TikTok trauma queens are scaring off decent men for good
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know why men are done with marriage. They’re not “afraid of commitment.” They’re not “toxic.” And they’re certainly not “intimidated by strong women.” No, men have just finally figured out what the rest of us should’ve admitted years ago: It’s a terrible deal. Not for women — oh no, we’ve gamed it beautifully. For men.
And now, they know it.
Any man who walks away from marriage isn’t afraid of commitment. He’s just smart enough not to sign up for a state-sanctioned mugging disguised as romance.
According to research from the Marriage Foundation, between 70% to 80% of divorces are initiated by women. Among college-educated women, that number jumps to 90%. Translation: The more educated she is, the faster she realizes she can exit stage left with the house, the kids, the 401(k), and a monthly check. All she has to do is say, “I’m not happy,” and a judge will handle the rest.
And what a show it is! He loses his kids, his paycheck, and often his sanity, trying to keep up with court-mandated payments while living in a sad little apartment, granted visitation rights so limited he needs a calendar app and a court order just to see his own kids. Meanwhile, she’s posting #SingleMomStrong like the children are accessories she won in the divorce. How exactly is this empowering for anyone?
Women’s emotional garbage cans
It’s not just the divorce itself — it’s what leads up to it. Modern women have traded femininity for feral instinct, egged on by a culture that rewards emotional instability and calls it “empowerment.”
Think I’m exaggerating? Just spend five minutes on TikTok. You’ll find women screaming into their phones about “healing energy” and “divine feminine rage,” sipping boxed wine in a bathtub surrounded by crystals and court summonses. These women don’t want to love a man — they want to fix their daddy issues with a living, breathing human wallet.
They call it love, but what they really mean is trauma alchemy: “If you loved me, you’d fix me.” No, sweetie. You fix you. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll attract a man who doesn’t have to call his therapist after every date.
This epidemic of emotional dysfunction isn’t accidental. Many of these women were raised in homes where masculinity was vilified, fathers were absent, and mothers were so bitter they could curdle milk with a glance.
These girls were handed generational rage and told it was feminism. They didn’t heal; they weaponized their pain and waited for the first man dumb enough to step into range. And if he’s not dumb? He’s the enemy. Because how dare he not offer himself up as a sacrifice on the altar of her unprocessed trauma.
Courts eat men alive
Family courts, of course, are the handmaids of this dysfunction. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that less than 20% of custodial parents are fathers, despite all evidence that children need both parents. But try telling that to a judge who thinks “fatherhood” is a weekend hobby and “child support” is a government-backed extortion racket.
Many states rake in billions through Title IV-D incentives, meaning the more money the state extracts from fathers, the more it receives from the federal government. It’s not justice — it’s a racket. It's a taxpayer-funded kickback scheme that rewards broken families and punishes paternal love.
RELATED: Democrats can’t mock masculinity and expect men to vote for them
Ivan Rodriguez Alba via iStock/Getty Images
Worse, child support is often calculated not on what a man actually earns but on what the court believes he should earn. That’s called “imputed income” — and it’s how you turn a plumber into a felon because he couldn’t pay child support based on the fantasy that he’s a brain surgeon. If he misses a payment, he goes to jail. If she violates a custody order, she might get a warning. Maybe.
This isn’t equality. This is Turner v. Rogers in action. The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that authorities can lock a man up for not paying child support without providing him a lawyer. Land of the free, indeed.
Here’s what’s wild: Women still don’t get it. Men aren’t angry at women — they’re done with them. Like this woman said, men are done negotiating with feral energy. They’re not trying to win an argument anymore. They’re exiting the game. Quietly. Permanently. And still, the same women who created the chaos stand around wondering, “Where did all the good men go?”
Honey, they’re over there — dodging alimony, living in peace, and thanking God they never married you.
‘Empowered’ women, depressed men
Here’s the kicker: We’re not even ashamed of it. We brag about it. We meme about it. Divorce glow-up. Trauma bonding. “Soft girl era.” Meanwhile, the men are just trying to stay out of court and off antidepressants. Feminism? Please. This is narcissism with a publicist.
Men want peace. They want loyalty, partnership, and respect. They want what their grandfathers had — a woman who had their back, not a woman who records their fights for social media clout.
