Sonja Pietilainen – författare

In the German election of February 2025, thirty-seven per cent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four voted for Die Linke. Among young men of the same age the strongest single party was the AfD. Britain in 2024 gave the same reading in a different alphabet. Young women are moving left, young men right, and the gap between them is wider than at any point in the life of anyone now under forty.The pollsters have a phrase for this, a generational gender realignment, and a picture to carry it: two halves of a rising generation drifting apart like continents, a natural sorting. The picture is symmetrical. What it describes is not.This Guide argues the asymmetry. Young women's leftward turn is a datable radicalisation with a programme behind it: the 8 March strikes spreading out of the Spanish state and Argentina, the Swiss general women's strike of June 2019 that was the largest mobilisation in that country's post-war history, Ni Una Menos against femicide, the mass revolt against Poland's abortion ban. A woman of twenty-two voting Green or Die Linke today is, more often than not, a veteran of one of those squares. Her move is a wave. The rightward turn of young men is a different kind of object: a recruitment channel, built and maintained, running on a real grievance whose author it falsifies.At the centre of the casebook is Judith Carreras, writing in January 2020, five years before any of this was called a surprise. She has the machine on the bench in pieces: the manosphere and its dialect, its pipeline into the parties of the far right, and the two faces those parties wear on gender, open misogyny alongside a femonationalism that borrows feminism's vocabulary in order to aim it at migrants. Read in 2025, the piece does not read like analysis. It reads like a forecast filed and then forgotten.Thirteen articles from International Viewpoint, 2019 to 2026, are gathered here as extracts in four parts, each headed with its issue, date and author. Part one is the wave in its own words, from Oksana Shine, the Feminist and LGBTQIA+ Commission of Gauche anticapitaliste, Tamara Knežević on Switzerland and Javier Pineda on Chile. Part two takes the backlash apart, with Carreras, Fortune on incel killing and Kate Manne's account of misogyny as the law-enforcement branch of a patriarchal order, Phil Hearse on hyper-masculinity and the neoliberal culture of cruelty, and Ashley Ahn on the anti-feminism that carried Yoon Suk-yeol to the South Korean presidency on a pledge to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Part three is the far right's double game: Sonja Pietiläinen on Meloni, Le Pen and the fascist femininity that launders racism by seeming to be its opposite; the NPA's national feminist commission on what happens when feminists march against the far right and the police choose sides; Manon Boltansky on what the movement does to abortion once it holds power.Part four answers everyone who reads the gap as demographics. Stephanie Coontz, interviewed by Meagan Day, is the hostile witness: the share of Republican men wanting women returned to their traditional roles climbed from twenty-eight per cent in 2022 to forty-eight by late 2024, and then, a year on, the same youth poll had the Democrats ahead again. The drift of young men turns out to be the most reversible thing in the picture. José Luis Hernández Ayala closes the case from Mexico City, where a march billed as Generation Z rising against the government proved, on a count of who was actually there, to be less than a third young.The wave is a movement, with a date and a demand. The backlash is a product, with a manufacturer and a market. A left that mistakes the second for a fact about young men will concede the false author in order to chase the male vote, and earn the defeat that follows.A Red Mole Guide: an argued introduction with a casebook of primary sources. Number nine in the series.