research papers on Marxism, as if it’s still an actual thing that matters and needs to be “researched”.
I think Haidt has shown (actual) research that proves that left wing people don’t understand what right wing people really believe very well. So they protest against a cartoon caricature evil villain that exists primarily in their own minds. This business with protestors not actually knowing anything about Hamas seems very similar somehow. OK, Hamas are not “right wing” by any measure, but the hugely distorted idea of who they’re supporting and opposing is definitely present.
Conservatives are presented in a cartoonish, stereotypical way by the MSM, and the MSM are quite leftist.
Watch Hitler speaking to audiences of women. They were among his most rabid supporters.
I suspect there is an element of physical attraction to the macho men of Hamas as exhibited by the ISIS brides. Maybe if our own young men were a little less, beta, low testosterone and gender confused young girls wouldnât be looking longingly at the modern day version of the SS?
Apparently the women in Hitlers audiences used to wet themselves with excitement – just like teenagers at Beatles concerts years later.
“Maybe if our own young men were a little less, beta, low testosterone and gender confused young girls wouldnât be looking longingly at the modern day version of the SS”
ï»żWhose fault is that?
it’s because young women tend to be quite stupid
Yes, Just like young men.
well of course
Being serious, men are socialized slightly differently than women, so tend to be less conformist with high status fashions.
Also, men are more diverse
I am woman, and even as a teenager, I was never conformist. I have always marched to the beat of my own drummer, and I still couldn’t care less what the mainstream does or think.
Perhaps the real shift is in what constitutes liberalism. Could it be that the whole notion has been feminised.
The explanation is very simple! These girls are instructed by ambitious mullahs from their local mosques to do Godâs work. These muslim girls are either free volunteers, or are paid per day to rip up those posters. These girls are brainwashed; they offer no independent thought of their own.
The mosque network connecting radical mullahs is under estimated in radicalising muslim youth. Boys are instructed to demonstrate stubbornly, and girls instructed to do their work stealthily. The Friday prayers are nothing but sermons in radical verses of Quran.
It’s not just women, some policemen are doing it too.
Anger as police in Manchester pull down posters of Israeli hostages – after Met slammed… – LBC
The fundamental question is how so much money can be spent on education and the person emerges from university more ignorant and stupid than when they entered.
It could be that they think they are less likely to face physical attack.
Also “women now outnumber men at universities, and are more likely to study social sciences and humanities subjects”
Social sciences and the humanities are not proper subjects and are a refuge for the intellectually limited
Whilst I agree with the first part of your statement, I disagree with the second one. Humanities and social sciences are proper subjects, and can certainly be intellectually challenging. Think of all the great philosophers and polymaths of the past! A university education was humanities-based. The objective was to teach critical thinking, reasoning, and to broaden one’s perspective. Unfortunately, social sciences, and to a lesser extent humanities, have mostly been captured by ideologues who no longer teach any of the above.
In classical terms, the humanities are great. But today’s universities do not teach classical liberal (Enlightenment) ideas, they propagandize socialist memes.
KS – I’m afraid ER might have a point. Five years ago I took a postgraduate course in Historical Research at Birkbeck. I attended a lecture on Empire, and representations of Empire – delivered by a historian of Byzantine coinage. So far, so good. But the thrust of the lecture was the validity of self-representation – that is, if an Empire says it’s an Empire, then it’s an Empire (yes, yes, I know you can see where this is going, but it was new to me – bear with me).
Unconvinced, I asked the woman sitting next to me what she thought. In response to her non-committal grunt, I suggested that if I said I was a zebra, was I a zebra?
I even went to speak to the lecturer; I suggested maybe an Empire had to have more than one nationality (eg Austria-Hungary); perhaps an Empire had to answer to no other (eg Act of Supremacy 1534: This Realm of England is an Empire, whole unto itself.)