But those women are rarer than ever. We’ve traded homemaking for hot-girl summer, traded character for chaos, and traded companionship for control. And then we expect men to marry us?
Newsflash: Men don’t marry liabilities.
We told them they weren’t necessary. We told them masculinity was toxic. We told them they owed us emotional labor, financial support, and full-time access to their phones. And when they refused, we called them weak. Now, they’re gone. And we still have the audacity to act confused.
Maybe it’s time we stop blaming men for not wanting us and start asking if we’re actually worth wanting. Until we clean up the emotional landmines, stop weaponizing the courts, and remember what being a woman actually means, we’re not a risk worth taking.
And any man who walks away from this mess isn’t afraid of commitment. He’s just smart enough not to sign up for a state-sanctioned mugging disguised as romance.
Men Listen To Podcasters Like Andrew Schulz Because Women Have Invaded Their Real-Life Spaces
Bezos’ $56 Million Second Wedding Is A Monument To A Culture That Celebrates Divorce
Kids Don’t Just Need A Father Figure. They Need A Dad
23 Manly Gift Ideas Guaranteed To Make Your Father’s Day Celebration Even More Masculine Than It Already Is
There’s Another Gender Gap Nobody Is Talking About – And It Just Might Doom Democrats
One piece of advice for Democrats: You should smile more
Nate Silver: Young men's mental stability helps put them out of Democrats' reach
Nate Silver, an American statistician and founder of the now-shuttered political analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, recently dug into why men, young men in particular, don't like Democrats — a trend that has Democratic operatives scrambling both for answers and Joe Rogan-sized remedies.
Silver indicated that a big part of Democrats' problem might be that those young men beyond their reach are not mentally unstable or attracted to a mentally ill style of politics.
Losing men
Democrats — whom Americans largely regard as weak and ineffective — are right to be desperate.
'Young men's attachment to the GOP has grown.'
After all, in the 2024 election, President Donald Trump captured 60% of the white male vote, 54% of the Hispanic male vote, and 21% of the black male vote toward a combined total of 55% of the male vote overall.
Men ages 18-44 majoritively voted Trump. Firming up that figure were the young white men who previously supported former President Joe Biden but jumped ship and swam rightward, voting for Trump by a 28 percentage point margin.
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted in a report last month that "since 2013, young men's attachment to the GOP has grown, but most of this growth has occurred among young white men, whose affiliation with the GOP went from 26% in 2013 to 36% today."
While young white men largely drove the trend, Deckman noted that "young Hispanic men saw a 6-percentage-point increase in Republican identification since 2021."
Meanwhile, "young women have consistently been less likely to identify as Republican and more likely to identify as Democratic than their male counterparts across racial groups," wrote Deckman. "In 2024, around one in four young white women aligned with the Democratic party (26%), compared with 18% of young white men."
RELATED: Democrats can't mock masculinity and expect men to vote for them
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As with young women's leftward drift, young men's rightward orientation does not appear to be a flash in the pan, hence the recent efforts by Democrats — who failed to heed James Carville's pre-election warnings about the fallout of "faculty lounge" attitudes and the party's dominance by "too many preachy females" — to diagnose and correct for their problem.
Mental strength is Democratic kryptonite
Citing data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, a 50,000-plus person national survey administered by YouGov, Silver noted that higher self-reported mental health correlates with conservative political views.
"I think an underrated factor in the 'how can Democrats win back young men' debate is the effects of personality, which differ especially among younger voters [and] are quite strongly correlated with voting preferences," tweeted Silver.
Whereas only 20% of liberals reported having "excellent" mental health, 51% of conservatives said the same. On the bottom end, 45% of liberals said their mental health was poor, while only 19% of conservatives reported the same.
'Conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer.'
"So the young men that Democrats have trouble with aren't necessarily the ones who have been captured by the conservative 'manosphere' or who are looking for a helping hand," wrote Silver. "Rather, it's those who report relatively high mental health and see Democrats as being too neurotic and perhaps constraining their opportunity to compete and reap the rewards of their work."
Silver suggested that compounding Democrats' problem is that they are seen as "nits," which he defined as "neurotic, risk-averse, sticklers for the rules, always up in everyone's business."
RELATED: The Democratic Party is not dying — it’s evolving
Photo by Craig Hudson for the Washington Post via Getty Images
The link between ideological persuasion and mental or emotional well-being is well-documented.
