According to a YouGov poll, men aged 18-24 were twice as likely (12%) to vote Reform UK than young women. In the US, 56% of men aged 18-29 voted Trump compared to 40% of women. Trump also made gains with Black and Latino men, and in the UK, the Guardian reported teenage boys of colour being pulled towards Andrew Tate. Both Farage’s Reform Party and Trump can be described as hard right. Farage endorsed Trump every time he ran for election. Left progressive movements seem unable to attract young men and men of colour to the same extent as the right.

As a young man of South Asian descent, who has always been left wing, I offer some reasons for this trend based on observation and personal experience.

On the surface, there is an easy yet incomplete explanation for many young men voting Trump over Harris: it is proof of the patriarchy in action. Some may argue it was young men afraid of losing their masculinity and male privilege and so they refused to vote for a woman in a show of raw misogyny. Some would argue that men of colour are just more sexist.

After all, we have been fed the message our whole lives that our cultures are inherently more sexist than White Europeans, and we have been demonised as being disproportionately disposed to being sexual predators or criminals. And during the US presidential election, there were even some women online threatening to engage in the 4B movement from South Korea in which women swore off sex with men in protest. It would be disingenuous to pretend that there aren’t major problems with misogyny and patriarchy in the developing world because there are, but this is an incomplete narrative.

The biggest divides in the US election occurred in the youth vote, and this is part of a wider trend with young men and women being the most polarised in regards to gender and feminism. Something is happening very specifically with young men that didn’t with older men. Race too is a large aspect which cannot be ignored. Men of colour, so often ignored and vilified by many in society but with limited support from liberal movements, are also moving to the right. For example, we saw Latino men move from 59% Democrat in 2020 to a majority voting for Trump in four years, whereas Latino women voted Harris by 58%. Despite the wider gender divide and this shift, Black men were still far more likely than white women and Latino women to vote Harris so the gender lens must be combined with race to get a fuller picture.

That being said, it is true that young men are more likely to be right wing across the world than their female counterparts, regardless of the country. So why is this really?

I propose that several factors are at play in the UK, which may also be true for other countries. Young men are the group at the highest risk of suicide. Men are also far more likely than women to go to prison by a margin of 96% to 4% in the UK and, again, young men are more likely to go to jail than older men. Young boys also do worse in school.

Whilst young women face their own issues, it feels from my perspective as a young man, that their issues are at least acknowledged by the left and progressive movements – if not always solved – whereas young men’s issues get less attention. For example, the fear women have walking home at night due to the threat of rape and sexual assault, and the indignity of catcalling has been drilled into us, and rightly so. The UK government regularly mentions their violence and women and girls scheme. Yet, men are rarely included in the combating violence rhetoric despite being one third of all domestic violence victims.

This isn’t to say we should focus less on violence against women. We should, of course, keep working even harder. But when men are one third of all victims and still only 0.8% of all refuge beds are put forward for them, with 0 existing in London, there is a problem. It shouldn’t be a zero sum game. We should be doing more for violence against all people, regardless of sex or gender and ensuring no victim is left behind; especially when only 1 in 20 men will ever seek help despite 1 in 6 being victims of domestic violence.

Young men were, and are, also subject to a deluge of pop feminism via social media which is, quite frankly, discriminatory and I think pushes a lot of men away from the left and understandably so, even though pop feminism doesn’t represent the left in any way. It’s important to point out that pop feminism is not the same as feminism, but because of social media, pop feminism is what young men are mostly exposed to. The growth in pop feminism is an example of capitalist co-optation and corruption of feminism, exacerbating rather than eliminating gender hierarchies. That is the very opposite of feminism. Tools like corporate social media have been used to great effect to promote the growth of pop feminism.

Since the late 2010s, pop feminism has been using phrases such as ‘the future is female’ and twitter trends such as ‘kill all men’ and ‘men are trash’. I remember some women I knew personally who very seriously posted online openly discriminatory statements about men such as the infamous ‘men are trash’ and who saw no issue. These messages were coming from accounts that seemed to be otherwise progressive and this resulted in many young men, even ethnic minority left wingers like me, feeling angry.

