Angry young women are driving men into the arms of cougars
If you’ve been on the internet in the last decade, you’ll have heard that, as an archetypal New York Times opinion headline put it: “ The boys are not alright” .
According to countless think pieces and Netflix dramas , most young men are spending their days indulging in violence and writing in online chatrooms about how much they hate women.
In 2018, the word “incel” was a finalist for Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. In 2025, the Dutch Language Institute crowned “manosphere” as the emerging word of the year, in part, they said, because of the popular drama Adolescence about a quiet 13-year-old boy slaying a girl in his class because of something someone said on the internet.
But when you look more closely, you’ll realise that, in fact, the boys are doing swimmingly compared to the girls, who have in aggregate become “Angry Young Women” , traipsing around the country in keffiyehs, screaming about formerly trendy Left-wing issues, and how much they hate men.
In a piece for the New Statesman , pollster Scarlett Maguire revealed just how dire the numbers are. “Thirty-eight per cent of men,” she wrote, “say they feel ‘very positively’ towards women, while only 18 per cent of women say the same about men. This trend is particularly pronounced among women under 25, of whom just 35 per cent feel ‘positively’ towards men.”
Needless to say, these numbers are worryingly low, given that young men and young women are naturally predisposed to at least try to like one another. But young women can sit and seethe all they want. Because while they’re complaining about how unfair it all is and how terrible men are, by the latest accounts, their male counterparts have moved on.
The New York Times recently reported that “ older women are in demand by younger men” , adding that the dating app Feeld had reported huge growth in this preference in the past two years. According to a 50-year-old woman on Feeld, who chronicled her week on the app in an article : “After finding the courage to finally scroll, my first eyebrow raise came from the number of younger men that had liked my profile. About 30 per cent of them were under the age of 35.
“What is it they find alluring about the thought of being with a 50-year-old? Do they think I am rich, and imagine I’ll take care of them? Do they think I am experienced and can show them a few tricks? Or is it simply that they think I would be grateful for the attention, and therefore more likely to say yes to a date?”
While some of that may be true, and it’s also true that some men like to be mothered in a relationship, the sadder and likelier answer is simply that they think that she will be nice to them.
When The New York Times interviewed young men about their reasons for seeking out older women, the answers were things like:
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“Because of a toxic dating world... they all hate us all. Social media is: ‘Men are trash.’ You know who’s not saying that? The older ones.”
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Older women aren’t “ghosting me after six weeks”.
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Older women have more “openness for a relationship. A real relationship: exclusivity, something longer-lasting”.
While it’s obvious why men are fleeing to the comforting arms of their own Mrs Robinson – the only demographic left willing to give young men the benefit of the doubt before they bring out the pitchforks – this trend is likely to make matters between the sexes worse.
Young men and women in this country are remarkably divided – with Gen Z women, according to the polls , being “much more pessimistic about the country and their own lives than men”.
What women need, now more than ever, is a nice young man to sweep them off their feet and make them ask themselves: “How could I be so stupid?” Not to sound too schmaltzy, but the answer to this increasingly worrying contagion of fear and misery is true love.
But how are young women to get their Prince Charming if he’s wrapped up in the arms of someone the same age as his mother? Not to mention, it will do terrible things for the fertility rate, which, in this country, is already falling. And somebody has got to pay for those pensioners when their young boyfriends leave them for – hopefully – a coming generation of women that, one can only hope, is not so addicted to algorithmic misery that they don’t even want the basic joys of life like love, romance, marriage and children.
