Skip to main contentAccessibility feedback
Get Your 2025 Catholic Answers Calendar Today...Limited Copies Available

What’s Making Young Women So Liberal?

Trent Horn

Audio only:

In this episode, Trent reveals why women under the age of 30 are more liberal and pro-abortion than they’ve ever been in history.

Transcription:

Trent:

In the past decade, women under the age of 30 have become more politically liberal than they ever have before, whereas men the same age are becoming more conservative. We saw this in record numbers of young women turning out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, but we also see this outside of the US in countries like the uk, Germany and South Korea where in the last 10 to 15 years men have become more conservative, but women have become markedly more liberal in their political beliefs and this has real consequences. In the 2024 election, abortion was the number one issue for women under the age of 30. So why are young women supporting abortion and big government and politicians who support those values at record rates? Well, people are complicated, so there’s rarely a single explanation, but in today’s episode, I want to focus on one idea behind this Substitutional patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a broad concept, but it’s basically the idea that men are especially suited to lead in their relationships with women. The most common examples would be the natural role of husbands and fathers to be the leaders of their families. Ephesians 5 23 says, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its Savior and Pope Pius XI, put it this way, in his 1930 and cyclical Casti Canubi for if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. Again, this objection of wife to husband in its degree and manner may vary according to the different conditions of persons place and time. In fact, if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family.

But the structure of the family and its fundamental law established and confirmed by God must always and everywhere be maintained intact. We are hardwired by God to desire this kind of arrangement. You can see it in women who confess that they are not attracted to liberal men that have no desire to lead them, but they’re bafflingly attracted to conservative men who do have a desire to lead in a family relationship. Women naturally want male leadership, but feminism has told them that marriage and children are traps and that only by putting themselves first can they find true freedom, which leads to heartache. As I showed in my episode on Childish Cat Ladies linked in the description below, and there are things like the Me Too movement, which laudably opposed sexual assault, but also made women think every man is one step away from being a rapist. You even have women saying that it’s safer to be alone in the woods with a bear than with a man. Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or bear the

CLIP:

Bear bear?

Trent:

Or they think that men just want to dominate women and when they hear the word patriarchy, they think of Margaret Atwood’s Goofy 1985 novel, the Handmaid’s Tale about biblical terrorists taking over the country and oppressing women in the novel and TV adaptation. The men in this story force women to wear red dresses and white bonnets don’t allow them to have their own names and rape the women in weird ceremonies so that they can give birth to children who will be raised by the infertile wives of these rapists. It’s a feminist fever dream, but if you are a conservative, then according to them you basically want the Handmaid’s tale in real life. You see this in women who wear the Handmaid’s Red dress to protest Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and even Amy Coney Barrett because she once belonged to a charismatic Christian group called People of Praise and some of their female leaders were called Handmaids.

CLIP:

If you read about people of praise, you will see that for example, the highest office a woman can hold in a people of praise community is now called woman leader. It used to be called handmaid. I’m not exaggerating. This is literally Trump going in the direction of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, I’m not making it up.

Trent:

Somebody should tell this guy that Christian women emulated the blessed Virgin Mary. The self-professed handmade of the Lord long before Atwood’s novel and other people have said the pro-life movement’s goal to end abortion is the same as the Handmaid’s Tale because both involve forcing women to stay pregnant

CLIP:

In the puritanical regime of Gilead, which takes over the USA fertile women are turned into Handmaids raped by powerful men called commanders and forced to give birth to babies who are taken away and placed with the commanders and their wives. All this sounds far too bleak to be imaginable in the us, but elements of it are already happening in some states, women being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term check.

