Hating Men Isn't Improving Your Life

I had spent years advocating for girls and women, traveling to Africa, helping run workshops on self-worth, and cheering on every female milestone in boardrooms and classrooms. I believed in lifting women up. But that day, something shifted. I saw a little girl, no more than three years old, sitting perched on her father’s shoulders, wearing a tiny pink hat. She wasn’t old enough to understand the slogans or the chants, yet there she was, absorbing the message: the world is stacked against you, sweetheart. Society doesn’t value girls and to matter, you’ll have to fight like a man. In that moment, I realized we were teaching the youngest among us to see themselves as victims before they could even spell the word. We were teaching them to be angry. I didn’t blame the dad, though. He thought he was doing the right thing: protecting his daughter, showing his solidarity. After my awakening, I left the march convinced that female victimhood was the most disempowering force imaginable. It was a cancer spreading through our culture, one that robs girls and women of agency, joy, empathy and real connections. I made it my mission to call it out. ‘This could truly help women!’ I thought. Boy, was I naïve. The backlash was swift. Women I had been friends with for years, who were supporters of girls’ education and mentors in STEM programs, laughed in my face. Some in DC literally walked me out of meetings. “You’re internalizing the patriarchy,” a woman told me. Another accused me of “gaslighting survivors.” I realized then that the very institutions meant to empower women had become factories for grievance. We were radicalizing girls to view every setback as systemic oppression and every man as the enemy rather than building confidence. In that moment, I realized we were teaching the youngest among us to see themselves as victims before they could even spell the word. Fast-forward a decade, and the problem hasn’t improved. It’s on overdrive. Young men, sensing the hypocrisy of pop feminism, are shifting rightward in droves. They’ve watched boys get pushed to the back of the line for decades while girls received every resource, most of the scholarships, every “you go, girl” motivational talk, and all the attention for their issues. Now they’re tired of the constant blaming and shaming. As an advocate for boys and men as well for the past 8 years, I’ve watched the very real rise in misogyny closely. Online spaces have filled up with resentment on both sides, but while the “manosphere” gets endless negative coverage, the other side flies under the radar. Female-led misandry is mainstream, and it’s in our schools, our media, our Hollywood blockbusters, and our university lecture halls. Podcasts hosted by women casually trash men as toxic, incompetent, sexist or irredeemable. TikTok feeds overflow with videos declaring “men are the problem” or “why I’m done with dating.” The hatred isn’t just on the fringes. It’s everywhere. Look at the 4B movement exploding out of South Korea and now reaching corners of the West. Women there, and increasingly here, are swearing off romance, and they’re also rejecting fathers, brothers, and male friends entirely. No dating, no marriage, no sex and no children with men. It’s framed as liberation, but it’s really a full-scale withdrawal from half the human race. We’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid since elementary school: boys are bad, boys are privileged, boys must step aside so girls can shine and, don’t forget, “the future is female!” I grew up with it myself. We then wonder why, years later, young women look around and declare there are “no good men left.” Female-led misandry is mainstream, and it’s in our schools, our media, our Hollywood blockbusters, and our university lecture halls. The divide between men and women is growing in all areas. A NBC News poll of Gen Z Americans revealed a concerning reality. Young men who supported Donald Trump in 2024 ranked “having children” as their top marker of personal success. For young women who backed Kamala Harris, it ranked near the bottom—12th out of 13 options. Instead, they prioritized careers, financial independence, and “doing the things you want.” High school girls today, according to Pew Research, are less likely than boys to list family as a life goal. Article after article in magazines and online outlets reinforces the message: being single is the ultimate power move! Who needs men? You can have it all—travel, promotions, and self-care—without the “burden” of boyfriends or husbands. Women gobble it up, then double down: the reason they hate men is because “there are no good ones!” The hypocrisy is frustrating. We spent decades telling boys to shrink themselves, to hand over the spotlight, that they’re inherently oppressive, and to apologize for their very existence. We designed schools to favor girls’ learning styles, poured funding into women’s programs, and celebrated every female first while boys’ issues like suicide rates and declining college enrollment barely registered. How exactly were “good marriageable men” supposed to emerge from that environment? An environment that demonized them and pushed them down? Once you recognize it like I have, you can’t unsee it. More research drives the point home even harder. Privileged women with college degrees, professional jobs, and economic security