Gen Z Men Can’t Afford the Patriarchy (And Women Are Done Subsidizing It)

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]This is an article that came out about a month ago, March 13th. It says, "Jenzy men will never be breadwinners. So why do so many still want traditional wives?" This paradigm that is coming that is here right now is going to speak to why the the divide between men and women will stay um will stay big. It might even grow bigger. This is going to be why the birth rate continues to plummet to hell. Women are becoming more and more financially secure than these dudes. But these dudes still want to control things like back in their grandpappy's time. They still think that women are supposed to obey them. They have an issue with feminists. They have an issue with career-minded women. And this is at a time when women are making gains, especially child-free women.

[00:00:49]Child-free women are making gains in education and their careers. And for that reason, they are closing the wage gap. So, we're going to continues to see these paradigm shifts in society. Let's look at this article. Almost a third of Gen Z men, those born between 1997 and 2012, believe a wife should obey her husband. According to a survey by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College in London released for this year's International Women's Day, across the entire sample, which included more than 23,000 people in 29 countries, the situation was admittedly less extreme. About one in five respondents agreed with this statement. In the US, the proportion was slightly above the global average at 23%. While in Australia and the UK, it dropped to 18 and 13% respectively. In some places, however, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, over half of the population surveyed held this belief.

[00:01:55]So, this is the graph that says a wife should always obey her husband. What percentage agrees? The dark purple right here strongly agrees that a woman should obey this man. Um, this darker blue here disagrees strongly. You see Sweden is all the way down here. What is that?

[00:02:14]Like 79% say uh-uh women do not need to um obey men. And you see the people at the bottom. Um, Hungary, Netherlands, Belgium, Japan. Oh, Japan's down there.

[00:02:26]All right. So, you see as we go up, we already said this. Indonesia, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Turkey, um, Turkey.

[00:02:34]So, you see where all of these countries are right here. So, you can kind of check this out yourself. Still, what's most worrying is that Jenzy men seem to cling more tightly to traditional gender roles than any previous generation. A third, for example, also believed that a husband should have a have the final say in important decisions, compared with just 17% of baby boomer men born between 1946 and 1964. And nearly a quarter think women shouldn't appear too independent or self-sufficient, double the share among men in that older cohort. This is quite paradoxical. For one, because young people are often assumed to be more, not less, likely to reject rigid social expectations, including those related to gender, but also because young men today hardly fit the traditional masculinity mold either.

[00:03:29]In fact, it's hard to imagine that most of them ever will. Even during the periods we tend to imagine as the height of traditional gender roles, male authority in the household and women's supposed obedience were never entirely automatic. A man's privilege and power in the home were instead largely conditional on his ability to provide.

[00:03:52]As historian John Tosh writes in a man's place, masculinity and the middle-class home in Victoria, England, this breadwinning was what justified the husband in demanding difference and obedience of his wife and children.

[00:04:07]Failure to provide was unmanly and undermined the claim to authority.

[00:04:11]Hence, for a wife to make this charge against her husband was to strike him at his most vulnerable point, sometimes at the cost of inciting him to violence.

[00:04:22]The term bread winner itself only really caught on in the early Victorian period, i.e. the first half of the 19th century.

[00:04:30]By that point, domestic production, making goods at home, was becoming outdated, and labor increasingly meant work done outside the home, usually for a wage or salary. And among some socioeconomic groups, it was mostly men who won the bread, while women's labor at home faded into near invis into the near invisible background. The key phrase here, though, is some. For upper class Victorians, earning bread was rarely a must, although their lives were still structured along gender lines with menaging estates, finances, public roles, etc., while women handled domestic and social duties. Among the working classes, on the other hand, the majority making up around 75 to 85%, paid work in breadwinning weren't just male domains. Analysis of 19th century census data from England and Wales by researchers Amanda Wilkinson and Edward Higs shows that many married women worked too. Nobel Prize winner Claudia Golden also uncovered a similar pattern in her research on the US labor force.

[00:05:40]Even during the supposed houseian mid 20th century housewife era, a period heavily curated by glossy magazines and advertisements promoting the idealized image of eternally cheerful homemakers.