Trent:

This is as dumb as saying Hitler was a vegetarian. So vegetarians are Hitler. Seriously, that’s the argument. Rapists in the Handmaid’s Tale are against abortion. Therefore, people who are against abortion are Handmaid’s Tale rapists. I’m against abortion because it kills babies. The fact that villains in a fake story had evil reasons to oppose a baby being killed, IE, they want to force women to stay pregnant doesn’t mean that everyone who is against killing babies is motivated by those same evil reasons. Also saying a Christian society will necessarily oppress women overlooks the fact that when societies become Christian, life gets better for women. You can see this in places like India where Christians banned satee, the practice of burning widows alive on their husband’s funeral pyre or in ancient Rome where Christians were unique because they didn’t practice female infanticide like the Romans and they took care of elderly widows instead of forcing them to remarry.

Keep in mind though that nature will not be mocked and if you reject a vital part of humanity’s nature, something worse will fill the void. For example, woke ideology filled the vacuum left by new atheists who rejected ritual religion and morality as can be seen in this clip of white people kneeling and asking black people to forgive them. Likewise, vilifying men in the late 2010s has left a void for some other powerful force to take care of women and fill that space government. According to Pew research from 2009 to 2017, about thirds of men wanted less government and one third wanted more. However, during that time period, women were pretty evenly split on the issue until 2017 when a majority of women wanted bigger government. We can see precursors to this and things like the Life of Julia, a 2012 Obama campaign infographic that highlighted how his policies would allegedly help fictional Julia.

It includes things like Julia being in government funded preschool as a three-year-old government paying for Julia’s birth control and then helping her raise a baby since no husband or man has ever mentioned in the story. And then Julia living by herself, presumably off of the government social security benefits in the life of Julia, her dad and her husband are actually her Uncle Sam. Creepy, and in 19 60, 50 9% of adults under the age of 30 were married, but today only 20% of that age group is married, so unmarried Julia is the norm. In her book, all the single Ladies, Rebecca Tracer says, unmarried women want the government to provide pay equity, paid family leave a higher minimum wage universal pre-K lowered college costs more affordable healthcare and broadly accessible reproductive rights. In other words, they want government to make up for the economic shortfall that comes with not having a husband.

And now you have people like British professor Adam Swift saying that married families have an unfair privilege over unmarried or single families, such as having free time for mom and dad to read the kids before bed. He writes, I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children. But I think they should have that thought occasionally, and I think Swift should worry more about having an intelligent thought occasionally instead of spouting this kind of dribble. So children not having a father married to their mother is unfair. I agree with that. It’s one of the reasons fornication is gravely evil. Children have a right to come into existence through the marital act, not sex pretending to be the marital act, but the liberal answer to the problem is not marriage, it’s murder.

Just remove the possibility a child will be born out of wedlock entirely by preventing him from even being born. That’s why abortion was the number one issue for women under the age of 30 in the past election, which isn’t surprising because these women are usually unmarried. 87% of abortions are obtained by unmarried women. Abortion upholds substitutional patriarchy because unlike fathers who actually love their children, government only supports people when it’s expedient for bureaucrats just as the government will push assisted suicide if it can get away with not paying for end of life care. As I detail in my episode on assisted suicide pods, government will push abortion if it can get away with not paying for beginning of life care. A 2024 study even showed that married women are the least likely to vote Democrat at 45%, whereas 72% of never married women vote Democrat.

Even unmarried women who live with a man vote Democrat 61% of the time because the men in their lives are not leaders, they’re leeches and deep down these women know that and so they use substitutional civic or governmental patriarchy as a backup. This also explains why women under the age of 30 have the highest level of trust in the federal government. To them it may not be perfect, but it’s still more reliable than couch surfing Chad. And if the government won’t do what they want, then they can’t risk Chad impregnating them, which is why some women on TikTok are going on a sex strike because they no longer have substitutional patriarchy in the form of the big government that they want.

CLIP:

Baby, if you wanted to touch my body, you should have voted for it.

