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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. You probably know by now about Donald Trump campaigning hard on notions of traditional masculinity, right, to spread the gender gap wide with women so skeptical of him and hope to attract even more men than he is losing women. Or as ABC News put it recently, "The Republican nominee is amping up his hypermasculine tone and support of traditional gender roles, a reflection of the surgical campaign-within-a-campaign for the votes of men."

How unsettled is it? Well, ABC quotes the well-known right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk saying, "If you are a man in this country and you don't vote for Donald Trump, you're not a man." Some of you may have heard Trump's instantly infamous ode to the golfer Arnold Palmer over the weekend when he was campaigning in Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump: Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough.

Brian Lehrer: Strong and tough. Trump in Pennsylvania on what makes a man a man? And I spared you, some of you know, the end of that clip where he actually praised Palmer as a real man for the size of his anatomy. This is what it's come to. It's no surprise to you by now, I'm sure, on his willingness to be both gross and retrograde, which is what really made the news about that clip.

But here's what might surprise you. That kind of appeal isn't just aimed at older men who resent the fact that the old-world patriarchy style is falling out of favor and fear it's falling out of power, it's also aimed at young men, Gen Z men. There's apparently a really big youth gender gap being seen in this election. An article on this in the New York Times on Friday said, "If this enormous gender gap among young voters holds up, it will be one of the most important developments of the election season, one that would perhaps even change how we understand gender and cultural dynamics in America today."

It goes on to say, "The signs of possible Trump's strength among young men are obvious online. Many of the major online young male subcultures, from gaming and gambling to cryptocurrency and weightlifting, are increasingly tinged with a kind of conservative politics." Well, that from the New York Times reporting side, Jessica Grose is here from the opinion side. She's the New York Times columnist who writes about family, religion, education and culture. She had a column recently about the apparent gender gap in the presidential election, focusing mostly on young voters. But take heart, the headline of her column is The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overstated. Jessica Gross joins us now. Thanks for some time today, Jessica. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jessica Grose: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to your column on Gen Z men, would you care to comment on the way Trump is campaigning explicitly on traditional notions of masculinity or what ABC called hypermasculinity and why you think that's part of his game?

Jessica Grose: I actually think that's giving him too much credit as a strategic thinker. I think he just says whatever comes to mind for him. I think some of his appearances on podcasts appealing to young men specifically as a demographic, I would say that is strategically trying to appeal to them. But in terms of the things he says in speeches, he says a lot of things in speeches and I personally don't feel like he's sort of hypertargeting any particular group of people.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's an ongoing conversation in its own right. Is Trump just riffing or is there a strategy behind what he's doing? But I guess you don't think Trump, as a New Yorker will be attending the New York Liberty ticker-tape parade for their championship on Thursday.

Jessica Grose: I would be very shocked to see him there. Although I, as a native New Yorker, am so happy about it.

Brian Lehrer: In your column, you start with a major storyline of this election being the Gen Z gender gap, with young women expressing much more liberal views than young men, as you put it. Can you flesh that out for us a little? What are Gen Z genders diverging on?

Jessica Grose: So I think the headline is more that Gen Z women have become much, much more liberal, and Gen Z men are not that different from millennial men. Two things are causing that. Number one, Donald Trump. Donald Trump is uniquely repellent to young women for reasons we've already been through, and younger women, he has been the head of the Republican Party for their entire political consciousness. That's one part and then obviously, the fall of Roe is incredibly galvanizing and I think a little bit under-discussed as something that is making young women extremely angry and extremely motivated to vote.

Brian Lehrer: Where does the theory that these differences connect to misogyny among Gen Z men come from? The headline of your column is The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overstated, but people can differ on issues without being misogynistic or from the other side, hate men.

Jessica Grose: Exactly. So there are influencers like Andrew Tate who have a lot of acolytes and you can see every day on any social media platform really repellent, horrible ideas about women being expressed by kind of anybody, but particularly young men and influential young men. It's easy to say, "Oh, all young men are falling under the thrall in these subcultures," as you also previously mentioned. While certainly it is a concern and people like Andrew Tate have a lot of followers who believe in the sort of truly misogynistic things that they believe in, it's not all young men.

I think if we overstate the influence of people like Andrew Tate, we're doing all young men a disservice because we won't hear their actual problems and we will assume that they have attitudes about the progress of young women that they really don't have. Most young men are supportive of equal rights for women broadly, right? The devil's always in the details and when you get to how important that is to them compared with other issues, I guess, unsurprisingly, it's just not as important to them as it is to young women.

Brian Lehrer: That's where it changes. Yeah. So let me ask you to expand on that even more, because I found it really interesting. As a part of your column, you cite a new book that says young men are, in fact, largely supportive of gender equality, including abortion rights. They just prioritize economic issues over social issues, and that prioritization hasn't really changed over time. So the only thing-- So go ahead. Go ahead. Tell me more.

Jessica Grose: Oh, no, it hasn't, and I think we really need to discuss the difference between college educated young people and non-college educated young people. I think that is part of also what is driving the split, because if you don't have a college education in this country, it is much harder to have a stable life, to raise a family. Those are real problems that not just women, but men without a college education are facing. That is drawing a lot of voters to Donald Trump because they think he will handle the economy better than the Democrats and Kamala Harris. I don't agree with that, but it is-- I understand why they feel that way.

Brian Lehrer: You refer to the numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct by Trump. Where do you think they fit into the Gen Z men or women political divide, if at all?

Jessica Grose: Well, certainly, women are not happy. I think a lot of them--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, really? That's news.

