Taylor Swift is many things. But she did not, at least until recently, look like the battleground on which an election could be fought.
Though on reflection, maybe it makes a weird kind of sense. Like Donald Trump, whose allies are said to be threatening a remarkably silly-sounding “holy war” against the singer, Swift is an unstoppable cultural phenomenon with a deep hold over the American psyche. She epitomises what many young women want to be – powerful but joyful, financially independent, patently not in need of a man but having zero trouble getting one – while he stands for all those threatened by this subversion of the patriarchal order.
How dare Swift not suffer the supposedly inevitable fate of 34-year-old women who haven’t yet settled down and had a baby, namely panicking at the prospect of dying sad, lonely and surrounded by cats? (Though she definitely has the cats, she looked anything but sad posing with one of them for the cover of Time when it made her Person of the Year.) By now she should be bitterly regretting being so picky, not out playing packed stadiums under the adoring eye of her American footballer boyfriend.
Set aside Trump’s obvious fear of her endorsing Joe Biden, and what seems to trigger a small but furious minority is the female empowerment she personifies, which they interpret as male emasculation. What makes all this worth taking seriously, meanwhile, is how startlingly young some of these grumpy reactionaries are.
Something is happening to Gen Z that belies lazy “woke” stereotypes. As young women become dramatically more liberal, young men are getting more conservative, not only in the US but – according to a Financial Times analysis – from South Korea to Germany, Poland to China. Though the divide is relatively modest in Britain, polling this week found that one in five British men aged 16 to 29 who have heard of him think warmly of Andrew Tate, the YouTube misogynist currently facing charges in Romania of rape and human trafficking (which he denies). So much for all those well-meaning school assemblies on toxic masculinity.
Studying those graphs, meanwhile, explains something that’s puzzled me ever since Greta Gerwig’s Barbie came out, which is why a film that seemed fun but cheerfully shallow to many middle-aged women was taken deadly seriously by many of their daughters. The world of “She’s everything, he’s just Ken”, with all the suppressed male resentment that implies, is closer to their reality than ours – though I know of more than one liberal mother aghast to hear her teenage sons parroting arguments from Tate videos.
For some young men, the anti-feminist backlash seems to have been a gateway drug to harder views on issues from immigration to social justice. As the Oxford academic James Tilley’s Radio 4 series The Kids Are Alt-Right recently highlighted, young people have fuelled the rise of far-right as well as far-left parties in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Across Europe and the US, anti-immigration rhetoric is being explicitly linked with falling fertility rates and resulting demands for white women to knuckle down and have babies. On the fringes of British Conservatism, meanwhile, all this mingles with an ugly (and economically illiterate) argument that competition from immigrants is what’s really stopping the young getting on to the housing ladder or into top universities. Blame anyone but the government, in other words, for young lives being so tough; blame inclusiveness, if you feel left out in the cold. To boys who see their fathers as arguably having had life much easier, it’s a potentially powerful message.
But if the political implications are alarming, there are more intimate consequences, too. Why on earth would the Swiftie generation want to settle down with men who seem to hate them, ranting on dates about how feminism has gone too far and scoffing at ideas they hold dear? The angriest Kens may be heading for the kind of lonely lives that, if anything, might only intensify their embittered search for easy scapegoats.
It’s still unclear what exactly is driving all this, with possible causes ranging from social media polarisation to pushback against #MeToo, economic trends such as more women than men going to university (with consequences for lifetime earnings), or the so-called bachelor timebomb in South Korea and China, where young men outnumber women and so struggle to find partners. Such a complex phenomenon won’t have simple answers. But unless young people of both sexes are happy to end up living alone with their cats, it’s probably in all our interests to find them.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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