Reports of the Death of Love are Greatly Exaggerated!

The media headlines screamed it loud enough: "Young women hate men." "The death of love." "Generation Z ladies are done with the opposite sex." All because a New Statesman poll dropped showing only 50% of women under 30 (and a grim 35% under 25) view young men favourably, while 72% of young men still look at young women with genuine warmth.

Janice Fiamengo, bless her, just published a sharp takedown on her Substack (link below) calling the panic exaggerated, and she's right. The gender sky isn't falling. But let's not kid ourselves either. This poll is a flashing red warning light about what decades of feminist messaging has done to ordinary young women's hearts and minds.

Fiamengo digs into the raw Merlin Strategy data and it's not the man-hating apocalypse the clickbait wants you to believe:

Only 21% of young women hold a negative view of men (3% "very negative," 18% "quite negative").

That leaves 76% who are positive or neutral.

Most still feel somewhat safe around men, trust them in many situations, and can talk politics with them without it blowing up.

82% of young women want a life partner.

75% want children.

Men, for their part, remain remarkably traditional: 72% favourable toward women, 38% "very positive." They still believe in the whole deal, partnership, family, the works.

So no, love isn't dead. But the asymmetry is glaring. And that's where the real story lives.

Fiamengo nails it when she points out that young women have been marinated in "toxic masculinity," "believe all women," consent hysteria, and endless online content telling them men are dangerous, untrustworthy, and basically the root of every problem. Of course, some of them absorbed it. You can't spend your formative years being told the other half of humanity is suspect and then expect warm, trusting relationships to bloom naturally.

This isn't biology or some inevitable "battle of the sexes." It's cultural engineering. Feminism didn't just push for equal pay or legal rights (things most normal people supported). It spent decades reframing men as the enemy class, privileged oppressors whose very nature is suspect. Schools, universities, social media, Netflix, corporate HR departments, all repeating the same script: men are the problem.

The result? A generation of young women who, even when they personally like the guys around them, carry this low-level cultural suspicion. They've been taught to scan every interaction for "red flags." They've internalised the idea that wanting a traditional family makes them somehow regressive. And when they do date, they bring that guardedness into the relationship which, surprise, surprise, makes men pull back.

Meanwhile, young men are still showing up optimistic. They haven't been fed the same poison. They still see women as partners, not adversaries. That gap isn't "natural" — it's manufactured.

Young women who've swallowed the feminist line often end up lonely, anxious, and confused about why "good men" seem so hard to find. They hit their late 20s, realise the career-and-independence script left them empty, and suddenly the biological clock starts screaming. But by then the habits of suspicion are baked in. Trust is hard to rebuild once it's been systematically undermined.

Young men, seeing this, are checking out in growing numbers, not because they hate women, but because they're tired of being treated like the villain in their own love story. Why invest emotionally when every disagreement risks being framed as "toxic" or "abusive"?

Fiamengo is too polite to say it outright, but the data screams it: feminism's long war on "patriarchy" has collateral damage, ordinary men and women who just wanted to fall in love, build something, and raise kids without it being turned into a political battlefield.

The hopeful part of Fiamengo's piece is that the majority of young people on both sides still want the same things: connection, family, stability. That's not nothing. It means the damage isn't irreversible.

But pretending the negativity is just "media exaggeration" misses the bigger picture. This poll is downstream of fifty years of anti-male propaganda dressed up as empowerment. Until they stop teaching young women that men are the enemy, until we call out the double standards, the false narratives, and the institutional capture, these gaps will keep widening.

Real love between men and women has always been messy, beautiful, and worth fighting for. Feminism didn't invent the sexes' differences; it just taught one side to weaponise them. The data shows most young people haven't fully bought the lie yet.

The question is whether we let the cultural machine keep pushing before it's too late to repair the trust. Because if we don't push back — loudly, unapologetically, and without caring about being called "misogynist" — then the reports of love's death might stop being exaggerated.

https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/reports-on-the-death-of-love-are