Conservative Woman Says The Most ‘Feminine & Embarrassing’ Thing A Guy Can Do Is Admit He’s A Democrat
When did political parties become gendered?
cottonbro studio / Pexels Election season in the United States is well underway, and the divisions between political parties are growing deeper and more entrenched every moment.
A conservative woman said that the most ‘feminine and embarrassing’ thing a guy can do is admit that he votes Democrat.
Emily Wilson shared her less-than-nuanced perspective on political theory, equating having liberal beliefs with femininity.
She posted her view on the subject for the whole world to see, explaining, “They’re saying all the college kids, boys, men, whatever they are, are trending conservative, and I’m like, yeah, duh.”
“The left is so insane at this point that, like, if you’re a dude, especially if you are a straight dude, and put yourself in that category, like, you’re like, insane,” she continued, low-key dragging people who aren’t straight and anyone with a different set of values.
“It’s like, not only is it, like, it’s embarrassing. It’s like, imagine being a man and being like, ‘Yeah, I’m a Democrat,’” Wilson said. “It’s like, literally the most, like, feminine, embarrassing thing you can do.”
While Wilson doesn’t include any statistics or evidence to back up her stance, political outlet The Hill covered the survey she’s most likely referring to, sourced from the federal organization Monitoring the Future.
The survey found that high school senior boys are almost twice as likely to identify as conservative over liberal.
Over the past three years, about one-quarter of seniors identified as conservative or very conservative, and only 13% of boys identified as liberal or very liberal.
The data shows that more young boys are going in deep on conservatism, which is a marked shift from past years. In the late 2000s, liberal boys tended to outnumber conservatives.
Photo: Armin Rimoldi / Pexels
This drastic change denotes the rapid rise of a certain form of Republicanism, harkening back to a bygone, imagined era where the narrative held that “Men were men” and women didn’t speak up to advocate for themselves.
In opposition to senior boys’ increased conservative views, senior girls have become more liberal. In 2012, 19% of 12th-grade girls identified as liberal. In 2022, that number rose to 30%.
These numbers highlight how young women are concerned for their futures, which makes sense: They’re witnesses to regressive laws that are actively limiting hard-won rights for bodily autonomy and safe, accessible healthcare.
Photo : Yan Krukau / Pexels
According to Gallup, young women from ages 18 to 29 are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades. They’re almost twice as likely as boys to say that they’re liberal, showing the widening gender gap in real-time.
Still, the largest group of senior boys, over two-fifths, declared themselves apolitical, answering “none of the above” or “I don’t know” to the question of their political ideology.
Yet, as the late Howard Zinn once said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” signifying that not choosing sides is, in effect, choosing a side, just one that doesn’t stand up for people’s basic human rights.
The narrative that women like Wilson are upholding is nothing particularly new. Conservatives have aligned liberalism with weakness for decades, which is essentially what Wilson is saying: If you’re a liberal man, you’re basically a woman.
She believes this to be embarrassing, yet one could say what’s more embarrassing is measuring someone’s political beliefs up against their masculinity in the first place. It’s embarrassing to disregard entire swaths of humanity for the sake of your own narrow belief system.
Most of all, it’s embarrassing not to care if people have access to the rights that this country proclaims to offer everyone while turning your back on communities in need of support.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture analysis, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.