I’d thought an ‘Empire’ had to have some sort of ,grounding in objective, measurable reality. This was my first contact with the cancer that seems so rapidly, to have replaced enlightenment thinking in the West: Romanticism. We live in a causal universe, KS: and this all started in the humanities and social science departments, before metastasising. They have to shoulder at least some of the blame.
The ignorance of numerous young people would be unbelieveable if one had not witnessed the undermining of standards in many universities. In particular there has been a tendency of university bureaucrats to use the woke agenda to undermine the authority of academics. But I don’t think we can simply reduce this to sex differences, although it may be important to understand them. Ir is probably easier for the woke lobby to undermine standards in humanities and social sciences than in “hard” sciences simply because the latter are indeed hard, both in sense of being resistant to deformation and in the sense of difficult to master.
So does this mean that a young college dude has to go pro-Hamas to get laid? At least in my day, the Vietnam War and the draft made it easy to nod and agree. Now you have to cheer for 10/7-style genocide?
Alternatively, you could follow my wifeâs advice and date a Republican. According to her, theyâre better looking and donât require a correct statement of values before sex. After 32 years of bliss, I have to admit it has worked for me.
“Needs must” old boy. Young men will say anything they need to.
Simple, repeal the 19th amendment. (women’s suffrage)
Purity Spirals. Young women are particularly susceptible to getting caught in competitive purity Spirals. This is understandable, since purity is a very gendered idea that is imposed on girls from early childhood on. As is competing with one another for social kudos, rather than in sports. This needs factoring in when considering why many young women are so vehemently progressive. There’s a lot of “holier than thou” going on.
Freya India. Nice name.
There is not a paragraph in her essay without a good point.
So, several points of my own:
There are well established behavioural differences between men and women. It is not as if they needed to be established. Those differences are continuously variable and can be socially modified but they are not socially constructed. The emancipation of women must lead to their greater exercise of power or else what does this emancipation even mean?That being the case, the past ~70 years in the West may be seen as one gigantic social experiment without any thought given to this cautionary note: You canât change the sensibility, the psychological make-up, of those exercising power without changing the nature of that power and the ends to which it is exercised. This is the feminization problem, itâs social effects are all around us, and it is not going away.
Blame Labour and the other left wing parties in other countries, they are totally out of touch regarding terrorists and their sick ideology. Setting standards of behaviour is a key role of politicians and Labour/Lefties have loose morals, in effect reinforcing bad behaviour by individuals who remove posters of innocent people captured by terrorists.
Hamas want to destroy the state of Israel and the Israeli people, men, woman and children, civilians and military alike.
Hamas mantra is “kill Israelis”
In Northern Ireland we have Irish terrorists with political SF leading them …. an identical terrorist regime to Hamas, with the same immoral methodology.
They have the same mantra “kill Brits” and they too have the same goal of wanting to destroy Northern Ireland and killing civilians …. we have had many 7th Octobers in NI …. Enniskillen Remembrance day bombing, Omagh town bombing, LaMon disco firebomb etc……. all identical to the Hamas Israeli killings in October.
The worlds oldest English language daily newspaper (Belfast Newsletter) only today published an article highlighting that the Irish terrorists planted a bomb in a hospital, killing 2 medics and injuring a child … And their supporters now walk the streets against Israel!
And, guess what … Labour, especially Corbyn, are ‘friends’ with these groups, often praising them.
To be fair, the Conservatives also do not apply the same rules to Irish terrorists either …… why are children’s play parks allowed to be named after terrorist killers?! NO WAY would mainland UK permit a play park to be named after an ISIS or Hamas terrorist, yet in NI UK this is common place and ‘normalised’. This is totally dysfunctional and immoral, never-mind that it openly breaks hate laws.
Lets hope the new NI Police head will no longer allow political policing to happen (the last head was sacked {resigned!} for political bias allowing Irish terrorists to break COVID laws and wrongly discipling good police officers for doing their jobs correctly).