Jessica Grose: I know. I think a lot of Gen Z women, like a lot of women of all generations, find it just noxious and disgusting. The fact that, you know, my colleague Jessica Bennett wrote about all of the women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault a few weeks ago in The Times, and it's almost like we don't even register them anymore because there have been so many accusations and we are just so used to this as part of the package of Donald Trump.

I can understand why young women find that unacceptable, and I wish more young men found that unacceptable. I don't know if there's enough granular data to understand if they just don't believe these things to be true, if they just don't really care about it, if they're willing to overlook it, if it's they're holding their nose, I don't know, but certainly, there are, I think you can definitively say fewer young men for whom it is a deal breaker.

Brian Lehrer: Let me take a phone call for you. This is a mom of two sons in their 20s, so in the exact demographic that you're writing about in your column. My guest is Jessica Grose, New York Times columnist on her piece, The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overrated. By the way, yes, this is the same Jessica Grose who wrote the book a couple of years ago called Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. Here is American mother, Lydia in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi, Lydia. Thank you for calling in.

Lydia: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I agree with Jessica that I think the idea of their misogyny for this age group is overrated. But listening to my sons and their friends, they're college educated, I think there's this sense that they can understand why men vote for Trump because they feel in the wake of heightened identity politics that their voices have been discounted, that they need to stay silent because they're white males and nobody wants to hear what they have to say anymore.

I think that sense that they have hasn't made them Trump voters because in our family, we all think he's outrageously horrible, but they understand his appeal and they have expressed an understanding of that.

Brian Lehrer: Lydia, let me--

Lydia: They feel confused that they feel that way.

Brian Lehrer: Lydia, thank you so much. And I'm sure you've heard this before, Jessica, right?

Jessica Grose: Yeah, I absolutely have, and I am sympathetic to it to a degree. I think especially when you are marinating in social media where the most negative and angry voices from any point of view rise to the top--

Brian Lehrer: And that mingles with misogyny.

Jessica Grose: Exactly. I can understand feeling that way, but I think men are, especially college educated men in their 20s, are still doing pretty well. I think there's this complicated dance between what's happening interpersonally among people and what is happening politically. I think, especially if you're in liberal spaces, I'm not surprised that they feel that way. I think it is a mistake to not try to have everyone have a voice and a say and understand each other's point of view. I do think that we are in a period where we're walking back a little bit some of the excesses of, I would say, the past five years in terms of who is allowed to speak, but I think it is certainly something I've heard frequently.

Brian Lehrer: Barack Obama entered this fray recently, addressing young men on what he sees as one of the reasons they may not be ready to vote for Kamala Harris. There is a gender gap in the polls. Obama.

President Barack Obama: Just because part of it makes me think, and I'm speaking too men directly. Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think about that, Jessica? It's been criticized a lot, but when I listened to it this morning, it seems to me it may be very consistent with what you wrote in your column, that when he talks about men finding other reasons not to vote for the female candidate for president, that it might be that they prioritize economy over everybody's rights and things like that, but again, it mingles with misogyny, or at least that's Obama's accusation.

Jessica Grose: I think for some it absolutely does. I think they'll explain it to themselves in some other ways. A colleague of mine once wrote, "I'll vote for a woman, just not that woman," and that woman is just whoever is running for president.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, because whether explicit or implicit bias, they just see the same things in a woman more critically than they would see the same fault, let's say, even if it's a fault.

Jessica Grose: Right. But I mean, as political scientists have proven that the unwillingness to vote for women candidates has really fallen over the past 20 years. The barrier tends to be women running, but when women run, they win at pretty much the same rates as men, which is a huge move forward that I think we don't talk about enough.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things that I think the media does so badly during campaign season is rely on not just the polls, but a few polls as actually defining of where people are and I thought you had a good corrective on that in your column. The polling you cite doesn't actually have that much of a Gen Z gender gap at all. 53% of Gen Z women, 50% of Gen Z men plan to vote for Kamala Harris according to the Harvard youth poll, if they have it right. Do you think all this media reporting and speculating and even hand wringing about Gen Z men being radicalized to the right is exaggerated or just plain wrong?

Jessica Grose: I don't think it's exaggerated. I think it can be missing the forest for the trees. It does exist. There are a group of radicalized young men. They absolutely exist. They are not made up, but I think they are potentially overcovered. There's a lot of different beliefs that people have and different things that they value. One of the things that I love the most when I do political reporting is just understanding that almost nobody has beliefs that line up perfectly with a party platform or a caricature of what we think of any kind of voter, right?

People have a collection of policy, and individuals are usually not following policy arguments super closely. I do not blame them because it is so boring, but when you ask people about why they believe in certain issues, it's always more complicated than what I think often devolves into caricature. Again, it exists, I think, perhaps just is overcovered.

Brian Lehrer: Don't tell this audience that policy is boring.

Jessica Grose: I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: You may hear from them later in the day.

Jessica Grose: I'm doing my best, but when I sit down and I'm reading a white paper, it's not my favorite part of the day. I'll do it, but I don't love it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's finish with this, because I think this is important from your piece. Because ultimately, you're not just reporting on the facts as you see them and the misinterpretation of the facts as you think they're being reported on, you think getting it wrong matters. That just the inaccurate depiction of young men as more misogynistic than they are is corrosive to our culture. Why is that? And then we're out of time.

Jessica Grose: I think because it makes everyone more defensive. It makes young men think that young women are primed to hate them. It makes young women think that young men are primed to hate them. I think, again, actually, just meeting each other as human beings and talking to each other is always more productive than relying on polls and stereotypes and random things we see from jerks on the internet.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica Grose, New York Times columnist is author of the 2022 book called Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. Her column that we've been talking about just recently out is called The-- sorry, there it is, The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overstated. Good conversation with me and with our caller. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Jessica Grose: Thanks so much for having me again.

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