Why is the new generation rebelling against Feminism?

The problem: The dangerous gender political divide and why it will hurt humanity

In the West, a significant backlash against modern feminism has begun to take shape among a segment of men. What started as disagreement has hardened into open rebellion.

In countries like South Korea and the United States, this reaction has become so intense that it is now reshaping national politics. We are witnessing an unprecedented political gender gap, where large numbers of young men are shifting sharply to the right, while young women of the same generation are moving sharply to the left.

This divide is profoundly dangerous for the future of human society. A society cannot survive when its men and women see each other as political enemies.

When trust and cooperation between the sexes collapses, everything that depends on it collapses too. It leads to the breakdown of family formation, a steep fall in birth rates, and a deepening epidemic of loneliness and isolation for both men and women. It poisons the workplace, the public square, and intimate life with suspicion and resentment. It fuels political extremism and paralysis, as no common ground can be found. And ultimately, it destroys the most fundamental human bond on which all of civilisation is built, i.e., the partnership between man and woman.

If left unchecked, this polarisation will not just create unhappy individuals; it will lead to a demographically shrinking, socially fragmented, and emotionally hollowed-out society.

An Important Additional Angle for Ex-Muslim Readers:

There is another dimension to this issue that is particularly significant for the ex-Muslim community.

While this divide over feminism in the West largely takes the shape of traditional right-wing versus left-wing politics, the dynamics are entirely different and far more sensitive in the context of the Muslim world and the ex-Muslim community.

In Islamic societies, this division is not fought along right-left lines, but rather between religious narratives and secularism. Religious establishments masterfully weaponize this gender and feminist friction, convincing the younger generation that feminism and secularism pose a direct threat to their family values and religion, thereby aligning them against secular and liberal values.

This is precisely why this issue becomes far deeper and more dangerous for the ex-Muslim community compared to Westerners.

On one hand, we must defend women's rights and gender equality; on the other hand, we must avoid providing a narrative that religious forces can exploit to mobilise youth against secularism and human freedom.

While fighting against religion, we must not weaken feminism, and while defending feminism, we must not strengthen the religious narrative.

This is why a more balanced, humane, and inclusive feminist narrative is vital not only for Western societies, but equally crucial for the ex-Muslim community.

If We Have Identified the Problem, the Next Question Is: How Do We Solve It?

I say this as both an atheist and a feminist. Therefore, my argument is not against the fundamental principles of feminism, but is made from within a feminist perspective.

Before proposing a solution, we should first examine how contemporary feminism typically raises awareness about the oppression and discrimination women face.

Consider the following as a representative example of modern feminist messaging:

"When a woman says 'no,' many men experience it as an attack on their ego. From childhood, they have been conditioned to believe that a woman's attention and affection are prizes they are entitled to win. When faced with rejection, their wounded pride often turns a desire for connection into anger, character assassination, insults, or emotional manipulation. This reaction stems from a patriarchal mindset that sees women not as free and equal human beings, but as property or territory to be conquered."

There is undoubtedly an important element of truth in this analysis. Patriarchal socialization, centuries of discrimination against women, and the unequal treatment women continue to experience are all real problems that cannot be ignored.

However, this raises an important question.

Even if this analysis captures a substantial part of reality, is the current way of communicating it achieving its intended goal?

The evidence increasingly suggests that it is producing an unintended consequence. Instead of encouraging many young men to understand feminism, this style of messaging often causes them to feel personally blamed and morally condemned. Manosphere influencers, online grifters, and reactionary political movements have become highly effective at exploiting this reaction. They convince many young men that feminism is fundamentally hostile toward them, pushing them away from equality and cooperation and toward resentment, polarization, and anti-feminist politics.

The question, therefore, is not whether feminism's goals are morally justified. I have no disagreement with the goals of protecting women's rights, achieving equality, and reducing violence against women.

The real question is a strategic one.

If our objective is not merely to express justified anger, but to genuinely reduce violence against women and build a more equal society, then strategy matters just as much as moral correctness.

Can we communicate the same moral principles in a way that invites young men to become partners in this change rather than pushing many of them into a defensive reaction?

I believe the answer is yes.

That is the central argument of this article.

How Feminism Can Win Back Young Men Without Abandoning Its Principles

The suggestion is simple, i.e. directly attacking men and painting their egos as the enemy is likely not the wisest approach.

First of all, we need to recognise a very fundamental truth, i.e. nature is not 100% perfect or fair for humans. Evolution is blind, and it moves forward without caring about human comfort, and humans have had to make massive compromises and sacrifices just to survive its blind trajectory.

This same unguided nature is what gave us the gift of "might is right," where the strong exploited the weak, regardless of gender (i.e. strong men/women both exploited other weak men/women both).

This same "might is right" rule then further gave us the gift of "patriarchal system", while men were stronger.

That brings us to Lesson 1:

• Instead of blaming modern men for inventing patriarchy, we should view them as inheritors and victims of a thousands-of-years-old system. The root culprit is an imperfect, blind human nature that originally birthed these structures.

