I’ve always been one to dismiss student government elections as glorified popularity contests — I’d tell myself I’d much rather engage with the weighty substance of real politics than what I perceived was its lame, watered-down, politically inconsequential and ideologically immaterial high school counterpart. And, as my failed run for the Treasury Secretary as a sophomore scandalously revealed, these elections are clearly rigged against the real cool kids (me) of our school, so I had no interest in engaging with what was clearly fake news. But as I’m finding out in my final year here, not only do our national elections happen to be the real glorified popularity contests, but these seemingly trivial student elections that I had been dismissing for so long appear to be just as revelatory about the politics and ideology of our community — if you’re paying enough attention. In fact, if you start looking back far enough at these student election results, you’ll notice a trend —- and it’s almost as boring as it is deeply upsetting. As it turns out, ‘Iolani’s elected student leadership is one big boys’ club. Whoa! Fork found in kitchen! A real shocker, I know. But if you take a step back, you’ll find what’s truly interesting lies in the implications. 

You see, for better or for worse, our school is in many ways an unforgiving microcosm of our broader societal fractures, and these student elections reveal far more about ourselves than we’d ever care to admit. It strips away our comfortable illusions about who we really are — about who among us gets to serve and who gets to command power. But in this particular political moment — one defined by a war on diversity, equity and inclusion, and one where political identity increasingly splits along gender lines in our generation —- it is these uncomfortable revelations about ourselves that demand our utmost attention. 

Caring and Community Service at ‘Iolani: When good work is women’s work is devalued work

I look back at our club fairs with a bittersweet fondness — albeit more bitter than sweet. The merciless sun beating down on crowds of students, the harsh sunlight casting upon a row of handcrafted posters advocating for environmental protection, community volunteering and social justice. Tabling each of these tri-folds and posters is a troop of young women, faces glistening with sweat and passion in the oppressive heat, voices rising and falling as they beckon passing students to join their causes. 

Two years ago, in the cramped but cozy confines of the Community and Civic Engagement Office, I recall a similar scene unfolding every weekly lunch: a dozen young women crowded around a small table, earnestly discussing upcoming service initiatives and volunteer projects. Male representation was a rare occurrence — perhaps one or two male students attended the initial meetings of each semester, their presence growing increasingly scarce as the year progressed, until they both vanished entirely. Both have since graduated, but their absence today has left behind a pattern that speaks to something far more profound than mere scheduling conflicts. Throughout my short yet fulfilling tenure at the service committee, amidst changing faces and evolving projects, the fundamental question at those meetings remained the same. How do we make people care? 

My answer, for the longest time, was cynically simple: that we don’t — no amount of opportunities, emails, announcements, even bribes promising treats and goodies and extra credit would be enough for the majority to even glance our way. But “we just don’t care” was where my answer stopped — I never asked why we didn’t care, perhaps because it was depressing enough grappling with the fact that we simply don’t. Once I did start asking why, however, it quickly became clear that the answer was never quite the fact that we don’t care, as much as we can’t.

Indeed, in our rat-race school culture where competitive individualism spreads like rampant wildfire beneath the thin veneer of our One Team motto, caring for the collective has become a neglected virtue, if not an outright liability. When we view our relationships through this lens of individual competition, we foster a zero-sum mindset — where a win for others means a loss for ourselves. If we’re ahead in the race, why slow ourselves down for the losers? Sure, it sounds cynical, but when your school constantly reminds you through explicit policies and implicit cultural cues that it prizes AP scores, GPAs and — let’s be honest — modest female attire over intellectual curiosity and moral courage, caring beyond oneself feels increasingly foreign — even scary. 

This isn’t to suggest that there’s some inherent deficit of compassion amongst our generation — that our phones have turned us into soulless, selfish, braindead zombies as some folks might suggest. Rather, our apathy is in many ways a very human and even rational response to a system that devalues the very concept of caring itself. When every waking moment of your education is a thudding reminder that your success can only mean outperforming peers in the relentless pursuit of capital, is it any wonder that caring for the collective feels like an unaffordable, even dangerous, luxury? Is it any wonder why the misuse of AI is now as rampant as it is? At the end of the day, this behavior is just a response to a system that has come to prioritize performance and employability over education and engagement. So before waving these issues off with shallow refrains about “kids these days” or that “it’s the damn phones,” perhaps we should ask ourselves: what created the conditions that cause young people to act this way? What is their behavior a response to? 

