Women Are Becoming More Like Men

It’s summer again and this summer I’m writing you from Spain. Everyone knows Barcelona, Madrid and Seville, but the surprise this year for me was Santander. It’s a northern beach town in Spain I didn’t expect much from. It reminded me of what imagine Cannes might’ve felt like back in the day, a seaside resort made for tourists but before the contemporary age of over-tourism. Clean air, decent seafood, wide promenades. The kind of place that's either forgotten completely or ruined by discovery, there’s no middle ground anymore.

@five.more.minutes.travel

Santander is one of the most beautiful cities in Spain! Where do you want to travel to next? #santander #spain #budgettravel #europeansumm... See more

But it wasn't Santander that held my attention during these weeks in Spain. It was the other travelers. Everywhere I went, Madrid's airports, Barcelona's streets, Seville's plazas, I saw them, solo female travelers. They're checking into hostels with confidence, navigating foreign metros with ease, and walking confidently.

I thought maybe I was just noticing it more, confirmation bias or whatever, but the statistics confirm what I was seeing. Up to 72% of solo trips from the U.S. are now taken by women. In fact, the entire culture of travel blogging, lifestyle content, influencing, it's become overwhelmingly female territory.

@linzblog_

Does anyone have any tips?! Comment below 👇 #milanvlog #travelitaly #italyvlog #travelblogger #travelsolo

This represents a reversal of historical patterns. For centuries, travel literature was dominated by male voices, from Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway. The dangerous, unpredictable nature of travel made it largely a male pursuit. But cheap flights, smartphones, and the world becoming safer have dramatically lowered the physical-risk premium that once deterred women from traveling alone. What used to require physical strength, spatial awareness, and resilience now just takes a working phone and decent shoes.

Study abroad numbers tell the same story, seventy percent women, thirty percent men.

For many women today, being well-traveled has become not just desirable but essential to their identity. Meanwhile, men who haven't traveled find themselves socially disadvantaged in ways they don't fully understand.

Travel is just one piece of something larger, one writer calls it the Great Gender Inversion.

It’s not an isolated trend. You start to see it everywhere, women taking over activities that were once predominantly male oriented. Doing stuff. Going places. Being rebels.

The Gender Inversion

The Gender inversion can manifest either behaviorally or aesthetically. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

For example, here is a simple observation of the inversion. Men don’t walk around shirtless anymore.

Walk through any city neighborhood on a summer day and you'll notice something that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago, the men are covered up while the women are showing more skin than ever.

For most of human history, public spaces offered men far more freedom to expose their bodies. Construction workers routinely worked shirtless. Men mowed lawns, played pickup basketball, and walked down the street without shirts. It was normal. I remember it. Now, you barely see it. Every man is wearing a shirt.

Meanwhile, women have claimed the right to public exposure. See-through tops, mesh panels, and barely-there fabrics are mainstream fashion. You see their nipples in the summer. Their thong bikini through their see through pants. They have become not just acceptable but fashionable.

@its_emandmay

No free shows around here 😤

There’s other aesthetic changes. Tattoos.

For most of history, tattoos were mostly male territory. Warriors, sailors, criminals. Markings of rebellion, toughness, and exclusion. Even into the late 20th century, tattoos were seen as low-status, dangerous, and overwhelmingly male.

Then came the 2010s. The stigma eroded. Tattoo culture went mainstream. Professional white collar men and women decided to get tattoos. As recently as 2015, men and women had roughly equal tattoo rates (22% vs 25%).

But now, in 2025, tattoos on women have surged to 30% while men have actually declined to 19%. Women are the tattooed gender now. Men are pulling back to the historical norm for them.

Part of this is technological. Fine-line tattooing techniques now allow for the delicate, minimalist designs, flowers, constellations, script, that appeal more to women than traditional bold, heavy tattoos. Think of the little doodle tattoos most women have now.

But really, it’s cultural. Women have decided to tattoo themselves, but men are stopping. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it is rebellion. Maybe it’s a flex. A tattoo wont ruin the value of a beautiful woman, but it also won’t make the value of an unattractive women rise.

It’s all just part of the gender inversion happening now in many domains.

In This Newsletter

Once you start looking, you’ll see it almost everywhere, across habits, spaces, and cultural signals.

1) Take a look:

• Religiosity: Men are now less religious than women across nearly every denomination.

• Alcohol: In younger generations, women are drinking more, while men are pulling back.

• Swearing: Linguistic studies show women have caught up to, and surpassed, men in frequency of swearing.

• Wanting Children: Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12.

• Sex with Students: Almost every week we hear about a story of how a female teacher is having sex with an underage male student. This used to be the reverse.

2) What Are Men Turning Into?

Religiosity

Perhaps nowhere is the great gender inversion more striking than in the realm of faith. Gen Z represents the first modern generation in which men appear to be more religious than women, a reversal so dramatic it upends thousands of years of human social organization.

For the entirety of history, women have been the religious gender. They were the ones who ensured children said their prayers, who dragged reluctant husbands to Sunday service, who maintained the family's spiritual traditions. Women have traditionally been more likely to pray daily, attend religious services, and report that faith plays an important role in their lives.

The reasons seemed intuitive, women's traditional roles as caregivers and nurturers aligned naturally with religion's emphasis on compassion, community, and moral guidance.

But something fundamental shifted with Gen Z. Recent surveys suggest that young men are now slightly more likely than young women to identify as religious, attend services, and say faith matters to them. The gap isn't enormous, but it represents a historic reversal and it continues to grow.

This religious reversal may be the most consequential aspect of the Gender Inversion. Religion has always been the primary mechanism for transmitting cultural values across generations. If men become the religious gender while women become non-relgious, we're witnessing not just a role reversal, but a fundamental rewiring of how culture itself gets passed down.

Alcohol Consumption

For centuries, drinking culture was male territory. The three-martini lunch, beer commercials during sports, wine connoisseurship, all masculine domains. Even the stereotypical alcoholic was "he." Think Mad Men.

But among younger generations, especially in cities, that's flipped. Women now drive wine industry growth and dominate craft cocktail culture. The Aperol Spritz wave? Female-driven. Wine tastings? Packed with women. "Wine mom" culture has transformed from stigma to sophisticated self-care.

Young women ages 18 to 25 in the United States are now binge drinking more than their male peers. This is a big change, historically.

Meanwhile, male influencers like Huberman or Joe Rogan have quit alcohol altogether. They use their gigantic platform to tell men how unhealthy alcohol is.

The stigma has completely reversed. Women posting about wine night get likes celebrating having fun. Men posting about getting drunk with the boys risk seeming immature. The entire cultural permission structure around alcohol has flipped genders.

The Baby-Yearning Gap

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