drink the victimhood Kool-Aid the most. Studies from Harvard show they’re more likely than their working-class counterparts to believe the world is rigged against them. It makes a perverse kind of sense. When you’ve been handed every opportunity, ordinary struggles feel like injustice. Working-class women, who’ve more likely faced real barriers, tend to be more pragmatic. They know life is hard for everyone. But the elite narrative that I discuss in a recent piece for the Institute for Family Studies dominates our culture, and it’s poisoning all women, as we can see in the marriage rates of working-class women. At least the college-educated and professionally successful still have a pretty steady marriage rate by the time they're 45. Working-class women’s rate has dropped dramatically. When you’ve been handed every opportunity, ordinary struggles feel like injustice. The most visible symptom of this disease is anger. A lot of women today are furious, and they don’t always know why. So they aim it at the nearest target: men. I hear my friends complaining all the time. Scroll through social media or tune into a campus protest, and the rage is there. There’s disappointment in dating, but it’s also a worldview that frames every male success as theft from women, every disagreement as misogyny or mansplaining, and even compliments as sexual harassment. The New Statesman ’s recent cover story, “ Meet the Angry Young Women ,” highlights this phenomenon. In it, British women in their twenties describe refusing to date or even befriend men with differing politics because “they don’t see you as human.” One student calls young men emotionally stunted for not weeping over global crises the way she does. The piece details how educated, middle-class women (despite their advantages) feel more pessimistic and alienated than ever. They prioritize activism over family and view motherhood as a threat to their identity. The article’s polling mirrors what we’re seeing in the think tanks I collaborate with: young women are twice as likely as young men not to want children, and far less likely to believe the system works for them. The vast majority of young men have a positive view of women. The vast majority of young women under 25 have a negative/neutral view of men. Do you think this stems from experiences or from being taught since they were young that “men are bad”? This isn’t empowerment. If you truly open your eyes, you recognize all we do is support women in the West. Girls and women in the West are not victims. We have more opportunities, more resources, more legal protections and more social support than at any point in human history. Universities bend over backward for female students, corporations chase diversity quotas, and the media celebrates women in every field. Meanwhile, boys face a rigged game. They have barely any support or resources, they’re punished for normal boy behavior, and they live in a culture that treats masculinity itself as suspect. The data from the American Institute for Boys and Men on male disadvantage in education, mental health, custody battles, and workplace fatalities is overwhelming, yet we’re still teaching girls the opposite. We’re teaching them they’re victims, and they’re becoming radicalized because of it. The women absorbed in this victimhood can’t see it. The cultural messages are too loud and too constant. From children’s books that cast boys as bullies to university Title IX offices that assume male guilt, the story is the same: women are fragile and men are dangerous. No wonder young women are angry. No wonder they’re opting out of relationships, families, friendships and even basic civility toward the opposite sex. If we want safer communities, stronger families, and a less divided society, we have to treat female victimhood like the cancer it is. If we want safer communities, stronger families, and a less divided society, we have to treat female victimhood like the cancer it is. That starts with honesty. We must stop institutionalizing the blame game in schools, stop letting Hollywood and academia teach girls that men are the enemy, and stop rewarding grievance with likes, book deals, and speaking gigs. What we should be doing is teaching resilience. Teach girls that setbacks are normal, that men are not monsters, and that building a life with a good husband is one of the greatest sources of meaning and happiness for human beings. We should celebrate strong families instead of scorning and devaluing them. And we must all acknowledge that boys and men deserve support too, that their struggles don’t cancel out ours. Mending the divide won’t be easy. It means women need to look in the mirror and admit we’ve been sold a lie, which is admittedly hard to do. Victimhood feels powerful in the moment, but it leaves you bitter. The data and trends all point to the same conclusion: young men are checking out, young women are doubling down on their anger, birth rates are plummeting, and disconnection and loneliness are epidemic. We can keep feeding the cancer, or we can cut it out now and start repairing what’s broken. Female victimhood is a poison. And if we don’t name it, we’ll all pay the price—men and women. The little girl in the pink hat I saw at the women’s march and all the girls like her need to hear a new narrative. One that unites us and truly empowers us, not one that leaves her angry for life.