A global study shows Gen Z men are twice as likely than their grandfathers to believe a wife should obey. The question isn’t what changed. It’s who got to them.
31 percent
That’s the share of Gen Z men—boys who grew up with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Beyoncé, and #MeToo—who say a wife should always obey her husband. I’ve spent decades sitting across from those boys, as a college admissions consultant, watching them audition for adulthood in 650 words, and I still had to read that number twice.
The Numbers That Shouldn’t Add Up
The research from King’s College London/Ipsos, a global study of 23,000 people in 29 countries, was released for International Women’s Day. In that data, 31 percent of Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband; only 13 percent of baby boomer men say the same. So the men who came of age before Title IX, before Roe, before no‑fault divorce, the ones we picture as permanently stuck in Mad Men’s 1960, have much more of an equality mindset than the generation we just finished raising.
It gets stranger.
Here’s what the women have to say. Only 6 percent of boomer women agree a wife should obey. Among Gen Z women, it’s 18 percent. The daughters and granddaughters of the women who fought for credit cards and contraception are three times more likely to sign up for obedience.
The study also found that when you separate people’s private beliefs from what they think “most people” believe, a gap opens up. Only 21 percent personally agree men should have the final word at home, but 31 percent think that’s the social norm; only 17 percent personally believe women should take on most childcare, but 35 percent think that’s what their country expects. A lot of people are performing traditional gender roles they don’t even believe in because the culture is loud enough to convince them “that’s just how it is.”
The Boys I Actually Knew
My last cohort of students were almost all Gen Z or late millennials raised in the trophy years: everyone special with each success laminated and stuck on the fridge. Their mothers, often my peers and younger, hired tutors, test prep, essay editors, consultants like me, and then cleared every obstacle out of the way.
Then COVID hit. Overnight, the entire scaffolding for boyhood disappeared. No Friday night lights, no prom, no scouts, no band, no dumb lunchroom antics. The boys who relied on practice, games, and AP calendars suddenly had nothing to push against. Meanwhile, the girls, on the whole, coped better outside organized life.
We haven’t been honest enough about that difference. A lot of adolescent boys simply aren’t as resilient without formal structures as girls are. When those vanished, many of them retreated into themselves, their rooms, their screens. And the internet was fully ready for that moment.
In those rooms, they didn’t just find video games and memes. They found new “teachers.”
A 2025 report from the Movember Institute found that nearly two‑thirds of young men engage with “men and masculinity influencers” online—creators who make up what the report calls the “manosphere.” That’s not a fringe population.
Inside the Manosphere, which hit number one on Netflix in March, follows a handful of the movement’s most popular figures and the boys who hang on their every word. A young fan looks straight into the camera and explains what he’s learned: Life as a man means you’re born without value, and the only way to matter is to dominate. Another boy says the men on his screen are “the only ones telling the truth.”
As Briana Edwards, a graduate student researching the manosphere at UNC‑Chapel Hill, told The Daily Tar Heel, “It’s really the weaponization of progress. Women are to blame for where men are in the United States, and the world more broadly, since it is a global phenomenon.” That’s the story so many of these boys heard, often for the first time, from men they’d never met but saw every night: Your problems aren’t about mental health or a pandemic that blew up your life. They’re about women.
The Mothers
Somewhere off‑screen in all of this are the adults who love these boys.
Many of them are Gen X parents, especially mothers, who write to me and describe themselves as the “lost generation.” Latchkey kids who raised themselves, watched their boomer or Silent Gen parents live larger and richer, and walked into adulthood with the sense that no one had planned for them.
Their anger is real and earned. I share a lot of it. But I keep circling a harder question: I moved around the world, changed houses and schools every two years, raised my son inside some of the most conservative cultures on earth. Somehow he turned out to be the man in this piece who does half the diaper changes and would be offended on his wife’s behalf at the mere suggestion of obedience. I don’t know how much of that is parenting, how much is luck, and how much is timing. That uncertainty is exactly what frightens me about my grandsons.
Bell hooks wrote that “to indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings,” and that a mother who tells her son to “be a man” is helping enforce that patriarchal will, whether she means to or not. Go ahead and swap in “be strong,” “don’t cry,” “protect your sister”—all the day‑to‑day scripts that say: Your job is to be in charge. Pair that with snowplow parenting and you get boys who were told they were exceptional but rarely asked to do the slow, boring work of becoming emotionally literate humans. Then the world shut down, and the algorithm finished off the job.
The Counter Attack
Susan Faludi called this pattern 30‑plus years ago in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women: Every wave of progress for women is met with a cultural counter‑attack. What she couldn’t have predicted was TikTok, YouTube, and whatever other manosphere ideology is streaming into teenage bedrooms at scale. The numbers make that story explicit.
In one summary of this research, 57 percent of Gen Z men say efforts to promote women’s equality have gone so far that they now discriminate against men. A fifth of young men who have heard of Andrew Tate—the self-described misogynist influencer whose TikTok clips have racked up billions of views—view him favorably, not because he invented misogyny, but because he packages it as self‑help for boys who feel left behind.
The Deal Boys Were Sold
These aren’t just opinions about women. They’re rules about themselves—rules that say: Don’t be soft, don’t be tender, don’t be present with your children, don’t tell your closest friend you love him.
In a recent viral clip, actor and activist Jameela Jamil makes a point that clarified what I’d been circling. If women were naturally submissive, she argues, patriarchy wouldn’t have needed centuries of law, violence, humiliation, and economic pressure to force them into line—and even then, women keep getting back up. Her darker suggestion is that patriarchy’s real success story is men.
I see artifacts of patriarchy in both the King’s College data and the boys I knew. For thousands of years, male ritual has centered on being both a leader and a team player—learning to be obedient in pursuit of a larger collective goal. They’re told they’re meant to lead, but most of the models they get are about lining up: teams, fraternities, workplaces where you earn approval by taking orders from the loudest man in the room. By the time the manosphere finds them, they’re already fluent in obedience. All that’s left is to convince them obedience is power.
Where My Own Boys Land
My son was born in 1990, he’s a millennial, which means he missed the worst of the manosphere but got enough internet to understand the world had changed. I have two grandsons who are in diapers. I’ve helped hundreds of high school boys navigate their first big step into adulthood. And now, I’m looking at a generation of young men and women who, in measurable ways, are more willing to sign up for obedience than their grandparents were.
I can’t look at this data and not see the faces I love. I can’t see “31 percent” and not picture those boys in my office, their brows furrowed over college acceptances, and wonder which TikTok rabbit hole they fell into since I last saw them.
There’s still time with my grandsons. Time to teach them the only thing that actually matters—how to be a decent human being in a world that keeps trying to talk them out of it.
But I no longer believe that progress moves forward on its own. It bends as we push it—and whoever is pushing harder tends to get their way. Right now, a very organized, profitable corner of culture is pushing boys back to an untenable past.
