The most persuasive theory I’ve heard is that it’s due to consuming different social media. Young women are using Instagram and TikTok and young men are using YouTube and X.
This also makes sense since the gap began widening as these platforms hit the market.
>why are young boys leaning right and young girls leaning left?
The current right-wing project seeks to take rights away from women.
They sell this by telling young men that this will make women more desperate, which will force them to settle for those young men. The sales pitch tells them that this will get them more attractive women, and make those women their servants.
You might as well be asking in 1860:
>Why are white plantation owners voting for Breckinridge while Black slaves are rooting for Lincoln?
I think the biggest factors are differences in secondary education attainment and the proliferation of online information silos. One of the first things the algorithm susses out about a user, is their gender. It then pushes them into different hyperrealities. This should be illegal.
It should also be noted that the primary driver of the gap is young women towards the left. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the left offers tailored theoretical frameworks and policy solutions to young women explicitly on the basis of their gendered experience. Young women have an extra dimension of self-interest to vote left that doesn’t exist for young men.
I think a big input was how parents and society overall addressed the changes caused by feminism.
We started teaching girls that the world was different, that they could be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do and that they should have higher expectations in every aspect of their lives than the women who came before them. Then we did fuck all to inform boys that the world was changing and the privileges and advantages that they would have gotten in the past wouldn’t be their in the future. So you have a generation of now adults where men are prepared for the reality of 1980 and women for 2025.
We also have shifted to a world in which education in academic pursuits in the biggest determiner of success. Girls start maturing faster and thus are able to sit down and shut up and listen to the teacher. This biological tendency is enforced by societal factors where girls are supposed to be proper and boys will be boys. This gives girls an early advantage and since education has lasting rewards for early successes, boys are falling behind.
Social media is also a huge factor. They get different messages in their media and it has been easier for the far right to sell propaganda to boys than girls.
It’s both incredibly simple and surprisingly complex.
The simple answer is that right wing propaganda has successfully targeted those with insecure masculinity, and sold them the false but simple solution of male dominance.
The complex answer is that due to decades of conservative obstruction and the resulting general decay of institutions, life in America is sucking more and more over the years. With no generational wealth to protect them and a gutted education system preventing them from understanding it, the kids are the ones that feel it the most. In particular, kids/young adults are not able to access the careers and quality of life their parents did. This has driven many of them to reject the institutions that they feel have failed them. For context, don’t forget that most of those institutions (schools, governments, media) have been pushing diversity narratives for at least a decade or so. This makes it a natural jump for them to reject diversity itself. The right wing knew this, and targeted great amounts of propaganda at young men. This was incredibly successful. Without the education, experience, or context of having lived through pre-2016 eras, most of these young men don’t understand what they are being told and what they’ve adopted. They are just mad and lashing out, and propaganda gave them a target that was easy to understand from their life experience so far. The fact that they are jumping into the arms of the exact political movement that caused their plight in the first place is completely lost on them because they were never given the tools to understand or even notice.
for the first time in history, women are obtaining higher ed degrees more often than men, so women are becoming better educated than men. Better education leads to more progressive (or at least less regressive) voting.
Young men have been somewhat (or a lot) left behind in the social discourse from progressives in recent years.
Phrases like Toxic Masculinity indict men without offering a clear explanation of what the alternative should be.
The Me Too movement was quickly co-opted to “believe all women” by the right, with the implied message that all men were to be disbelieved.
I have a son and a daughter. I absolutely see Me Too as a valuable corrective on predatory behavior. I also was very aware at this time that young men were getting a message that young men were not seen positively.
In the very valuable effort to raise the prospects of girls, we have shit on the boys just a little bit, if not more. It’s a fine line to raise one without diminishing the other.
Red media space has picked up the slack. It’s also undoubtedly coded more traditionally male, in not the healthiest way. If we don’t spend time with the boys, someone else will, and this is part of that.
I was 5 when Dubya got elected and while I know he wasn’t a great president, he was still a good role model, a conventional president. He showed me leaders should be down to earth, self deprecating, and approachable. How he acted after 9/11 showed me it’s okay to have empathy as a powerful man. He tried to unite the country and made sure to differentiate Muslims and radical terrorist Muslims. Could you imagine if 9/11 happened during the Trump administration?
