‘I do not like my state of mind; I’m bitter, querulous, unkind.’ So wrote Dorothy Parker in the early 1920s. In her aptly named ‘Symptom Recital’, the poet confesses her cynicism, her inability to take ‘the gentlest of jokes’, her resentment toward ‘simple’ people. She is a woman ‘disillusioned’, ‘empty-breasted’ and prone to grumbling and grousing. ‘I shudder at the thought of men’, she concludes. Then, more quietly: ‘I’m due to fall in love again.’

Today’s young women, though they may share Parker’s general discontent, are in little danger of having it interrupted by romance. ‘Meet the angry young women’ reads the headline of a recent New Statesman feature – a deep dive into the concerns of British females aged between 18 and 30. The article follows polling by Merlin Strategy, which revealed a generation of young women disillusioned with capitalism and the political climate, and largely unwilling to form close ties with those who disagree with them on the hot-button issues of the day. While they are twice as likely as their male counterparts to believe Britain ought to pay slavery reparations, they are only half as likely to want children – which is unsurprising, given their general aversion to men. A mere 35 per cent of Gen Z women under 25 were found to have a favourable view of the opposite sex.

Though the stats are bleak, they will hardly come as a shock. Most young women need only look around at our friendship groups to realise how few of us are coupled up at an age when our parents might have had a child on the way. What is surprising, however, is that one sex appears to be far more invested in the ‘gender war’ than the other. Some 72 per cent of Gen Z males reported having a positive view of the fairer sex – a curiously high number, given the supposed misogyny epidemic we’ve been up in arms about lately.

Among the ‘angry young women’ interviewed for the New Statesman, few were willing to be friends with guys, let alone date them. One brave girl had taken the plunge. She described her privately educated, straight, white, male sweetheart as a ‘fucking labrador’ – a term reminiscent of the internet archetype, the golden retriever boyfriend (GRBF). The GRBF is a devoted and inoffensive young man with a willingness to play the emotional-support animal. Much like his millennial predecessor, the ‘himbo’, he is affectionate, goofy and, most importantly, unproblematic. His lack of intellect, coupled with a desperation to please, makes him explicitly non-threatening to both your sensibilities and status. (Though given this particular angry young woman’s boyfriend reads books about how climate change ‘isn’t a big deal’ – a big no-no for angry young women – perhaps ‘fucking labrador’ remains one rung below the GRBF on the dog-boyfriend scale for now.)

‘I love it’, a male friend of mine admitted when honing in on that particular passage in the New Statesman piece. ‘It’s so honest.’ He went on to describe the relationships of several ‘fucking labradors’ he knows personally – young men so dedicated to making their partners happy that they are prepared to put up with all manner of treatment. One, he recalls, was told by his girlfriend that he could only sleep over if he beat her and her friends in a race back home from a club. They were already halfway there while he was still leaving. But with minutes to spare, her boyfriend overtook them, panting, and was allowed through the door for his efforts as opposed to having to traipse home in the dark.

Another of my friend’s mates had harder luck. He was never allowed to sleep over, due to his partner’s unwillingness to risk a poor night’s sleep. He was sent packing at all hours of the night after spending evenings with her – including on his birthday. ‘My job is to make her happy’, the dejected young man said when my friend broached the topic. My friend tells me that in the absence of being needed in any other way – economically, physically – guys will take whatever form of relationship they can get. Or, according to the Telegraph, start turning to older women in the hopes of being treated a little better.

Much of the response to the New Statesman article has carried an air of vindication. Men who have long lamented the corruption of Western women by radical feminism now supposedly have their proof: today’s women just want to see men miserable, feminised, even ‘enslaved’. ‘The Green Party would rule the UK if it was up to female voters aged 18-50’, stated one prominent X account, accompanied by an unsettling breakdown of what the House of Commons would look like in such a world. Wokeness, it seems, has turned the majority of women into rabid, drum-beating man-haters.

Or has it? While the New Statesman polled Gen Z women from a variety of class and educational backgrounds, the subsequent interview feature sought ‘radical’ influencers, pro-trans, poetry-night attendees and members of feminist societies – girls for whom politics is an active part of life. Though blue-haired misandrists excite the algorithm, I’d wager the average left-leaning, man-fearing young woman – who is, as it happens, the average young woman – paints a far more nuanced picture.

‘The idea of a boyfriend is a little scary’, a female friend told me recently:

‘Like, it’s just some random guy you then decided was safe and good enough to choose. And what if you didn’t have all the facts? What if he switches up on you suddenly? Especially with all the Reddit sites and “red pill” content and so on. The fact that all these women out there trust their man, and it turns out he’s in these chat rooms – or worse – is terrifying.’

This friend, a soft-spoken 26-year-old who grew up in a single-parent household, has never been in a relationship. She dates, though usually in quiet anticipation of being disappointed – which, to be fair to her, she often is. When I ask if she has any men she considers platonic friends, she replies: ‘No. Not anymore. Not ever… Some of the things I’ve heard men say, it’s like they don’t even view women as people.’ She adds that she knows there are good guys out there. She just doesn’t know where they are.

