Lockdown Drove Men and Women Apart

Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the psychic toll of Covid and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s rarely noted, says Conor Fitzgerald on Substack, is that these things are linked: establishment reaction to Covid alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of sex-based political polarisation. Here’s an excerpt.

A recent article in Vox (yeah, I know) highlighted the growing cultural power of what the author describes as the “anti-woke tech bro”, a mutation of the old style Libertarian and described as follows (emphasis of the final sentence is mine):

They regurgitate the gospel of tech overlords like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the creators who interview them — Joe Rogan and his many imitators. They love tough-guy sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu but are worried about vaccines, seed oils, and the mainstreaming of trans rights. Their worldview is often a paradox, full of irony and sometimes hypocrisy. …

Since the Obama administration, two things happened that changed the way these men (and they are overwhelmingly men) think, look, and behave online: the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic…

The article is wrong and silly in all the predictable ways but that last part is true and worth dwelling on. Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the unaccounted for psychic toll of Covid, and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s not always noted is the obvious conclusion that the former crisis fed the latter: that establishment reaction to Covid in the West alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of current sex-based political polarisation. The idea that the approaches adopted by all important bureaucracies and interpretative institutions during the plague years seemed based on a set of values foreign to many men, and accelerated male withdrawal from respectable cultural spaces and the creation of alternative ones explains an awful lot.

To begin it’s worth reminding ourselves how men and women felt about Covid and Covid restrictions.

Polling carried out by Gallup during 2020 highlighted that men were:

less concerned about catching Covid;

less likely to wear a mask in general, as well as less likely to wear one in or outdoors;

less likely to follow social distancing guidelines, and more likely to never follow them.

The report noted that, “looking at the last two months of data, it is clear that differences between men and women are related to partisanship, but they also transcend it… there are still clear gender differences that go beyond party. Strong gender differences are observed among Republicans… such that men tend to be less concerned about and less likely to take measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission than women within their same party.” …

In these surveys, as in media coverage generally, men’s differing attitudes and behaviours are always seen as a problem to be solved, stemming mainly from misinformation and buttressed by natural cruelty, slovenliness, lack of reflection. But it’s at least as likely that these differences result from a different set of values, and with some thought it’s possible to reverse engineer a set of values from the polling results. Those values include things like:

The importance of accepting whatever level of risk and consequences are necessary in order to live a life worthy of the name;

Since difficulty is a normal part of life, the necessity of living with even quite punishing difficulty without complaining, becoming visibly upset or offloading the cost of that difficulty on to others;

The importance of preserving owned space (psychological, physical, behavioural) from incursion by others;

A feeling that it is profoundly morally wrong and personally disreputable impose the cost one’s own fragility on everyone else – especially where you feel that fragility stems in part from something that is within your control, such as obesity or general unfitness;

The importance of never centering one’s identity around potential or real victimhood or vulnerability, even where you acknowlege those are considerations.

To take the last two as an example and to make the question of values and psychology more concrete: men make up the vast majority of deaths by suicide, and a large proportion of suicides are attibutable to men feeling that they have become a burden or hindrance to those around them. If that’s how men see the world, what did it mean for them that we created a years-long period in our lives where we demanded that they impose the burden of their health as a limiting factor on the world at large?

Even men who consented to various Covid restrictions and who were in the end happy to do so will recall the tug of these impulses as restrictions took hold. So will most women of course, but as the polling reflects the feeling was much stronger on average in men. …

It’s likely that what many men took away from the crisis was that the respectable world despises your way of seeing the world, and will not tolerate it; and you need to find or make your own spaces where you can’t be reached as an urgent priority. A simultaneous rejection by and flight from respectability and the mainstream was an existing trend before Covid, but Covid turbocharged it.

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