It’s insane to think that little boys are watching Trump right now and thats their introductions to how a world leader should act. I couldn’t imagine how differently I’d view life if I was growing up in this era. I
The right promises to create a society so miserable for women that they have no choice but to marry any man, no matter how neglectful or abusive he might be.
People on the right blame a lot of men’s problems on feminism. This tends to have the effect of not just making men more conservative, but also making them misogynist (especially those most vocally right wing). That has the effect of pushing women away from that side of the political spectrum on top of the more direct attacks on them like restricting abortion access.
I’ve listen to a few podcasts from researchers who say it almost all relates to dating.
With women liberated, they can choose any parameters that they want for dates now, so physical attraction has become dramatically more important. Women tend to lift each other up, so if you are less attractive, you still get support from your friends.
Men are far less supportive of each other. If a guy is short, he’s probably not doing well and other men will do their best to keep him down in the sexual market place.
There are tons of men in their 20s who aren’t getting regular sex, when compared to women of the same age. This in creating bitterness.
We need to get to these men when they are young to help them learn that it’s okay if no one wants to date you or have sex with you. Only like 40% of men procreate throughout history. It’s normal to be alone for men.
Conservatives want to take us back to the 1950s. The 1950s were better for white men because they basically did not have to compete with women or minorities in the work force so could secure good jobs without any real talent or hard work. The 1950s were worse for women because they basically had no independent agency or ability to follow their own dreams if their dreams were anything other than being a house wife.
One party wants incompetent drunk white men like Pete Hegseth to fail upwards again. The other doesn’t.
One thing that hasn’t been noted is that, issue by issue, young men are not getting increasingly right wing. Young women are getting regressive at a faster rate than young men are, although young men are generally more progressive on issues than their fathers are or were.
It’s much more notable in identity and party affiliation than it is by actual ideology.
Because people are fundamentally selfish and the Right does a better job of appealing to men by virtue of being “edgy” and by virtue of being anti-feminist.
Young boys have only ever experienced a strong economy, so they’re angry about social movements that seem to threaten their sense of prestige. They don’t yet know that Republicans destroying their economic future is a bigger threat to their social standing than annoying tumblr posts.
The manosphere is fairly popular among younger men and older teens. It’s pretty right-wing and reactionary, and it’s getting to them at an impressionable age and when the role of men in society is becoming less important and more diverse. Conservatives are giving them direction that’s leading them to the right, while young women and older teens girls are still being shown all the injustices being done to them at the hands of a (still) male dominated society, and the ones making a fuss about that on the internet tend to be more progressive/liberal.
There’s some crossover with some stuff, like young women are being heavily targeted by makeup advertising again which is blending with feminism to create this brand of feminism and female empowerment where makeup is seen as liberating. There’s a lot of anti-government stuff on the left that bled into the youth, especially men, and created a weirdly more left leaning libertarian subset of young men. There’s other changes and fusions, but those were two of the most prominent that I’ve noticed.
It’s super easy to lure people into a victim mentality, especially when they don’t want to read about how women only make 82% as much as men doing the same job, and only 12% of corporate managers are women. Rather than looking at broad social trends and history, it’s easier to just say to young men, “You’re being oppressed – statistics don’t lie” (while cherry picking statistics). It really has been a failure on the part of the left, I think, to have not done outreach to men’s rights groups (not the crazy incel ones) to address the feeling of failure and loneliness that a lot of men suffer and which drive them into the arms of guys like Andrew Tate.
Propaganda mostly, both ways. And I say that as a big ole lefty. Much of our younger generation is getting their news from clips on social media that come not from the news, but content creators who are not vetted by any real process and deliver their information pre-spinned. A lot of actively false information makes its rounds on both sides of the aisle that is shared because it feels true rather than it actually being based in truth. As a result they receive a hyper-distorted worldview.
Young men are drawn to areas where right wing folks made a ton of inroads in setting up their propaganda shop. Video games, gaming communities, forums that talk about young men being abandoned, etc. and they see that their further left fellow kids are constantly sharing and reposting content that is pretty left-wing. It’s easy to see how feelings of some alienation by society is really easily repackaged to indoctrinate, and a lot of the language and content used on the left at first blush can reinforce that indoctrination, because we’ve long had a messaging problem towards white young males in particular.