She isn’t the only one. It turns out that anxieties about ‘locker-room talk’, red-pill-content consumption, and the prospect of their significant others leading a ‘double life’ online were experienced by several women in my circle – none of whom is of an ‘angry’ disposition. On the contrary, these are kind, agreeable women. They aren’t spending their days waving placards at rallies, sporting pussy hats or bemoaning the plight of the modern female with their pals at FemSoc. They would be similarly uncomfortable attending a Green Party rally or taking to the streets to shout ‘globalise the intifada’. And yet, if you were to poll them on issues such as Gaza, Trump, Reform – and yes, men – they would tick many of the same boxes as the New Statesman’s ‘angry young women’ did.

As such, perhaps it is not the angry young women we should be paying attention to, but the nice young women who move in their jetstream. If I gave you a quid every time a friend of mine nervously prefaced her opinion with a self-conscious, ‘I just feel like…’, you’d be rich yesterday. Since the majority consider themselves non-political, opinions on contentious topics are less likely to arrive as a result of interrogation and debate than they are via a hunch, a vibe, an intuition. Such gut feelings usually emerge after they’ve figured out what everyone else is saying about it on Instagram.

And today having the ‘correct’ politics is essential, especially on Gaza, immigration or trans. It is the difference between being deemed acceptable and being deemed awful – and no one wants to date someone awful.

When I ask my friends why they think so few women our age hold a favourable view of men, the answer is unanimous: ‘Maybe women have the confidence to speak their minds now.’ When I point out that our mothers’ generation – hardly a cohort of timid tradwives – held men in much higher esteem, I am met with a sceptical ‘hmm’. I float the tentative idea that, before the 1990s, women did not, in fact, live in a state of quasi-servitude. The group agrees that they are unsure, but will look into it.

Indeed, some women seem to believe that a significant portion of men are chomping at the bit to regain lost control over them. This is not only true among ‘kill all men’ types, but sadly, among those who still have hesitant fantasies about a long-term relationship. A 2025 Whitestone Insight poll found that 62 per cent of women aged 18 to 24 consider men their age ‘pretty frightening’. This brings to mind a viral TikTok interview from last year, in which women were asked whether they’d rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear. Most chose the bear. ‘Bears don’t always attack you’, reasoned one respondee. Though highly likely that these women would think twice if they were truly placed in this situation, they really do believe that men are generally erratic, violent or out to hurt them as soon as the fragile social rules preventing them from doing so are removed.

Of course, the UK – like everywhere else – struggles to combat violence against women. But it is equally terrible at combatting the idea that women are in danger most of the time. Far from offering any concrete insight into the matter (or indeed, responding to the alarming increase of cases where women are being attacked, snatched, raped and assaulted at random), the Labour government has done quite the opposite. Its proposed ‘re-education programme’ to tackle misogyny in schools only reinforces the idea, to men and women alike, that male aggression towards women is a clear and present danger. That it’s not a software issue, but a case of hardware that needs ripping out before it does any real damage – a curiously biologically essentialist notion for a political set that claims to be against all that.

The media sphere is perhaps the most unwilling to help out men’s image at the moment. White men, especially working-class ones, have had a particularly bad time of it, as just about the only demographic it is still politically acceptable to vilify. Most boys in the UK report feeling as though portrayals of themselves on film and TV are at best uncharitable and at worst ‘pathetic’. Meanwhile, the likes of Adolescence, Louis Theroux’s Into the Manosphere and the endless rollout of ‘hot serial killer’ movies continue to fulfil a seemingly insatiable desire to experience the object of women’s fears from the safety of our homes.

These portrayals are rarely countered with depictions of men as protective, charitable or just. Over time, the idea that men can be any of those things looks less and less likely. ‘Do you know red-pilled men personally?’, I ask a girlfriend after watching Louis Theroux’s hit documentary. She says she doesn’t. I ask if she knows of anyone who knows any red-pilled men. She shakes her head. ‘But that’s the thing’, she adds: ‘You’d never know. It could be anyone!’ The bogeyman is nowhere and everywhere – ever present and ever terrifying.

In this era of dwindling male-female friendships, single-parent households and a distinct lack of third spaces in which to meet someone, the most unfortunate thing is that actual men seldom get the chance to dispel the violent, sex-obsessed spectre hovering in their stead. The internet is flooded with women who have never had a successful relationship giving advice to women who have never had a relationship at all. ‘I don’t like toxic men’, says TheWizardLiz, an influencer with a huge following. Her video ‘stop dating broke guys’ has millions of views. If the manosphere is hiding in plain sight, the femosphere doesn’t appear to be hiding at all.

I have a great deal of compassion for the nice young women who buy what the angry young women are selling. It is difficult not to. When my friends and I discuss what the purpose of marriage is these days, the conclusion is difficult to reach. To raise children together? To maybe be able to afford a flat one day on a combined income? Aren’t married women statistically unhappier anyway? Sixty years is a long time to be tied to one person, isn’t it? And what if they’re the wrong person after all? The conversation calls to mind a scene in Peter Chelsom’s 2004 comedy, Shall We Dance, in which Susan Sarandon’s character muses on the same question of the point of marriage. ‘Because we need a witness to our lives’, says Sarandon simply.

Except, ours is a generation of women that already has many thousands of witnesses to our lives – to our thoughts and feelings, our righthink and wrongthink, the way we looked years ago versus now. But social media is a passive partner. The thought of sharing your life with an actual man – one that might secretly be scrolling HSTikkyTokky videos in bed beside you – is terrifying. With this in mind, I have the same level of sympathy for these women as I do for the lonely incels who hung off Andrew Tate’s every word. They, too, have been taken for a ride.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.