The night before the 2016 presidential election, I watched a short news feature about how women in the US vote and, hoo boy, it made for some bracing viewing. “I would never vote for Hillary Clinton – she is literal scum,” a white woman in Florida told the reporter. When he asked her to elaborate, she said, “She let her husband sleep with that intern.” The interviewer asked if she had similarly strong views about Bill Clinton, given he did the aforementioned “sleeping”. The woman shrugged and replied, “Boys will be boys.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this attitude – men, those poor creatures of machismo and id, can’t help themselves, but women should do better – in the wake of the US midterms. Initially, when the results came in, there was a sense that we were witnessing a thrilling new feminist dawn: Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women elected to Congress; Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women to be elected to Congress; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. But the initial crowing about a female future was quickly tempered by the release of voting patterns: a heck of a lot of white women had voted for Republican candidates.

US writer and legal commentator Elie Mystal was retweeted 9,500 times when he pointed out that 59% of white women in Texas voted for Ted Cruz, a man who still supports Trump even though Trump once retweeted a comment denigrating Cruz’s wife for her looks. Some 51% of white women voted for Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who, as his opponent Andrew Gillum put it during the campaign, might not be a racist himself, but the racists think he’s racist. Meanwhile, 95% of black women supported Cruz’s appealing opponent, Beto O’Rourke; in Florida, 82% supported Gillum. “White women gonna white,” Mystal concluded.

These kinds of statistics have become a source of great angst and fury on the American left. In total, 49% of white American women voted for Republican candidates, which is less than the 53% who voted for Trump in 2016. But not less enough. “The betrayal of white women voters,” read one typical headline. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah devoted a whole segment to the question of why white women consistently vote for conservative men. Even Vogue was horrified: “Why Do White Women Keep Voting For The GOP And Against Their Own Interests?” it asked.

To which the answer is: because white American women are not a homogeneous bloc with the same collective interests. College-educated white women, for a start, overwhelmingly voted Democrat in the midterms. And sure, it would be great if white women didn’t have to go to university to learn not to vote for white nationalists like Iowan congressman Steve King. But in America, race, followed by education, have long been the crucial factors in people’s voting choices. After all, 56% of white women voted against Obama.

I understand why people expect women to vote for candidates who support minorities and women’s rights. But the truth is, a lot of white women aren’t feminists, and they identify primarily as white, not women. Republican women voters feel more solidarity with conservative men than with other women. Many see abortion as actively bad for women, so they don’t consider supporting anti-abortion candidates as voting against their own interests.

In 2016, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said it was imperative to “figure out how to win [Republican women] over” – and of course that’s right. But it’s striking how no one talks about trying to win over white Republican men, even though far more men vote Republican – 60% versus 49% of women. There is an assumption that white men are beyond help, but that white women should be better.

This should, I guess, be flattering, but is actually just letting men off the hook – granting them a kind of freedom born of low expectations. It’s an attitude you now see in various guises on the left and the right. After Brett Kavanaugh was accused by Prof Christine Blasey Ford of assaulting her as a teenager, my colleague Paul Lewis made a film for the Guardian in which he talked to Republican women about, among other things, the #MeToo movement. He asked if they agreed with President Trump’s contention that it’s “a very scary time for young men in America”. One woman nodded. “I have four boys,” she said, by way of explanation. And boys will be boys!

Well, I have two boys, both American citizens, and it’s true that Jewish mothers have high expectations for their sons. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect my sons to know they can’t assault women, or support a political infrastructure that benefits only them, or be compulsive horndogs like Bill Clinton. I’m good with them growing up knowing that if they are sexually or physically aggressive they will pay for it, and that voting only for their own rights drags everyone backwards.

Boys may well be boys, but one day they will be men. And being a man is not an excuse – it’s a responsibility.