If people online who are saying they are left wing are calling you trash, and the people on the right are saying you are OK for existing, what would you do? ‘The future is female’ is exclusive, not inclusive, why would we hold hands with people who preach that?

And then there is “toxic masculinity”. “Toxic masculinity” has emerged as a favourite buzzword of our age, and has become so ubiquitous that major public bodies from the UN to the BBC use it liberally despite how ill defined and divisive it is. Similar to pop feminism, toxic masculinity is used to create negativity and acrimony, and to spread disinformation, and corporate social media has played a central role in all of this.

Toxic masculinity is used to explain away all male behaviours perceived as wrong. Committed a crime? Toxic masculinity. Angry? Toxic masculinity. Don’t fancy dealing with a problem by crying? Toxic masculinity. The Guardian seriously suggested the reason some men wouldn’t wear a Covid mask was due to toxic masculinity.

I feel I grew up without any of that, I was fine with expressing emotion and yet, I still experienced problems. I feel I wasn’t given the support or empathy an equivalent young woman would have received. I was being preached at that I am wrong about what happens in my own brain.

This isn’t to say there may be some truth to the idea of toxic masculinity but when it is so ill-defined and used to silence and lecture young men, is it not worth at least considering how we use it or misuse it?

This labelling of young men and the lack of a positive and inclusive vision left a gap to be filled, and two less than positive role models sadly filled it. I would argue that these ‘role models’, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, were inevitable. When you have a whole generation of young men who are being targeted with misandrist social media trends and who are seeing their problems ignored or minimised, society should expect a backlash. All it took was someone like Peterson or Tate to fill the gap and say that men have issues too and that toxic masculinity and patriarchy weren’t useful, or at least, explanations for young men.

Peterson and Tate both went viral in recent years as supposed champions for young men or reflections of the ‘manosphere’. Whilst Tate is largely accepted to be a misogynist figure of ridicule and has been banned on social media, Peterson has over 8 million YouTube subscribers.

I will readily admit, when Jordan Peterson first appeared on the scene, I was in my late teens and early twenties and briefly quite liked him. He was articulate, a professor, and was the first to seriously acknowledge men had problems too and that oppressed and oppressor narratives based solely on gender are just not complete.

I still stand by those basic principles as true ideas, but I quickly changed my mind about him because, as a staunch leftist, Peterson’s constant conservative leanings were off-putting.

He was able, like other figures on the right, to blame these legitimate grievances on the left and more broadly “woke” movements, which they blame on leftism, and therefore use that to steal some young men to the right and especially the online ‘manosphere’ which encompasses the likes of Peterson, Tate and Rogan who are all right wing.

I have not followed him for a few years but by 2024, he seems to have leaned to the far right, for instance interviewing Tommy Robinson. But Peterson also spoke to and about Cristiano Ronaldo, who is one of the most well known celebrities of all time and undoubtedly even more so for young boys who follow football religiously and look up to male athletes more than any demographic. Peterson’s impact cannot be understated and it is not fear mongering to say he is genuinely dangerous because he was, and still is, someone who can radicalise young men.

Andrew Tate is a less sane phenomenon. The anti-intellectual is a topless, cigar-smoking, ex-kickboxer playboy with no background in any type of academia. In theory, he shouldn’t have been someone young men would take seriously. Yet, he was. He swept the Internet and became possibly one the world’s most infamous figures, all without any mainstream media coverage; just a fireball of social media reels and rants about modern society, ‘the matrix’, and women.

Andrew Tate is easy for me to explain in a way I think a lot of people who discuss gender – say in articles found in liberal outlets like the Guardian – don’t get. I was never taken in, not even briefly, by Tate, thankfully. But I could have predicted his appeal. He was just like many far-right figures who lace some truth into their ramblings which make them popular. Andrew Tate expressed vague conspiracies about ‘the matrix’ which was his word for a society that keeps us down, and his answer was to break free from it. He told us that governments and the mainstream media are not always to be trusted, and that it is good to work out and exercise and eat well.