Suella Braverman is correct …. the hate laws are not being applied equally across the UK; all terrorists and their ideology should be called out, including Northern Ireland Irish terrorists and Hamas.
To me it seems that many pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protestors are women. I would like to see western women offered the chance to go rebuild Gaza after the war concludes and see how many take up the offer.
Compare the lives of the young women tearing down posters with the young Israeli women tankers: https://www.timesofisrael.com/female-idf-tank-crews-ran-down-dozens-of-hamas-terrorists-on-october-7/
If you click on the link to the report from Melbourne (from the Herald Sun), you’ll read that the posters “appear” to have been torn down, and you won’t find anything about the prevalence of women among the tearers-down, because there are NO pictures of ANY tearers-down.
I suppose it’s more likely that the posters were torn down than that they were damaged accidentally, but the report from Melbourne doesn’t add anything substantive here.
I’m reminded of a bumper sticker that used to be quite popular in Melbourne: “Is that true, or did you read it in the Herald Sun?” And if you make the appropriate internet search, you’ll find the HS peddling dubious “news” about schools which let children identify as “furries.”
Taking the hostages was a terrible crime, and the whole 7-Oct-2023 event was an almost unspeakable atrocity. (We do speak of it so it can’t be literally unspeakable.) And the whole revenge thing is what has got us in this terrible mess. But where is the outcry about the thousands of Palestinians held imprisoned without trial in Israel. Are they not also hostages? Let’s complain about BOTH.
I think we agree that Oct 7th was an act of barbarism – well beyond terrorism in my view. There is no doubt Israel is not blameless in the overall situation, but NOTHING justifies what Hamas did in this day and age – it is something from medieval times. Trying to equate the barbarism of 7 Oct with other lesser infractions by Israel does seek to ameliorate and justify barbarism so don’t do it.
There is no doubt that given the opportunity, Hamas would like to repeat Oct 7th all over Israel – from the river to the sea. Hamas must be stopped if the Palestinian people are to have any chance of seeking a better deal for themselves. The ordinary citizens of Gaza are going to suffer far more as Israel acts to remove Hamas. Hamas knew that before Oct 7th, indeed they welcome the suffering now being inflicted on ordinary citizens whilst they sit safe (for now) in the tunnels they built with aid money, which was supposed to go to help those ordinary citizens.
Where is the outcry?! Itâs marching down the main streets of every large Western city, bought and paid for by the perpetrators and funders of terrorism.
Speaking of prisoners held without trial, care to give a thought to those who were walking around the US capitol on January 6th, when federal agents turned a legal protest into a riot for the cameras?
Why do tens of thousands of people protest when Israelis protect themselves from Palestinians out of self-defense, but it’s all tumbleweed when hearing reports of Chinese atrocities against Uyghurs? Or of Houthi attacks against Yemenis? Or slaughter of Syrians by their government? Out of all of these attacks on Muslims, the Israeli one seems most understandable, yet the most condemned. Why is that? We all know the reason, of course, but I’m curious as to your own.
What issues to demonstrate for are determined by local mullahs. Behind the screen, they instruct and finance young muslims to organise demonstrations.
Most in the West donot realise the sheer ruthlessness of what the mullahs preach.
I have again and again written here on Unherd that 7-Oct was an atrocity. I am against all the atrocities which occur. It’s you who is selective, not I. You support Israel. Why do you not support China?
Year after year more Palestinians are killed by Israelis than v.v. Whenever will we hear you condemn any of this?
Were the Uyghurs to protest peacefully (as the Palestinians did 2018) and the Chinese were to maim 5000+ Uyghurs killing 220 of them (as the Israelis did of Palestinians), I think you would complain and the West would be unequivocal in their condemnation of China. Why is China criticised and Israel not?
I will use your words when I ask you: “Why is that? We all know the reason, of course, but Iâm curious as to your own.”
It isn’t me who is selective in what I complain about, it is you.
If ever Unherd features articles defending China’s treatment of the Uyghurs you will find me speaking out.