Similarly, blind nature made women physically more vulnerable, while loading men with an excessive, unbalanced level of aggression. This is that same out of balance impulse that has historically caused men to fight, suffer, and kill each other over mates.

That brings us to Lesson 2:

• Men are, in their own way, victims of this over-the-top biological wiring. Hearing a woman's "No" can genuinely challenge their baseline instincts, meaning they have to actively sacrifice and restrain those impulses.

To be crystal clear, nature does not mean men inherently want to commit sexual violence. Rape is a horrific crime and a profound moral wrong, not a natural goal of a healthy mind.

However, we cannot ignore well-established findings from behavioural science and evolutionary psychology, i.e. on average, men experience stronger sexual drives, higher mating motivation (libido), and higher testosterone levels than women. These biological realities do not dictate a person's choices, but they do mean certain impulses run stronger on average, creating a distinct biological pressure.

Even so, the pressure men feel is completely incomparable to the systemic oppression women face. Women suffer far more. 

So, let's look at the true root problem:

• Man is not the ultimate root problem; he is a byproduct of the real root problem, i.e. the unguided, blind nature of evolution.

Why the "Blind Nature" Argument Doesn't Let Men Off the Hook

Yes, we acknowledge that nature is blind. And yes, men deal with biological pressures and are, in a sense, victims of their own biology.

However, that does not excuse inaction for two crucial reasons:

1. The Gap in Suffering: The discomfort or pressure men feel is nothing compared to the severe, systemic oppression women endure. While male pressure is often short-term, women's trauma from systemic abuse can last for years or last a lifetime.
2. The Gift of Consciousness: Even though nature is blind, it equipped humans with advanced reason. We have the capacity to comprehend this vast imbalance of suffering between the sexes.

We must remember two things:

First, nature is not morality.

Second, morality always demands sacrifice.

Civilisation itself is built on regulating our natural instincts. We are expected to restrain our natural tendencies toward aggression, revenge, selfishness, and tribalism. In the same way, men must learn to respect a woman's "No," even when it conflicts with their instincts and egos. That is precisely what morality demands.

Once we become conscious of the fact that women suffer far more severely than the pressure men experience, change becomes mandatory. Just as once we became conscious of the horror of slavery, we abolished it for the sake of humanity, we must now do the same with patriarchy.

Morality advances when humans become more conscious of unnecessary suffering and use reason to reduce it.

The Dangerous Gamble of Admitting That Men Themselves Could Be Victims of Their Nature

Yes, I am fully aware that this approach has a dangerous side. Many feminists may feel extremely doubtful about it, or be outright against using it.

A feminist reader wrote:

Your nature part is wrong. We didn't live in a patriarchy for 97% of our existence as hunter-gatherers.

And my reply was:

You are right that for 97% of our existence as hunter-gatherers, we did not live under strict patriarchy. But this is not the point here. 

Human behaviour generally operates on two levels:

1. Raw Biological Instincts:

Driven by hormones, neurochemistry, and evolutionary pressures (such as average differences in testosterone, mating motivation, and sex drive). These biological realities remain largely consistent across human populations.

2. Learned Behaviours:

Social structures like patriarchy or matriarchy evolved and shifted over millennia depending on environmental changes, subsistence strategies (like moving from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies), and local conditions.

Thus, when we talk about patriarchy or matriarchy, we are talking about this learned behaviours and how it changed when humans settled after the era as hunter-gatherer.

However, when I mentioned average biological sex differences in evolutionary psychology, I was talking about the first level of innate physiological impulses, and I was not trying to excuse abuse or justify the second level (cultural power dynamics).

Acknowledging that men experience certain biological pressures on average is not "calling an abuser a victim"; it is simply recognising the raw inputs that human reason, law, and morality are meant to manage and regulate.

Another feminist reader wrote to me:

"The nature argument doesn't make sense when you see that we have had functioning societies even without patriarchy. And this nature argument doesn't stop at just that. They literally justify abuse by men too, since apparently men are not robots and they can't control themselves, which is not only harmful for women but even dehumanising and offensive to men themselves."

And this was my reply:

I completely understand your concern, and I spent a long time weighing the risks of bringing up "nature" before posting this.

However, I still chose to include it for a very specific tactical reason, i.e. to disarm the manosphere grifters at their own game.

When grifters say "men are not robots" to excuse bad behaviour, ignoring biological realities leaves a gap that they eagerly exploit. The most effective way to counter them is not to pretend that natural impulses do not exist, but to immediately anchor the conversation in morality, ethics, and accountability.

Even historical non-patriarchal societies did not function because men's natural aggressive instincts magically disappeared, , but it was regulated by very strict band-level laws, shaming, and collective punishment. An aggressive man would be ostracised or killed. So the biological pressure was there, but culture controlled it. My argument is exactly that we need modern culture, law, and education to control it again. Nature didn't make us patriarchal by itself, but nature did give us the raw material that patriarchy later weaponized.