Sounds good, right? Expressed extremely vaguely and in short Instagram reels, what he said couldn’t be argued as wrong.

But he used this talk as a way to encourage young men to trust him and him alone, to buy his course and to go deeper into conspiracy theories about vaccines, while launching into misogynistic rants about the role of women and, oddly – given his Black father whom he venerates – biological racism. Of course, I should also mention, there are also allegations of human trafficking and rape against him.

Thankfully, his popularity has diminished, but his rise was a warning that young men could not be ignored any longer, and if they were, they would uplift men like Tate.

The irony is that the left doesn’t need to utilise any manipulation, but the right does. This is because left wing politics are better for young men than probably any other section of society. The left advocates for progressive policies that would improve the lives of young men. For example, as pointed out above, young men are at the highest risk of suicide and crime. They do less well at school and are more likely to work in dangerous manual jobs. Left policies like free healthcare and education, prison reform, better pay and working conditions, reducing poverty, and strengthening union support would potentially help young men more than any other demographic. The right offers no such solutions.

During the US presidential election, the Harris campaign didn’t seem to focus on progressive policies that could help young men. Instead, the campaign appealed to Harris’ gender. It is almost beyond belief, but the campaign ran an advert which implied men should vote or else women will not be attracted to them. I can assure any reader, as a young man, I do not choose my politics based on gender, nor does anyone I know. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing this article.

This kind of campaigning is just smoke and mirrors; it co-opts feminism and the left, and appeals to pop feminism, not actual feminism or actual left politics. It is no substitute for policies that champion the working class, youth, people of colour, women, and gender-marginalised groups. And campaigning like this is utterly insulting to young men like me. It promotes ridiculous arguments that seem to say we don’t care about things like healthcare or equality. No, we are mindless, sex-crazed animals. It is campaigns like this that leave the door wide open for charlatans such as Tate and Peterson and Trump, and that certainly offer neither liberation nor solidarity in collective struggle.

If the progressive movement hadn’t been co-opted and crowded out by pop feminism which looks down on young men, Trump might not have won 60% of the young male vote. I would also argue, as a young man of colour, that without this co-optation, it should have been easier to convince us to lean left and reject the right because we receive racism differently to women of colour in that we are demonised by the right wing as sex predators, criminals and threats. For example, the right wing ‘grooming gang’ moral panic, although obviously based on some real crimes, was invented to demonise Muslim men by suggesting they were disproportionately disposed to paedophilia. Right wing moral panics about crime in the UK focus on young Black boys in London, yet pay little or no attention to white boys who stab one another in rural towns.

The pop feminism, and what passes for diversity, equality, and inclusion on social media, is hostile to men of colour in my opinion. This is by design. These fake movements were instigated only in recent years and are co-optations by big corporations and media companies to give the illusion of change, to pacify us and our legitimate complaints, whilst they maintain their systematically racist power structures. Pinkwashing is a good example of this co-optation at work, wherein big corporations will put up a rainbow flag for a month during Pride but at the same time do nothing about furthering LGBT equality.

Instead of recognising young men of colour as victims of racial oppression, which we are (I have experienced racism more times than I can remember in my short life), we are ignored because these fake movements are run by the very same people who oppress us. I cannot reveal my sources for their protection, but I spoke to multiple men of South Asian descent in the UK who are journalists. They told me privately that the DEI movement was smoke and mirrors and doesn’t include us, and they expressed their anger to me.

The solutions to the problem of young men moving to the right are staring us in the face but we are too blind to see them. Treat people as equal humans, and you will attract them, just as Jeremy Corbyn did – he commanded real support with BAME Brits. Lie to them or sneer at them, and you will get a backlash, just as the Democrats did in the US presidential election. But the Democrats are not lone outliers. Across the world, liberal governments and progressive movements are losing the support of young men and, in the West, men of colour. The answer is an authentic left wing alternative that is strong enough to drive away the pop and fake movements, and that is sympathetic to young men and men of colour.

---