And so the internet fosters these divides and algorithms show content that supports these divides, and that vilifies the “other”. Content filters and algorithms have practically guaranteed that logging onto the internet becomes a self-reinforcing experience of every single belief you have, until they become ironclad.
The data shows young people are very active online. They live and operate in these spaces. It’s almost hard to escape it. The scary part is that I think a lot of those indoctrinated beliefs are so ingrained about the other side that many are incapable of articulating their primary needs and desires politically in a way that is not an attack on the “other”. Hell, I would be lying if I said I’m not guilty of it and it’s not hard as Hell to avoid.
Because teenage boys will vote for teenage boys which, let’s be honest, is basically what this administration is.
It also comes down to worldview. When you’re young and dumb and immature and full of piss and vinegar, you have a chip on your shoulder and you look for ways to embody and inflict your “masculinity.” You don’t care about nuances of society or culture or economics or science; all of that is for nerds and pussies and the people who told you you were dumb for liking pro wrestling (or whatever.) You see life as a zero-sum game of winners and losers where might (or white) makes right.
So when you see one political party basically doing exactly that you support them.
As an independent raising a daughter (10), and friends with kids, (10M), (8M), (15F), (10F), we are teaching our children to rule with their humanity, not their gender. Men and women should only be defined by gender when their anatomy comes into play: males can’t have babies, females can; male sex organs are on the outside, females are on the inside. We don’t put it in their heads that females or males are worse or above anyone regardless of gender.
I have explained feminism to my daughter. She understands what it is; she also understands what toxic humanity is….she makes decisions on how she’s treated and is expected to treat everyone kindly and fairly, but also not be a push over.
The problem we have in this country is we are being divided on two fronts: class and gender. Once we get over ourselves to be mad at and go after those who want to divide us on these two problems, America can go back to being a better country. Not a perfect country: no country is perfect, because it’s run by humans, but we can and should always try to do better.
They intentionally sought out communities of angry, disaffected, maladjusted young men who young women aren’t interested in and who don’t have much of a future ahead of them, and they built right wing echo chambers to direct the misogynistic anger they held onto society. That’s not my analysis, that’s what Steve Bannon planned.
Honestly I think it’s because the right has laid claim to this weird counterculture thing where it’s cool to be rude and crass, and they have a 5th grade idea of what masculinity and strength are. I remember when it was Pat Robertson and moralism over rock lyrics, video games, D&D, etc. It was cool to be on the left then, because it was rebellious to the “moralists.” More lately, it’s been primarily people associated with the left that tell us what not to say (“the ‘R’ word” etc). To be blunt, crude, and free is to flout these things.
Women are more free than they have been (abortion aside), and they’re embracing their freedom from the necessity of mate selection, and the left offers more freedoms in general.
the right are telling men what they want to hear, and giving them scapegoats, which is what the right are best at.
Stop attacking males in general. Anthony Mackie said he wanted to raise well adjusted respectful sons. And that was his idea of masculinity. And people attacked him like crazy .
In barest terms it seems to come down to control of women: leaning left gives women control over their own bodies, whereas leaning right gives men the control over women’s bodies.
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I seem to remember a rhyme that explains this…something about sugar, spice, and everything nice versus snakes, snails and puppy dog tails.
The most persuasive theory I’ve heard is that it’s due to consuming different social media. Young women are using Instagram and TikTok and young men are using YouTube and X.
This also makes sense since the gap began widening as these platforms hit the market.
>why are young boys leaning right and young girls leaning left?
The current right-wing project seeks to take rights away from women.
They sell this by telling young men that this will make women more desperate, which will force them to settle for those young men. The sales pitch tells them that this will get them more attractive women, and make those women their servants.
You might as well be asking in 1860:
>Why are white plantation owners voting for Breckinridge while Black slaves are rooting for Lincoln?
The right’s more likely to pander to guys by telling them feminism and women having expectations in a relationship has ruined society
I think the biggest factors are differences in secondary education attainment and the proliferation of online information silos. One of the first things the algorithm susses out about a user, is their gender. It then pushes them into different hyperrealities. This should be illegal.
It should also be noted that the primary driver of the gap is young women towards the left. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the left offers tailored theoretical frameworks and policy solutions to young women explicitly on the basis of their gendered experience. Young women have an extra dimension of self-interest to vote left that doesn’t exist for young men.