But the devaluation of caring itself isn’t the only troubling revelation — it’s realizing who among us now shoulders the burden of caring in our community. Students who genuinely do care exist: our Community and Civic Engagement committee stands as shining proof! Yet the fact that this committee consists entirely of young women reveals just how profoundly we’ve diminished the value of service and community. Isn’t it telling how the undervalued roles and responsibilities always seem to fall upon young women’s shoulders? 

But here lies the bitter irony: as young women increasingly shoulder the exhausting labor of driving collective progress everywhere in America, the actual power to enact such change remains stubbornly locked in male hands — the very hands that sternly wag its fingers in our faces, dismissing our efforts as less valuable, less worthy of recognition and less deserving of institutional support. That male-dominated STEM industries have become our most prized sectors, both at ‘Iolani and nationwide, receiving the most institutional backing in education, with Silicon Valley now manipulating political levers in Washington, is all a product of a very deliberate system. 

So when you start noticing that the formal corridors of power at our schools and institutions remain predominantly male domains, resist that urge to dismiss it all as natural order; what you’re looking at is the product of an expensive, high maintenance machine working very intentionally. 

The Political Labor of Gen Z Women

Indeed, no matter how much perceived progress we think we’ve made at ‘Iolani, from the all-boys school we once were to the co-educational institution that we are today, just look at the people in power — our class presidents and proconsuls to our school’s Board of Governors, and you’ll see that not much has changed. We still remain, at our core, an all-exclusive, private, big boys’ club. 

It would be laughably cliché if it weren’t so bleak. We’ve tacitly accepted a reality where boys will govern while girls will serve — where young men inherit the mantle of leadership and power while young women are relegated to begging those empowered men for breadcrumbs of change. This directly translates into politics: young women today are the most progressive group in American history; meanwhile, young men appear to be more checked out — not to mention, far more conservative. 

Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, conducted a series of interviews, focus groups and extensive polling among a cohort of Gen Z political activists for her book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. Young women, regardless of age, have always consistently voted at higher rates than young men. However, Deckman predicts that in the coming years, young women will surpass young men not only in voting, but in all political activities. In surveys, Deckman asked Gen Z, “What are you passionate about? What issues are critically important to you?” What she found was that there was a roughly “20% gap between young men and young women on everything.” This aligns with other polls. Data from Tufts CIRCLE polling shows that 37% of young women are motivated to get into politics, compared to 26% of young men. Furthermore, when we look at social movements such as Black Lives Matter, the environmental movement, gun violence prevention movements and efforts to encourage their peers to vote, we see young women being much more likely to participate than their male counterparts. 

Indeed, most polls consistently demonstrate that young women care far more about political engagement and social justice than their male counterparts. According to the 2024 American Gender and Society Survey by the Survey Center on American Life, the largest gap on social issues between the genders consistently appears in Americans between the age of 18 and 29. A 55% majority of young women identify as feminist, compared to 31% minority of men. Even on economic issues, Deckman found that Gen Z women appear to care more about inflation, jobs and unemployment, than their male counterparts. 

Indeed, it seems that, at least among our generation, the labor of caring, of fighting for the underdogs, of driving progress, has been silently yet systematically relegated to women. This seems to be especially the case at our school, where, as young men cultivate power and authority, young women have taken up the torch of nurturing humanity’s collective conscience. It’s a disparity in power and labor that’s become so entrenched, we barely perceive it. 

Just look at corporate C suites, legislative chambers and political offices across the nation. Maybe their rhetoric has evolved, their performances refined for our comfort, but we can’t lose sight of what’s remained fundamentally unchanged — the same group of people continue to hold power. We’ve collectively acquiesced to a ruling class that will gladly perform the aesthetic of diversity and inclusion for us, while maintaining the fundamental structures that prevent it from actually happening. 

Just consider the fact that 70% of students punished for breaking the dress code at ‘Iolani are female students. If there were more women at the top making these decisions, would we see the same kind of gendered rules and punishments occurring? 

The Two Political Identities of Gen Z

It is these day-to-day disparities occurring everywhere around us, from student elections to service committees to dress code policies, that illuminate the widening, unprecedented gap in political ideology between young men and women today. As values like service, advocacy, justice, and collective progress have become feminized and subsequently devalued, young men face powerful incentives to distance themselves from such qualities, steering them in the opposite political direction from their female peers. 

Is it any wonder, then, that figures such as Andrew Tate have risen to prominence among young men? After all, he is the living and breathing antithesis of service, advocacy, justice and progress. In spite of his questionable decisions to wear atrociously skinny jeans and tight suits tailored for women, it is his resolute rejection of culturally perceived feminine qualities that makes him allegedly masculine. Allegedly.  