Trent:

Finally, the idea that some young women treat government as a substitute for patriarchal leadership can be seen in the absurd meltdowns they have been having on social media over their preferred form of government being voted out of power. Look, I get being bummed about an election not going your way, but screaming and crying and acting hysterical is something you do if your husband or your father dies, which is what has basically happened to these women. And while some of this nonsense is driven by liberal institutions, some of the female repulsion de genuine patriarchy is caused by men who give it a bad name. These include the men of the manosphere who demean women with derogatory terms and speak about women as being only good for domestic or sexual duties, or these men just act as creepy as possible. Like Nick Fuentes, who recently posted on x, your Body My choice,

CLIP:

Adding fuel to the fire posts from Trump supporting provocateurs with large male audiences like White Nationalist Nick Fuentes saying, your body, my choice forever.

Trent:

And to be clear, none of this justifies doxing him or her harassing Fuentes at his home as one woman recently did. I know Next Defender will claim he’s just saying women shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions, a play on my body, my choice, but there are a million ways he could have made that point without sounding like a rapist. This kind of rhetoric just encourages women to double down on Handmaid’s Tale hallucinations when a wise Christian approach would follow. Colossians four, five through six, conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time, let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone. And some young men have such a hostile view towards women that I understand why women would be afraid if they heard those men parroting manosphere talking points. In 2014, Elliot Roger went on a shooting and stabbing spree killing six people in retaliation for women not being romantically interested in him.

Similar themes were behind a 2018 mass shooting at a yoga studio in Florida and a van attack in Toronto earlier that year, the driver of the van, 25-year-old Alex Manassian wrote before the attack, the Incel Rebellion has already begun. The term incel refers to men who claim they are involuntarily celibate, unable to date and marry women even though they would like to do that. Some of these men blame women for this situation and they harbor malice towards them that in some cases can become violent or at least it creepily endorses violence as can be seen in the countless online posts from incel calling Elliot Roger the Supreme gentleman, even defenders of patriarchy who rightly rebuke incel hatred and violence still make traditional family rules off-putting when they attach unnecessary burdens to them. Like saying a wife cannot leave the home without her husband’s permission. If these things are what some women think patriarchy is, then I understand why they flee from the idea as fast as possible and along with the problem of society and the manosphere perverting the idea of fatherly leadership, there is the problem of women being unable to find men who are ready to lead.

Granted, some of these women look for these men in the wrong places like hookup apps or they pass over these good men in exchange for attractive men that lack virtue, but other women genuinely seek out men who can lead, but those men are still hard to find even if you look in the right places. In some cases, the men they find are unsuitable because of the bad choices. The men themselves have made choices like consuming pornography that warps their minds and programs them to be unrelatable to women or pursuing distractions like video games to such an extent that they never make sacrifices that allow them to become competent providers. But in other cases, society has abandoned these men. They’ve called them oppressors and said they already had an unfair advantage, so why should we bother helping them? Even though women now outnumber men in college and men are more likely to drop out of the workforce and men are also more likely to die from suicide violence and drug overdoses.

Redeem zoomer who recently got married put it well in a recent expost. Young men today have very little opportunity to get a job or a wife. Yet society has the audacity to still call them the oppressors. This also explains why more young men are becoming conservative. Unlike young women, these men see government as something that is not looking out for their best interests or even working against it. Many of these men also lacked mentors in their own lives, so now they turn to their own patriarchal substitutes. People like Jordan Peterson or they’ll go into the manosphere and look up to vile elements like Andrew Tate. As I covered in a previous episode on the Red Pill, the Manosphere promotes pseudo patriarchy that equates manliness with the ability to buy stuff, manipulate women and freely fornicate with them. This is already a straw man of masculinity, so watching insecure men try to copy it is a sad straw man of a straw man. For example, here’s a video Elliot Roger made before his murder spree where he expresses confusion about why women don’t like him.

CLIP:

I everything I can to appear attractive to you, I dress nice, I’m sophisticated, I’m magnificent. I have a nice car, A BMW. Well, it’s nicer than 90% of the people in my college. I’m polite. I’m the ultimate gentleman, and yet you girls, you never give me a chance.