Is it true? Is there a study that someone could link.
Boys have fallen behind girls in educational achievement. We’ve seen this coming for at least a decade.
https://www.vox.com/2015/3/8/8170333/gender-gap-boys-pisa
I think a big input was how parents and society overall addressed the changes caused by feminism.
We started teaching girls that the world was different, that they could be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do and that they should have higher expectations in every aspect of their lives than the women who came before them. Then we did fuck all to inform boys that the world was changing and the privileges and advantages that they would have gotten in the past wouldn’t be their in the future. So you have a generation of now adults where men are prepared for the reality of 1980 and women for 2025.
We also have shifted to a world in which education in academic pursuits in the biggest determiner of success. Girls start maturing faster and thus are able to sit down and shut up and listen to the teacher. This biological tendency is enforced by societal factors where girls are supposed to be proper and boys will be boys. This gives girls an early advantage and since education has lasting rewards for early successes, boys are falling behind.
Social media is also a huge factor. They get different messages in their media and it has been easier for the far right to sell propaganda to boys than girls.
Empathy and feelings. Boys take longer to mature and come to understand later that being a selfish a-hole isn’t the best way to get through life
Boys went to Jupiter to get more stupider
Because they are voting for the party they feel emotionally protects them the most. Full stop.
Pathetically attempting to preserve the patriarchy
It’s both incredibly simple and surprisingly complex.
The simple answer is that right wing propaganda has successfully targeted those with insecure masculinity, and sold them the false but simple solution of male dominance.
The complex answer is that due to decades of conservative obstruction and the resulting general decay of institutions, life in America is sucking more and more over the years. With no generational wealth to protect them and a gutted education system preventing them from understanding it, the kids are the ones that feel it the most. In particular, kids/young adults are not able to access the careers and quality of life their parents did. This has driven many of them to reject the institutions that they feel have failed them. For context, don’t forget that most of those institutions (schools, governments, media) have been pushing diversity narratives for at least a decade or so. This makes it a natural jump for them to reject diversity itself. The right wing knew this, and targeted great amounts of propaganda at young men. This was incredibly successful. Without the education, experience, or context of having lived through pre-2016 eras, most of these young men don’t understand what they are being told and what they’ve adopted. They are just mad and lashing out, and propaganda gave them a target that was easy to understand from their life experience so far. The fact that they are jumping into the arms of the exact political movement that caused their plight in the first place is completely lost on them because they were never given the tools to understand or even notice.
It’s a few things-
for the first time in history, women are obtaining higher ed degrees more often than men, so women are becoming better educated than men. Better education leads to more progressive (or at least less regressive) voting.
Young men have been somewhat (or a lot) left behind in the social discourse from progressives in recent years.
Phrases like Toxic Masculinity indict men without offering a clear explanation of what the alternative should be.
The Me Too movement was quickly co-opted to “believe all women” by the right, with the implied message that all men were to be disbelieved.
I have a son and a daughter. I absolutely see Me Too as a valuable corrective on predatory behavior. I also was very aware at this time that young men were getting a message that young men were not seen positively.
In the very valuable effort to raise the prospects of girls, we have shit on the boys just a little bit, if not more. It’s a fine line to raise one without diminishing the other.
Red media space has picked up the slack. It’s also undoubtedly coded more traditionally male, in not the healthiest way. If we don’t spend time with the boys, someone else will, and this is part of that.
Why are [some] young [white] boys leaning right?
Looks at who’s president, is it that shocking?
I was 5 when Dubya got elected and while I know he wasn’t a great president, he was still a good role model, a conventional president. He showed me leaders should be down to earth, self deprecating, and approachable. How he acted after 9/11 showed me it’s okay to have empathy as a powerful man. He tried to unite the country and made sure to differentiate Muslims and radical terrorist Muslims. Could you imagine if 9/11 happened during the Trump administration?
It’s insane to think that little boys are watching Trump right now and thats their introductions to how a world leader should act. I couldn’t imagine how differently I’d view life if I was growing up in this era. I
The right promises to create a society so miserable for women that they have no choice but to marry any man, no matter how neglectful or abusive he might be.
