Gen Z’s radical vanguard have built their worldview on unprogressive foundations
To those minded to look on the funny side, there is plenty of gold in the New Statesman’s fascinating new look at the radicalisation of young women in Britain. The influencer, whose “Marxist” definition of working class conveniently includes the bourgeoisie; the gender-neutral dance that settled on making “tall, dominant, low-voiced people” the leaders; the meeting festooned with women’s liberation literature and its counterpoint, the pole-dancing class next door; the URL, with its intriguing, orphaned subhead “Why young women don’t want to date me”.
But I was particularly struck by the very obvious contradictions (another term with which our influencer might think herself familiar) riddling the young women’s world view, to which the authors draw attention but don’t, within the confines of an observational piece, really interrogate.
The first, on display throughout, is that so many of the young women interviewed seem to define themselves by their empathy whilst demonstrating only a very patchy ability to actually empathise with people; the second is that they root this in an essentialist view of the differences between men and women which would have, well, implications for feminism. Consider the following:
Ash first noticed that men felt the impact of the war less keenly when she lived on the 2024 encampments outside the Student Union. One May evening, Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me. “Men have to take a step back to actually see the situation and empathise with the person, but they don’t. If the system is set up for you to benefit, it doesn’t really matter.”
The first thing to note here is that our empath is either unwilling or unable to empathise with what she seems to be male ways of thinking and being; in progressive terms, she can’t de-centre her own experiences. This is a common theme throughout the piece, despite the fact that most if not all of the interviewees seem inclined to view male and female modes of being as innate. (It doesn’t stop them from being quick to judgement.)
Remember that “empathising” does not mean “sympathising”; you don’t need to agree with where someone stands to put yourself in their shoes. Truly empathising with someone with whom you profoundly disagree, especially one you know personally, is usually difficult and always uncongenial, but there is no evidence in the piece of any of these young women actually doing that.
What they offer instead is copious sympathy, directed towards comfortably remote objects, most obviously Gaza but also British minorities. If white young women are substantially more likely than their non-white counterparts to think this country is racist, are they actually empathising with an experience the latter isn’t actually having, or using the imagined other as a locus for a pity-party?
This is especially pronounced in our extract above. Ash is, after all, talking about men who are already at the protest; they clearly care sufficiently about what is happening in Gaza to turn up and try to take action. As such, any supposed test of empathy they’re failing consists purely of responding to the news in an appropriate way, i.e. “like the women”. Talk about centring your own experiences.
Such observations are hardly novel. It is a cliché that you will meet few so self-centred as a self-declared empath; these Angry Young Women read as simply the Gen Z iteration of the Mrs Jellyby Left. (Absent are any friends or dependents declaring that “Gaza is a beast!”, but if Mrs Jellyby had been radicalised online she too may not have come by her neglected obligations at all.)
Write it out like that, and it reads like … a pronounced bit of old-fashioned sexism
But Ash’s section of the article in particular also highlights the rather baffling implications — also hinted at by the author — of the basically essentialist position on the sexes these young women seem to have adopted. A mixed group of people receives bad news about an event they are mobilising to try and prevent. In Ash’s telling, the men’s response is “planning the next day’s protest”; the women’s response is “feeling cold and hopeless” and “openly weeping”.
Write it out like that, and it reads like such a pronounced bit of old-fashioned sexism that you’d struggle to get away with it were the scene fictional. But whilst rendered superficially progressive by the (baffling) implication that it indicts the male students, that is the scene laid for us by our Angry Young Woman.
Lacking from the piece is any reflection from Ash about which of those responses is actually the more useful, which is perhaps again suggestive of a not especially flattering difference of view about the object of protesting. If it is ultimately an act of sympathy, the bearing of weepy witness, sideline martyrdom, then the male students are coming up short. They probably don’t see it that way, though. (Again, our empath offers no insight into their comrades’ mindset, only her feelings about them.)
If Ash’s assessment that the differing responses of the men and women in her group reflect essential gender differences is true, that would also have wider implications for things like, say, the distribution of men and women in leadership positions. Such questions don’t seem to have been put to the Angry Young Women, but it at least feels very unlikely that many of those interviewed would accept such conclusions — yet nor is it obvious, given their essentialist premises, how they would coherently reject them.
This tension is not unique to the particular strand of feminism practiced by radicalised young women, of course. The belief that male overrepresentation in certain desirable fields (the hard sciences, executive positions) must be the product of patriarchy has never been obviously compatible with the common suggestion that female overrepresentation in others (education, the average workplace) simply reflects natural aptitude. Essential difference between the sexes, be it small or great, is a sword which cuts both ways, which is why contemporary feminism tends — in general, if not in every particular — to eschew it.
So it is curious, to say the least, to see Gen Z’s radical vanguard building their worldview on such an unprogressive foundation. If ever the NS revisits these Angry Young Women, perhaps it will ask them about that.