[00:05:54]Not all women stayed home, especially those who weren't white, and not all men were soul earners. In fact, in the US in 1950, married women in the workforce outnumbered single women, 8.6 million to 5.6 million. If you don't know what house means, Hian is an adjective that describes a past period of a time that was idyllically happy, peaceful, and prosperous. Is frequently used to describe a golden age or a calm, carefree time, such as the Houseian days of youth. There you go. You learned a new word today. The bread model was neither universal nor traditional, yet it took root in our cultural imagination anyway. And although there was another version of marital masculinity taking shape in the 19th century as well, following the British Empire's intensified imperialist ambitions in the 1880s, defined by toughness, aggression, and obedience to higher ranking men, traditional masculinity came to be mostly equated with authority earned through money and status. Of course, a man's ability to perform this role depended on a number of conditions other than class. Particularly later on, women being excluded or discouraged from pursuing higher education and many professional careers which limited their access to well-paid work, yes, but also steady employment and a single income being enough to support a family. So, what happens when few, if any, of these conditions can be met, but some still hold on tight to the olden days? I don't know why I said olden days when it says old norms.

[00:07:35]The IWD survey also shows that the gap in beliefs between Gen Z men and women tends to be wider than in previous generations, particularly when it comes to gender roles and equality. More than half, 54% of Gen Z women now identify as feminists and agree that things would work better if women held more leadership positions. Both figures higher than among women in any previous age group and much higher than among Gen Z men. The overwhelming majority also rejects the idea that a wife should obey her husband or that marriage suffers if a man stays at home to raise children while his partner works. But perhaps the most surprising gap shows up in attitudes towards attractiveness of women's professional success. See bottom right chart below. While Gen Z women are slightly less likely than millennial women to say that successful women are attractive to men, Gen Z men are more are the most likely demographic across all ages and genders to say so. This is the graph they were just talking about.

[00:08:42]Women with a successful career are more attractive to men. Um, so this is where it's a break. Look at this. The men and women tend to be on the same path. But the women of Gen Z, they break with that same that women are not. Women with successful careers are not attractive to men because they must feel it. They must feel that their success isn't attracting men. But you see, Gen Z men, they are well above the women. That's a very interesting point. Here's the one that's talking about a wife should always obey her husband. You see the Gen Z men are all the way up here. The women are down here. I think that says 18% for women.

[00:09:22]The men say like I think that says 31%.

[00:09:26]But the Gen Z men are even more traditional than the baby boomers. You can see that right there. This is the reason why there is such a big divergence between the Gen Z men and women. Look at this. I define myself as a feminist. There is a huge um break between the men and women. But there is an even bigger break between the Gen Z women and the Gen Z males. And then finally, a man staying home to raise children while women works causes problems in a marriage. The men say yes.

[00:09:56]You see that the women, especially the Gen Z women, say no. I had to make a part two on this. Gen Z men will never be breadwinners because it was getting long. If you tried to stitch together the ideal partner based on what some Gen Z men say they want, you'd likely end up with a peculiar hybrid. A woman who's ambitious and professionally accomplished, enjoying the freedoms won by the women's rights movement in public life and earning a good income, yet still willing to stick to old gender rules, gender rules at home. They need a woman to go out and work, but they want a woman that's going to come in and still do all of the household labor is basically what they want.

[00:10:36]But given all the other recent studies pointing to the widening ideological, religious, and political divides between young men and women, there simply aren't enough women who fit that description, and certainly not enough to match the demand. After all, that gap shows up even among young people who share the same politics. A recent NBA a recent NBC News decision Dex poll, for instance, found that right-wing Gen Z men see marriage and parenthood as life's ultimate achievements, while their female peers are more likely to value independence and spirituality.

[00:11:13]Some young men might want to cosplay as well Victorians or characters from the 1950s ad, but they can neither easily find women willing to play along nor realistically live up to those roles themselves. And they seem to be aware of that, too. The old traditional gender bargain has collapsed both socially and economically. Younger generations in particular are up against a grim economic reality. Youth unemployment is often twice as high for everyone else.

[00:11:43]So many struggle to find stable long-term work. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated while household housing costs have shot up, making it much much harder to buy a home now than it was for previous generations. For most household, a single income is also no longer enough to cover even basic living expenses.