People on the right blame a lot of men’s problems on feminism. This tends to have the effect of not just making men more conservative, but also making them misogynist (especially those most vocally right wing). That has the effect of pushing women away from that side of the political spectrum on top of the more direct attacks on them like restricting abortion access.
Just wanted to add – this trend is happening worldwide and in some countries, incredibly divisive.
I.e. South Korea. Their young men are overwhelmingly right while their middle aged men lean left. It’s crazy.
I’ve listen to a few podcasts from researchers who say it almost all relates to dating.
With women liberated, they can choose any parameters that they want for dates now, so physical attraction has become dramatically more important. Women tend to lift each other up, so if you are less attractive, you still get support from your friends.
Men are far less supportive of each other. If a guy is short, he’s probably not doing well and other men will do their best to keep him down in the sexual market place.
There are tons of men in their 20s who aren’t getting regular sex, when compared to women of the same age. This in creating bitterness.
We need to get to these men when they are young to help them learn that it’s okay if no one wants to date you or have sex with you. Only like 40% of men procreate throughout history. It’s normal to be alone for men.
Conservatives want to take us back to the 1950s. The 1950s were better for white men because they basically did not have to compete with women or minorities in the work force so could secure good jobs without any real talent or hard work. The 1950s were worse for women because they basically had no independent agency or ability to follow their own dreams if their dreams were anything other than being a house wife.
One party wants incompetent drunk white men like Pete Hegseth to fail upwards again. The other doesn’t.
One thing that hasn’t been noted is that, issue by issue, young men are not getting increasingly right wing. Young women are getting regressive at a faster rate than young men are, although young men are generally more progressive on issues than their fathers are or were.
It’s much more notable in identity and party affiliation than it is by actual ideology.
Because people are fundamentally selfish and the Right does a better job of appealing to men by virtue of being “edgy” and by virtue of being anti-feminist.
Girls are better critical thinkers.
Young boys have only ever experienced a strong economy, so they’re angry about social movements that seem to threaten their sense of prestige. They don’t yet know that Republicans destroying their economic future is a bigger threat to their social standing than annoying tumblr posts.
The manosphere is fairly popular among younger men and older teens. It’s pretty right-wing and reactionary, and it’s getting to them at an impressionable age and when the role of men in society is becoming less important and more diverse. Conservatives are giving them direction that’s leading them to the right, while young women and older teens girls are still being shown all the injustices being done to them at the hands of a (still) male dominated society, and the ones making a fuss about that on the internet tend to be more progressive/liberal.
There’s some crossover with some stuff, like young women are being heavily targeted by makeup advertising again which is blending with feminism to create this brand of feminism and female empowerment where makeup is seen as liberating. There’s a lot of anti-government stuff on the left that bled into the youth, especially men, and created a weirdly more left leaning libertarian subset of young men. There’s other changes and fusions, but those were two of the most prominent that I’ve noticed.
Young men have been fed a message that they are the victims of oppression, and that women have unfairly stolen opportunities from them. Honestly, it’s not hard to see why they might think that – women outnumber men in most 4-year institutions at a higher ratio than the gender ratio (58% of students at universities are women), and women are hired at a higher rate than men despite more men being active in the work force/seeking jobs than women.
It’s super easy to lure people into a victim mentality, especially when they don’t want to read about how women only make 82% as much as men doing the same job, and only 12% of corporate managers are women. Rather than looking at broad social trends and history, it’s easier to just say to young men, “You’re being oppressed – statistics don’t lie” (while cherry picking statistics). It really has been a failure on the part of the left, I think, to have not done outreach to men’s rights groups (not the crazy incel ones) to address the feeling of failure and loneliness that a lot of men suffer and which drive them into the arms of guys like Andrew Tate.
Propaganda mostly, both ways. And I say that as a big ole lefty. Much of our younger generation is getting their news from clips on social media that come not from the news, but content creators who are not vetted by any real process and deliver their information pre-spinned. A lot of actively false information makes its rounds on both sides of the aisle that is shared because it feels true rather than it actually being based in truth. As a result they receive a hyper-distorted worldview.