The result is a predictable bifurcation in our politics: while women grow increasingly progressive and left-leaning, embracing a collective and justice-oriented politics, young men are being drawn to an increasingly reactionary politics of belligerence, machismo and the fantasy of individual dominance. Having extensively explored the political landscape among young women, it’s time to venture into murkier territory — what exactly is happening with young men? 

While the change is certainly not as stark as progressivism among young women, a new trend of conservatism has emerged among young men, observed during the 2024 election. Pre-election polling, voter registration trends and post election exit polls all suggest a shift among first-time young male voters toward Trump and the Republican party. According to Deckman, in 2022, 49% of Gen Z men said that the United States had become “too soft and feminine” — in 2023, that number rose to 60%. And according to Pew Research and the American Perspectives Survey, an increasing number of young men, roughly 45% in 2023, believe that there is discrimination against men in American society. 

What’s up with young men?

The literature attempting to explain this rightward political drift among young men has become its own cottage industry. Some scholars attribute this to backlash and resentment against feminism and the #MeToo movement. Others point to the rising algorithmic influence of extreme “manosphere” content, where figures such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan have formed online communities built on male grievance and hypermasculinity. 

A more nuanced perspective comes from researchers like Richard Reeves, author of Boys and Men, who argues that men face genuine systemic disadvantages: higher suicide rates, greater likelihood of perpetuating mass violence, lagging educational attainment and higher depression rates. According to his framework, young men’s political radicalization stems from feeling abandoned by institutions that have prioritized the advancement of women and minorities while neglecting men. 

While I sympathize with all of these explanations, some succumb to a misrepresentation of the fundamental problem. Reeves’ emphasis on educational gaps between men and women, for instance, reveals a critical oversight once observed more closely through an intersectional lens: these gender disparities appear almost exclusively in states with chronically underfunded educational systems and low overall graduation rates. 

In well-funded states with robust educational infrastructure, gender gaps in academic achievement virtually disappear. For example, according to the Brookings Institution, in New Mexico, the worst performing state, girls are 9% more likely to graduate — meanwhile, in Vermont, that number falls to 2%. The difference in graduation rates between genders also pales in comparison to differences between other significant social determinants, such as races, income groups and even entire states — for example, the difference in graduation rates between Arizona and Virginia is as high as 20%. Most tellingly, the most pronounced struggles appear to occur among men of color — suggesting that what is being framed as a “male crisis” is more so an intersection of existing class and racial inequalities. 

Ultimately, this kind of framing exposes the fundamental flaw in treating young men’s struggles as an isolated gender issue specific to men. The forces that are harming young men — economic instability, educational underfunding, suppression of emotional vulnerability, social isolation — are all extensions of the same classist, patriarchal system that has long oppressed women and minorities for decades. 

Rather than perpetuate this zero-sum framing that pits men’s struggles in opposition to the struggles of women and minorities, we need to be able to recognize how systemic inequality harms everyone, with different groups experiencing varying manifestations of the same fundamental underlying pathology. To put it simply, the system that is harming young men is the same one that has been oppressing women and minorities for decades — and that is a message we are not quite hammering in enough.

Unfortunately, this kind of good-faith analysis happens to be a little too nuanced for the reductive, reactionary demands of mainstream media discourse. Consequently, rather than uniting young men and women in their shared struggle under our capitalist, racist, and patriarchal system, the institutional Democratic response — particularly among Washington’s consultant class — has devolved into a gross genuflection to reactionaries: let’s just drop everything and start kissing up to centrist Republicans and young men! To be fair, their political strategy has always been some version of this kind of backbone-devoid sycophancy, but it has been particularly sickening to see so many suggest a retreat on basic minority rights, such as transgender rights, at the slightest indication of conservatism amongst young men. 

The Burden of Bearing Misogyny while Nurturing Care

As a young woman caught in our generation’s ideological divide, I find myself frustrated, and deeply, deeply tired. There’s a dismally familiar asymmetry that permeates every conversation about gender and politics today. 

Media outlets, policymakers, and institutions express endless concern about the “crisis of young men” — their loneliness, their disengagement, their fractured sense of identity. We’re lectured repeatedly about their need for special attention, accommodation and understanding for their struggles — about how left behind they must feel in a society with increasing gender equality and white collar work. Yet when women and minorities express frustration, we’re immediately tone-policed, scolded for nagging these vulnerable young men who “can’t help” being products of a society that has “abandoned” them. 

But where is the equivalent concern for the young women and minorities who must navigate a world increasingly shaped by these men’s resentments? Where is the institutional hand-wringing about the young women who will spend decades living alongside — and under the authority of — a generation of men radicalized by grievances that they think of as only their own?