Thus, biological pressure does not give men an excuse. On the contrary, it sets the stage to demand exactly what civilisation requires of us all, i.e. that human choice and ethics must always override the raw instincts of nature.

Another feminist reader wrote to me:

Do you understand the dangers of this impulse argument? Imagine saying 'it's not completely the man's fault he raped the child, she was too lewd and not covered up, he's just following his psychological impulses.' You see how that sounds?

And I replied her:

Yes, I see exactly how it sounds, and you are absolutely right to raise it, because this is not hypothetical, but it is practically happening in the real world. It sounds exactly like the excuse that religious clerics have used for centuries to blame victims. That analogy is powerful, and with your permission, I would like to quote it in my article as the strongest counter-argument to my own approach, because readers need to see this danger clearly.

But this is precisely where we can turn the argument around and use it as a weapon against grifters themselves.

Even the men who loudly defend male impulses in the name of biology themselves loathe paedophilia and would never accept it as a valid excuse. That is our proof that they already understand the core moral principle that an impulse, no matter how strong it feels, never justifies harm.

We have already proven as a society that education can massively shift even the deepest biological edges. Religion educated people for centuries that marrying a 9-year-old girl is moral. The modern world educated society that 18 must be the minimum age. And the modern world won. It changed the opinion of a huge majority, including millions of religious people themselves. Today, the vast majority feels instinctive disgust at child marriage, which was not the case 200 years ago.

We did not achieve that by denying that such attractions exist in some individuals. We achieved it by establishing a higher moral principle, i.e., your feeling, whatever it is, does not matter, but the suffering and rights of the child matter more, and law, morality, and reason must crush that impulse.

That is exactly the principle we need to apply to end patriarchy as well. Not "he couldn't help it." But "he can help it, he must help it, and that is the price of being a moral human being."

Equality Means Responsibility in Both Directions

At this point, an important question arises. If we are asking men to control their desires, egos, and certain natural impulses, shouldn't the same moral principle apply to women as well?

Of course it should.

The purpose of feminism is not to replace male privilege with female privilege, but It is to build a society in which gender neither gives a person extra power nor provides an excuse from responsibility.

In the traditional social order, there was an unequal bargain between men and women. Men were expected to provide for the family, perform dangerous work, fight wars, and provide physical protection. Women, in return for security and family stability, were expected to sacrifice much of their economic and personal autonomy.

Modern feminism was right to dismantle the unjust part of that arrangement. But if we genuinely want to move beyond the old system, we must dismantle both sides of the bargain. We cannot say that women are free from traditional gender obligations while men are still expected to be providers, protectors, initiators, emotionally invulnerable, and willing to take risks. Nor should we maintain the idea that women are naturally more moral or empathetic, and therefore their behaviour should be judged by a different moral standard.

Please remember this universal rule: A person is good or bad only because of their actions, not because of their sex. 

This does not mean that the experiences of men and women are identical. They are certainly not, as biology, pregnancy, sexual violence, social history, and many other factors create profoundly different experiences for the two sexes. But different experiences do not mean that one gender has preference over the other. 

That is why we also need to take men's genuine problems seriously, like disputes over child custody and parental rights, male victims of domestic violence, suicide, deaths in dangerous occupations, certain gender gaps in education, and the social pressure that often forces men to hide vulnerability and appear strong at all times.

Recognising these problems does not diminish women's problems. We do not have to deny one person's suffering in order to acknowledge another person's suffering.

This is also where we need to take the manosphere seriously enough to understand it. The manosphere is not a single movement. It contains open misogyny and hatred, but it also contains some genuine grievances. Wisdom does not mean dismissing every grievance simply because it is being expressed by a movement we distrust, but wisdom means examining each claim on its own:

Does it point to a real injustice? Is there credible evidence behind it? And is the proposed solution compatible with equality and human rights? Where the answer is yes, we should not be afraid to acknowledge it.

Because if feminism is genuinely a movement for equality, it cannot concern itself only with injustices committed against women. It must be willing to oppose any injustice that harms a person because of their sex.

Equality does not mean noticing only the inequalities that benefit our own side. Equality means being willing to challenge injustice even when doing so is inconvenient for us.

Conclusion: From Blame to Responsibility

The goal of feminism has never been to win an argument against men, but to win a better world with men.

If our current messaging, however factually correct, is pushing an entire generation of young men into the arms of those who hate feminism, then we must be brave enough to change our messaging. Not our principles, but our strategy.

This alternative approach does not absolve men. In fact, it raises the bar for them. It says: Yes, you face natural pressures, but you are also a moral human being with reason, conscience, and choice. And because women suffer so much more, morality demands that you make the sacrifice to control your ego and respect her autonomy.

That is how we disarm the grifters, win back the middle, and remind men and women that we are not enemies by nature, but partners against the flaws of nature.