[00:12:04]I'd argue that it's precisely this mix of economic procarity and status anxiety stemming from failing to meet masculine expectations that fuels the political and ideological gender gap among young people. The online manosphere along with right-wing populists then exploit this sentiment by promising a return to the so-called good old days of male breadwinners and female homemakers. For many young men, this presents a seemingly straightforward, even if ultimately elucory solution to their problems. The problem is they don't have enough money, but they still want to be like, I'm in charge.

[00:12:47]In the most extreme scenario, this would entail forcing women out of the workforce in mass. In the short term, a smaller labor supply could indeed push wages up in sub sectors. But over time, removing millions of workers would shrink consumer demand, cut economic output, and make the whole economy smaller. An illustration of what economists call the lump of labor fallacy. The mistaken belief that there's only so much work to go around.

[00:13:15]What's far more likely is that shutting women out would push wages and household incomes down. and then hand even more power and wealth to those already at the top. So, yes, we managed to turn back the clock, but not exactly to better times.

[00:13:32]I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most young and youngish people, Gen Z and millennials alike, feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under us. And no matter how hard we try to find stability or certainty in this reality, we end up failing, often miserably. And when the world outside your own bubble feels out of control, it can perhaps be tempting to try to tighten your grip on what happens inside it instead. Although the bread winner model at the heart of old school masculinity, is no longer economically or socially viable for most men, especially young men, they can still look for other ways to assert authority.

[00:14:13]The fantasy of an obedient trad wife at home and a modern woman in the workforce is one shortcut. In this arrangement, young men can gain the sense of s um symbiotic dominance and validation that once mostly came with being a provider without actually being one. In practice though, it's actually women who do more of the providing since they contribute through both paid labor and through unpaid domestic um domestic care and emotional labor that keeps everything running. But being stuck in the past or caught in these fantasies will ultimately hurt all our futures. Young men won't find control or security by clinging to social and economic systems that have always relied on the exploitation and subordination of a vast underclass of women and men or by directing anger at women and their hard one independence. Instead, the way forward isn't through symbolic power plays, tradife fantasies, or a roll back of women's economic security and independence. The way forward is through rewriting the old scripts around gender and relationships, but also work. Men shouldn't have to be the breadwinners.

[00:15:27]Most men never really were, and certainly not if you look at the whole um the whole of human history rather than the last couple of centuries and most likely never will be. But women shouldn't have to be either. If initiatives such as universal basic income were taken seriously and the pressure to work to survive were lifted, relationship could relationships could be freed from financial stress and old hierarchies that still haunt so many of them and they might become something else entirely, something much better.

[00:16:00]There are many things we could control if only we collectively set our minds to it instead of turning on one another.

[00:16:07]The good news is that the latest IWD survey shows that in many countries, the diehard defenders of traditional gender roles are in the minority, even if that minority is bigger than we might hope and likely a tad bigger than it was some years ago. Unfortunately, progress tends to be wonky. We take one step forward and then we take two more steps back and then we start again and again. Still, young men and everyone else would do well to keep their eyes on the road ahead, not in the rear view mirror, and keep taking those steps forward. What I am seeing, this is the reason why so many of these men are so angry. Women are doing well these days, especially child-free women and single women.

[00:16:52]they're doing well with if they are not anchored down by men and babies because the motherhood penalty is what creates the big wage gap. And I do not believe that these dudes can handle that because they need to be better humans and be in these relationships because they're decent and want to be partners. But they won't do that. They still think that they get to dominate women simply because they have a peen. Many of them believe that they are entitled to a wife appliance or a girlfriend appliance and that they shouldn't have to do any labor. They think that women are put here to serve them um physically, emotionally, like women are supposed to be the brains of the operation and the project managers. And these Gen Z men will never get that. They'll never get that because so many women are out here doing their own thing to be financially um stable. And so there's going to have to be some give in this area where women are not going to be a servant but a partner. Be a partner. That's really it.

[00:17:55]There the the article was talking about they're taking two steps back. Well, they better start taking five to 10 steps forward so that they can actually have some progress and adapt to where things are right now. All right, y'all.

[00:18:09]What do you think of this article? Like I said, it's a month old, but I do want to hear your thoughts. Don't forget to like, comment, and share.