This isn’t to deny the genuine challenges facing young men. They are indeed victims of the same patriarchal, capitalist, racist system that constrains us all — victims of rigid expectations of masculinity, emotional suppression and an exploitative algorithm that manipulates and funnels their insecurities toward increasingly toxic “manosphere” content. 

Yet while New York Times columnists and political consultants wring their hands over young men’s emotional turmoil, their increasingly dangerous ideologies are wreaking real, measurable harm on women’s lives. 

Since 9/11, more women have been killed by their own male partners than every American killed fighting the War on Terror. By 2012, over eleven thousand women died by intimate partner violence — more than twice our military casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and every terror attack including 9/11. Yet this violence against women barely registers in our national consciousness. 

And while these domestic violence numbers continue to climb, the Equal Rights Amendment remains dead and buried in the legislative graveyard. Mass shooters are writing manifestos dripping with misogynistic rage and the blood of dead women on their hands. Roe v. Wade dismantled, hundreds of clinics shuttered, hundreds of thousands of women stripped of Title IX funding, bleeding out in parking lots because hateful ideology became policy. More Americans voted for a convicted rapist than a Black woman. Our collective hatred of women is so palpable, so comically on the nose, yet it gets dismissed in favor of the 57% majority of Gen Z men who believe that they face more discrimination as a result of promoting women’s equality. 

While we can acknowledge the societal forces shaping young men’s attitudes, we cannot ignore the tangible harms these attitudes are causing right now. The stark reality is that many young men are embracing figures who openly espouse misogyny and violence against not just women but the most downtrodden members of our society.

We are so, so violently hated. Every new fact and statistic I have to learn is a visceral reminder. Yet we are expected to soothe that hate, with gentle hands and forgiving hearts. These poor men, they’re expected of so much, they just need better role models! We’re expected to patiently listen to and validate men’s emotional struggles, all while constantly having to explain our humanity, battling legislative assaults on our bodily autonomy, voting rights and economic security — all products of their ideologies. 

But make no mistake — our patience, our understanding, even our capitulation, will never be enough to pacify this kind of hatred. We will always be too harsh, too nagging, too shrill, too demanding, too woke. Because while we work endlessly to perfect our tone, they’ll be out there perfecting their cruelty. There will always be more reasons to resist our cause, because it’s not our tone they hate, it’s us. 

The Power of Radical Anger

So yes, I am tired. Bone-deep, soul-weary, tired

I’m tired of extending endless empathy to those who would never offer the same courtesy. I’m tired of being told to understand the complex societal factors that lead young men to embrace misogyny, while fewer and fewer seem interested in understanding the weight women and minorities carry as we navigate a world that increasingly sees our rights as negotiable. 

I have spent years (of my albeit short life) believing that compassion and dialogue could bridge our widening polarization. That if we just explain patiently enough, listen empathetically enough, understand deeply enough, we can one day heal these cracks. Because that’s what they always tell us — that radical empathy is revolutionary. But what happens when that empathy will never be reciprocated? What happens when we exhaust ourselves trying to understand the pain behind their hatred while those same people vote away our rights? What happens when we’re expected to be both the targets of their hatred and their most patient educators?

The sobering truth is that the compassion integral to my politics, as a woman and as a progressive, has become a one-way street. 

I’m not saying we need to give up on empathy — our politics is desperately deficient in compassion. But we must be ruthlessly honest about who among us should be demonstrating more of it. Because for some of us, what’s deeply overdue isn’t our radical empathy, but our radical anger. 

Compassion alone has proven insufficient — unsustainable personally, and ineffective politically. Righteous anger, when channeled purposefully, is energizing and unifying. It’s politically effective. It makes people care. It’s arguably what propelled someone like Trump to power. And the thing is, we also have the right to harness that kind of force — not the nihilistic, destructive rage fueled by hatred, but the kind of clarifying anger of those who refuse to accept injustice as inevitable. This anger can coexist with empathy and compassion. It must. But it should no longer be suppressed by it. 

So if you take nothing else from this editorial, take this: get angry now. Get angry that they’re trying to negotiate our rights. Get angry that those who care are denied power. Get angry that those in power refuse to care. Get angry that violence and injustice are our status quo. 

Get angry because we know we are better than this — and anger, unlike endless patience, actually demands that we show up and prove it. 

The exhaustion, the pain, the frustration, it’s all real. But our anger, channeled wisely, might just finally be the force that doesn’t just ask for justice, but seizes it.