The radicalization of young women

By Eden Garcia –

Young girls didn’t used to become extremists or radicals. That was a phenomenon associated more with males, as the Netflix series “Adolescence” portrays.

But now, it’s the girls, more than the boys, who are getting radicalized. Among Gen Z in America, a 32 point divides males (who voted conservative) from females (who voted progressive).

The trend is international: “In the UK, Germany, South Korea, a majority of women have become hyper progressive in a relatively short time frame,” says Claire Lehman of Quillette.

In previous decades, males and females voted roughly with the same ideas. Differences appeared between generations, not sexes. But the gender chasm opened up in the last six years.

“Like in the UK, an increasing number of young women in Australia are shifting their votes to the Greens, the most left-wing party on the political spectrum,” Lehman says.

In Australia, Matilda McDermott is charged with vandalizing a Jewish MP’s office, spraying painting slogans such as “Zionism is fascism.” Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg urged fellow progressives to burn heritage sites and destroy anything with colonial links, including European trees, for “Anti-Australia Day.” She also doxxed 600 Jewish creatives.

Social media is the usual suspect. Young girls in particular have spiked with anxiety and depression, and sociologist Jonathan Haidt blames online pressures. In America, 41% of teenagers are shut-ins. They go out only once a week for fun (or less). They spend about seven hours a day doom-scrolling.

“Today’s culture for young people consists of a toxic blend of too much stress in the online world and too little risk-taking and fun in the real world,” Lehman says. “Girls in particular are marinating in the rhetoric of radical ideology, framing the world in terms of victimhood and oppression.”

TikTok, Instagram and other social media dish up a constant stream of “crisis, trauma and systemic oppression,” Lehman says. “The algorithms reward emotional content and reinforce polarization by creating filter bubbles that limit exposure to different perspectives.”

And girls’ friend groups tend to reinforce the radicalization. “The intensity and sensitivity to perceived inequalities in their relationships make adolescent girls and young women’s friendships more fragile than those of boys and men,” says evolutionary psychologist Richard Geary.

“The result is a heightened fear of social rejection and exclusion from the group young women will often endorse their group’s shared beliefs in order to maintain social harmony even when those beliefs might be questionable or extreme,” he adds.

What does this mean? First, girls get the sense of superior knowledge. Then there are enforcers in the group that impose the radical idea upon others, who go along with it to not rock the boat.

So when girls get taught critical theory – which applies Marxism ideas of oppression to race, gender and indigenity – their natural sensitivity and historic powerlessness turns them incendiary. They spread the outrage by social contagion.

“Universities, where women now outnumber men, are the primary incubators of this ideology,” Lehman says.

The woke graduates then take their poison with them into the corporate world, where they burden corporations and human relations departments with onerous sensitivity rules, Lehman says.

“These ideas are harmful not only to individual’s mental health but the organizations which become influenced by them,” she says. “These ideas lead to conflict and division and loss resources through pointless sensitivity trainings and vexatious complaints.”

Thus, the radical girls taking over dooms everyone.

“There are evolutionary reasons why young women might be more susceptible to certain political narratives that emphasize harm and injustice,” Lehman says. “For most of our history this sensitivity would have been adaptive. But today our protective instincts are being weaponized against us in an information ecosystem that is designed for exploitation not for well-being.”

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