Trent:

Roger is experiencing what I call cargo cult masculinity. Here’s what I mean. During World War ii, the allies in the Pacific airdrop supplies on the Melanesian Islands, which were also shared with the indigenous population. After the war, the supply dropped stopped, but the islanders believed that this cargo were actually gifts from their ancestors or the gods, and if they just imitated cargo bearing soldiers by doing things like building wooden rifles, fake airstrip towers and performing signaling drills, then the precious cargo would be returned. Of course, these natives fail to understand that things like airstrips are not the cause of cargo. They are effects associated with the delivery of cargo. Likewise, men who embrace cargo cult masculinity think that if they just imitate the outward appearances of successful men, their nice clothes, expensive cars, their bravado, then they will obtain the cargo. Those men have beautiful women, but those outward signs are not the cause of women’s attraction.

They are just signs that these men have traits that generate those accessories traits like intelligence, confidence, and charisma. Finally, I should point out that unmarried men, in spite of a growing trend to become more conservative, still support big government much more than married men, possibly because government substitutes for the role that these men should be playing within the family and society. Bigger government and liberal abortion policies also allow these men to pursue an extended adolescence rather than mature into their proper masculine roles of being a husband, father, and leader in the community. As can be seen in this excellent Freedom Tunes video,

CLIP:

Start looking for a job or we’re done.

You’re being so selfish. We all need to care for one another in our time of need.

And right now I need you to provide, I’m pregnant, Eric.

Oh, wow. That’s crazy. You should get an abortion.

Trent:

I’ll close on my favorite analogy for the husband wife relationship that serves as a balance between liberal and far right caricatures of patriarchal leadership. Consider the relationship between the pilot and co-pilot of an airplane. According to the FAA pilots and their co-pilots also called first officers are not equal in authority. One regulation says the pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for and is the final authority as to the operation of that aircraft. One pilot has the final call when it comes to decisions. You can see this in the 2016 film Sully, which shows how the pilots of US Airways flight 1549 successfully landed their damaged plane in the Hudson River saving everyone on board after a bird strike disabled their engines. Sully and his co-pilot Jeff skills use a call out to reaffirm who is in command of the aircraft,

CLIP:

The aircraft.

Trent:

The senior pilot has primary authority, but the co-pilot isn’t just a yes man who only does what the pilot tells him to do. In the past, several plane crashes have occurred because the co-pilot was too scared to speak up when the pilot was about to make a fatal mistake. New training in something called Crew Resource Management helps pilots to speak up when a pilot is in error and copilots can even take the controls if necessary to prevent an accident. The copilot is also fully capable of flying the plane if the pilot is incapacitated. Likewise, in my marriage, Laura is my copilot. If something were to happen to me, I fully trust she can fly the plane. If we lose both engines, I can count on her to help me fly. When things get tough, I lead. But if she thinks I’m about to make a huge mistake and crash the plane, she’ll let me know, and I trust her wisdom in these matters.

Finally, Laura doesn’t have to worry about government protecting her reproductive rights because number one, she knows murder is wrong, and number two, she knows that if she gets pregnant, I’m not going anywhere. So she doesn’t have to look to any fatherly substitute, especially the government. But when the family is undermined and men and women view each other as exploitative enemies in some kind of game, instead of as divinely created mates, this empowers the state to usurp the role of the family and eventually finish the goal of early socialists like Karl Marx, who wanted to abolish the family entirely. That’s why we need to evangelize the world with the Christian view of the family that rejects the anti-family attitudes of either career obsessed girl bosses or slothful man children. Pope Leo xiii spoke of the family, the Society of a Man’s House, a society very small one must admit, but nonetheless, a true society and one older than any state. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself, which are quite independent of the state. For more on this subject, I recommend Scott Han’s book, the First Society, the Sacrament of Matrimony, and the Restoration of the Social Order. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

Did you like this content? Please help keep us ad-free
Enjoying this content?  Please support our mission!Donatewww.catholic.com/support-us