For instance, a 2023 Columbia University study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health found that conservatives are generally happier than their leftist counterparts by a significant measure.
Epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and her co-authors found that "conservatives reported lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups."
"Beginning in approximately 2010 and continuing through 2018, female liberal adolescents reported the largest changes in depressive affect, self-esteem, self-derogation, and loneliness. Male conservative adolescents reported the smallest corresponding changes," said the study.
When attempting to account for the disparity, the researchers suggested that "conservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Democrats can’t mock masculinity and expect men to vote for them
Democrats are making a full-court press to woo men back to the party, with the New York Times recently reporting that donors are considering a $20 million effort to connect with the more “privileged” sex. The plan apparently includes studying the “syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in [male] spaces.”
It’s good that the party finally realized that alienating half the electorate is an unwise political strategy. Kamala Harris lost the male vote to President Donald Trump in 2024 by 10 points. The president won 60% of the white male vote, along with 54% of the Hispanic male vote and 21% of the black male vote. Those results are unsustainable.
A party beholden to feminists who think traditional masculinity is toxic will never prioritize the needs of the average American male.
But I have news for donors that will save them from wasting time and money: A party can’t do meaningful outreach to people they resent.
That may sound like a harsh assessment of the left’s relationship to men, but it’s true. What’s also true is that the problems Democrats have with messaging to men are primarily ideological, not rhetorical. That’s because the modern Democratic Party has a broad coalition of voters who hate any expression of traditional masculinity. This includes both liberal and radical feminists, LGBTQ+ activists who want to change the definitions of “male” and “female” altogether, and self-flagellating male “allies” who feel duty-bound to rid themselves publicly of their “toxic masculinity.”
The party’s inability to reach men is a structural — not syntactical — problem.
Men in previous generations, including the white majority, had a home in the Democratic Party. At that time, Democrats campaigned on bread-and-butter issues, such as jobs and education. They still talk about those issues today, but they occupy a much different space within the left’s business model.
Issues like the economy, health care, and even race could be viewed as “expenses” Democrats are willing to pay in order to sell their preferred “products”: abortion, all things related to LGBTQ+ Pride, and climate change.
In fact, progressives are so invested in “transgender rights” that they are willing to throw women under the bus to do so. That’s why Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he would support boys who identify as girls competing against natal females in sports. Any man watching the left dump its commitment to second-wave feminism in favor of first-wave “theminism” would be a fool to think Democrats would be loyal to him.
RELATED: From feminism to ‘theminism’: Nancy Mace faces liberal fury in Congress
Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images. Tom Williams / Contributor | Getty Imageseditsharetrending_up
The modern left prioritizes “marginalized” identities more than anything, which makes straight white Christian males apex oppressors in the left’s intersectional “Hunger Games.” This warped worldview puts Democrats in a bind. They want to win back men, but at the same time, they don’t want to upset the coalition of “oppressed” groups who look to them for protection from the “orange menace” currently in the White House — especially since some of the men they’re courting voted for Trump in 2024.
No one on the left wants to be blamed for bringing in a new batch of men into the party whose land acknowledgments are some version of, “My ancestors were settlers, and I don’t apologize for the country they’ve built.”
The truth is, the party whose symbol is a donkey is only interested in male “mules” — men willing to leverage their male “privilege” on behalf of the feminists, abortionists, and Pride activists who hold all the sway on the modern left. That means a black Christian man who is solidly pro-life has no space in the modern Democratic Party, while a white male feminist wearing a shirt with the slogan “The future is female” is a useful ally.
Men can sense the resentment, and many won’t be swayed by effete influencers who binge Joe Rogan interviews and practice their “bro” lingo in the mirror. A political movement can’t spend decades telling men that their very nature is problematic and then act surprised when the people they’ve been chastising defect in large numbers.
The irony is that when these efforts fail to produce the results the party desires, progressive pundits will respond 95% of the time with the type of preachy scolding from the same bitter “cat ladies” who drove men away from the left in the first place.
This is why any attempts to win young men back to the left will ultimately fail without a major change in the party’s priorities. A party beholden to feminists who think traditional masculinity is toxic will never prioritize the needs of the average American male.
Why Men Must Abandon The False Gospel Of Nice-Guyism
Get the Conservative Review delivered right to your inbox.
We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.
Today's top stories