Feminism support among Spanish youth drops to 54%

Feminism loses ten points among young people in four years

Identification of the young population with feminism has plummeted. In 2019, 64% of those under 29 said they felt very close to the movement; in 2023, that support fell to 54%, according to the latest report by Injuve, an agency dependent on the Ministry of Youth and Childhood. The gap widens especially between sens: women declare themselves feminists at a rate of 67.6% (they were 80.9% in 2019) and men at 40.9% (they were 54%). The official diagnosis points to social media, the pandemic, and denialist discourses. The diagnosis circulating outside offices is much less friendly to the narrative.

What the Injuve report says about the gap between boys and girls

The data sketch a war of the sens that is no longer a metaphor. 44% of young men believe that promoting equality has gone too far and discriminates against them. Only 55.1% of boys support the right to abortion, compared to 71% of girls. 44.1% back the remuneration of domestic work (60.9% of them) and less than half defend balanced presence in high positions, compared to 70% of women. Denial of gender-based violence rises from 5.7% to 13.2% among women and from 11.9% to 23.1% among men, according to a study by Fad Juventud.

The institutional reading attributes the drop to post-pandemic demobilization, the institutionalization of the movement, and discourses that have found a powerful loudspeaker on the internet. Sociologist Lionel Delgado summarizes it thus: networks have exploited the feeling of exclusion of some men to sell more, and boys have found spaces of belonging in the darkest places of the internet. He adds that this generation is also that of Elbichito, fake news, and Trump's internet, and that certain ultra-conservative forces have chosen feminism as a field of dispute.

Why many young people stop identifying with feminism

The official explanation does not convince a large part of those who have stopped feeling addressed. A 22-year-old young man puts it bluntly: he considers feminism an ideological construct, very intrusive, that does not work and excludes those who do not think in a certain way. He argues that children are no longer educated under macho logics and that the remaining machismo is concentrated among older people. Another, aged 21, admits some machismo and some prejudices, but believes it is not solvable in the short term and that the only thing possible is to let time pass. He also does not accept that gender-based violence be categorized as such and maintains that laws discriminate against men.

There is a current of analysis that flatly rejects the thesis of networks. It argues that feminism has not lost steam because of platforms or any external force, but because of its own contradictions, and that attributing it to the digital environment is a convenient excuse. Along these lines, penal asymmetry, exceptional courts for men, lack of presumption of innocence in certain procedures, and administrative aids barred by reason of sens are pointed out. The complete calculation, with the detail of each norm and each item, is the material that circulates most and the one least answered from the other side.

Feminism as business and as official narrative

Another line, more economicist, argues that the movement has become a subsidized sector with a life of its own. It is argued that it feeds many people who would have no other way of life and that it functions as a tool of control and conflict between sens. From this perspective, the problem is not that the discourse has lost efficacy, but that it was never hegemonic: simply, those who did not conform were silenced, and now the internet has given them voice. The most repeated comparison is religious: the article reads like the complaint of a priest facing the collapse of mass attendance.

The parallelism has its charm and its truth. Spain ceased to be practicing Catholic in two generations and no one asked for an Injuve report to explain it. That feminist faith among young people is now measured with the same anxiety suggests that the movement has ceased to be a claim to become just another identity affiliation, with its catechism and heretics. And identity affiliations, when institutionalized, deflate.

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The prediction with reservations is the trinc: if the gap between boys and girls continues to widen at the current rate, young feminism will become a predominantly female movement, with less social pulling capacity and greater dependence on institutional impulse. This is not fixed by a social media campaign. Nor is it fixed by ignoring why almost half of young boys, who grew up with equality as common sense, have stopped buying into it.