“According to exit poll data posted by CNN, Cuccinelli beat Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe 45-39 percent with that group, though the Democrat won voters ages 25-29 by a margin of 50-35 percent.”
“The CRNC ran a 60-second ad exclusively online throughout the month of October opposing Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe,” the memo reads. “The ad targeted females 18-24 years old, with whom, as polls indicated, Cuccinelli had been underperforming.”- Politico
The 18-24 voters broke pretty big for Cuccinelli, but that changes once you lump in the “wiser” millennials — branded by Rick Wilson as the Lena Dunham demographic, humorously of course. But therein might lie why there’s a change.
If you’ve ever watched Girls or have been aware of the things Lena Dunham says, you’d see a portrait of narcissism and entitlement. The sporadic insights are generally suppressed by a supreme unawareness of the first two traits. It’s possible that the 18-24 demographic is seeing what the millennial belief system has generated as far as outcomes. Maybe they’re wising up to them not being solid role models, but rather cautionary tales.
Can you imagine the excitement of tuning in to watch Hollywood interpret the glory of American youth as unpaid internships with few to little genuine loving relationships, mixed with a giant sense of entitlement without demonstration of earning anything?
To that sense of entitlement: there’s been a premise pushed in faux-feminism circles that Girls all but embodies. It is the idea that the women on the show are entitled to men wanting them. Despite any flaw — whether it be physical, emotional, or a lack of accomplishments — they are owed a relationship with a man. Based on this premise, any poor behavior or lack of interest in their appearance cannot be the cause of why he didn’t call back. It’s simply not possible.
Yet this doesn’t often result in good outcomes for the women. To share a space with reality even the writer occasionally realizes there will be negative consequences.
So since the central conceit of feminism (that one is owed a man’s attention) cannot be questioned — yet results in women being quite incapable of sustaining a relationship — we must pretend that obtaining said relationship is no longer important. We wouldn’t want to dispute the tenets of feminism:
- He should love you and put up with any behavior you throw at him. Its “quirky” and not deranged that you question him about everything he feels at every moment.
- You don’t have to be particularly accomplished or worthy of his time. Being a woman is enough. You go, girl!
- You are as beautiful as a supermodel no matter who you are — and men who dare to seek out a woman of similar or slightly higher attractiveness are craven idiots. You deserve a man as handsome as you would like him to be.
- If it’s something that females experience, everyone else should pay for it too.
- Corporations purposely pursue “sexist” strategies to exclude 50% of the market. Society is so inherently sexist that profit comes after the deliberate exclusion of women.
I say all these things as someone who was fed this nonsense by our culture and who partially bought into it for years — years of being single I might add. As a piece of advice, I stopped being single the moment I gave up on games, listening to other people’s bad advice, trying “the rules” or whatever else was trendy — and I just focused on being the best version of myself that was possible. And, yes, that included diet and exercise.
You aren’t owed a Brad Pitt if you look like a Lena Dunham. Sorry folks, but human beings are also visual creatures. Unless you plan on blinding everybody, both sexes will be judged by their appearance.
I imagine that watching this play out and seeing the consequences glorified in “hook up culture” (or in the pathetic foibles of Hannah Horvath) have given younger women pause. Could it be that a realization is occurring based on the data of this experiment and that a new generation is turning more conservative based on real evidence of failure?
I know I’m being some sort of anachronistic throwback when I say that perpetual adolescence is some sort of failure. Yet the numbers don’t lie.
- “For women aged 25 to 34 in the best-educated third of the population, the rate of single parenthood has barely budged since the 1960s — it was 5 percent then, it’s 5 percent now. But for those in the least-educated third, the illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled, rising from 7 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today. This decline in husband-wife families, the Brookings economist Gary Burtless recently argued, accounts for 21 percent of the increase in economic inequality between 1979 and 1996 (the increase in assortative mating — high-earners marrying other high-earners, low-earners marrying other low-earners — accounts for another 13 percent). Inevitably, the brunt of these negative trends is borne by children: Had family structure remained unchanged from 1970 to 1998, Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill recently argued, the child poverty rate would have been 13.9 percent, rather than 18.3 percent. That sounds like a small difference, but over decades it represents millions of lives unscarred by poverty, and millions of children more likely to become productive, law-abiding citizens.” – The Party of Sam’s Club
- “In the five years that President Barack Obama has served as president, the unemployment rate for workers ages 16-19 has not fallen below 20%. In fact, since his first full month in office in February 2009, the unemployment rate for young workers, the millennial generation, has not fallen below 22% and hit a peak of 27.2% in October 2010.” – CNS News
- “Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards. With debt now growing at a rate of $2,853.88 per second, it will surpass $1 trillion in 2012. And neither taxpayers nor consumers can afford it.” – CNBC The College Debt Crisis
- “If you’re under 25, by the time you hit your prime earning years, you’re likely to face bleak long term economic prospects because of our massive debt load along with the crushing taxes that will be required to pay for it.” – 5 Groups of Obama Voters that Are Crushed by Democrats.
- “Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade, who did a qualitative study of the hook-up culture among 44 of her freshman students (33 of them women), concludes that most of them ‘were overwhelmingly disappointed with the sex they were having in hook ups. This was true of both men and women, but was felt more intensely by women.’ The psychiatrist Miriam Grossman reports that the vast majority of women who have a hook-up experience later regret it. Wade confirms that the women she interviewed felt ‘disempowered instead of empowered by sexual encounters. They didn’t feel like equals on the sexual playground, more like jungle gyms.’” – Ricochet
So a generation of new voters has seen the consequences of single parenthood coupled with how impossible it was to find a part-time job in high school or college, a depressing sex life, followed by crushing debt from a degree that won’t get them a job. They’re looking at a world where that’s the perpetual expectation even by glorified Hollywood standards.
Perhaps they’re balking at picking up the bill that seems too high for so little return.