Young men are drawn to areas where right wing folks made a ton of inroads in setting up their propaganda shop. Video games, gaming communities, forums that talk about young men being abandoned, etc. and they see that their further left fellow kids are constantly sharing and reposting content that is pretty left-wing. It’s easy to see how feelings of some alienation by society is really easily repackaged to indoctrinate, and a lot of the language and content used on the left at first blush can reinforce that indoctrination, because we’ve long had a messaging problem towards white young males in particular.
And so the internet fosters these divides and algorithms show content that supports these divides, and that vilifies the “other”. Content filters and algorithms have practically guaranteed that logging onto the internet becomes a self-reinforcing experience of every single belief you have, until they become ironclad.
The data shows young people are very active online. They live and operate in these spaces. It’s almost hard to escape it. The scary part is that I think a lot of those indoctrinated beliefs are so ingrained about the other side that many are incapable of articulating their primary needs and desires politically in a way that is not an attack on the “other”. Hell, I would be lying if I said I’m not guilty of it and it’s not hard as Hell to avoid.
Right wing think tanks decided boys were an easier target. And they were right.
Andrew Tate vs Taylor Swift
Internet, media, and victim mentality.
Because girls mature faster than boys?
Because teenage boys will vote for teenage boys which, let’s be honest, is basically what this administration is.
It also comes down to worldview. When you’re young and dumb and immature and full of piss and vinegar, you have a chip on your shoulder and you look for ways to embody and inflict your “masculinity.” You don’t care about nuances of society or culture or economics or science; all of that is for nerds and pussies and the people who told you you were dumb for liking pro wrestling (or whatever.) You see life as a zero-sum game of winners and losers where might (or white) makes right.
So when you see one political party basically doing exactly that you support them.
Politics ebbs and flows. If anything, we’re in a right leaning part of the cycle and they pushed women left instead via abortion.
Each generation is, generally, a reaction to the previous one.
Gen Z leaning right after millennials were left is not, on the whole, surprising at all.
As an independent raising a daughter (10), and friends with kids, (10M), (8M), (15F), (10F), we are teaching our children to rule with their humanity, not their gender. Men and women should only be defined by gender when their anatomy comes into play: males can’t have babies, females can; male sex organs are on the outside, females are on the inside. We don’t put it in their heads that females or males are worse or above anyone regardless of gender.
I have explained feminism to my daughter. She understands what it is; she also understands what toxic humanity is….she makes decisions on how she’s treated and is expected to treat everyone kindly and fairly, but also not be a push over.
The problem we have in this country is we are being divided on two fronts: class and gender. Once we get over ourselves to be mad at and go after those who want to divide us on these two problems, America can go back to being a better country. Not a perfect country: no country is perfect, because it’s run by humans, but we can and should always try to do better.
[removed]
The right has been pouring millions into propaganda in the gaming and streaming communities on social media.
[GamerGate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign%29) was itself a practice run for the propaganda campaigns run against the population at large in the 2016 election.
They intentionally sought out communities of angry, disaffected, maladjusted young men who young women aren’t interested in and who don’t have much of a future ahead of them, and they built right wing echo chambers to direct the misogynistic anger they held onto society. That’s not my analysis, that’s what Steve Bannon planned.
It’s a strategy as old as society.
[deleted]
Gamergate and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Girls don’t need boys anymore and boys want pussy.
Honestly I think it’s because the right has laid claim to this weird counterculture thing where it’s cool to be rude and crass, and they have a 5th grade idea of what masculinity and strength are. I remember when it was Pat Robertson and moralism over rock lyrics, video games, D&D, etc. It was cool to be on the left then, because it was rebellious to the “moralists.” More lately, it’s been primarily people associated with the left that tell us what not to say (“the ‘R’ word” etc). To be blunt, crude, and free is to flout these things.
Now, the tables are turning back the other way.
Women are more free than they have been (abortion aside), and they’re embracing their freedom from the necessity of mate selection, and the left offers more freedoms in general.
the right are telling men what they want to hear, and giving them scapegoats, which is what the right are best at.
Likely because democrats care more about issues relating to womens rights.
Stop attacking males in general. Anthony Mackie said he wanted to raise well adjusted respectful sons. And that was his idea of masculinity. And people attacked him like crazy .
A large part is definitely social media algorithms
In barest terms it seems to come down to control of women: leaning left gives women control over their own bodies, whereas leaning right gives men the control over women’s bodies.