A new supposed “study” that the far-left Washington Post was all-too-giddy to publish says that both President Trump and the GOP appeal to men with a “fragile masculinity.”
According to Newsweek, the researchers from NYU, psychology professor Eric Knowles and doctoral student Sarah DiMuccio, “queried 300 men on Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to discover whether they had or would search for terms such as ‘erectile dysfunction,’ ‘how to get girls,’ ‘penis enlargement,’ ‘testosterone,’ and ‘Viagra’ among others.”
The researches said they found men who searched such topics had a high level of concern about masculinity. More from Newsweek:
They then correlated the geographic dispersion of these search topics in 2016 with how such areas voted in that year’s election, finding ‘that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as ‘erectile dysfunction.’ Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as ‘breast augmentation’ and ‘menopause.’
The researchers also checked relations between fragile masculinity and voting in 2008 and 2012, finding ‘that the correlation of fragile masculinity and voting in presidential elections was distinctively stronger in 2016’ than it was when John McCain and Mitt Romney were Republican presidential candidates.
Of the 390 U.S. House races, in the districts where a Republican faced a Democrat, the GOP apparently gained more support where search results pertained to “fragile masculinty.”
“There was no significant relationship between fragile masculinity and voting in the 2014 or 2016 congressional elections,” the researchers claim. “This suggests that fragile masculinity has now become a stronger predictor of voting behavior.”
It appears that the researchers did not properly take into account the fact that Viagra and erectile dysfunction typically afflict older men, who overwhelmingly vote Republican. It is highly possible they conflated the two. It is also possible that in the era of rampant feminism, President Trump’s take-no-prisoners attitude may have resonated with some men who feel disconnected from their more aggressive impulses, which political correctness represses.
Knowles and DiMuccio did say, however, that this supposed “fragile masculinity” did not prevent such voters from supporting female candidates in 2018, as in the case of Tennessee, where Republican Marsha Blackburn won the U.S. Senate seat. In Arizona, the female GOP candidate Martha McSally lost to the female Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
“The research reported here is correlational,” they claim. “We can’t be entirely sure that fragile masculinity is causing people to vote in a certain way. However, given that experimental work has identified a causal connection between masculinity concerns and political beliefs, we think the correlations we’ve identified are important.”
The researchers also do not claim if such “fragile masculinity” will be a voting guide after President Trump leaves office.
Following the 2016 election, one of the Left’s favorite talking points to explain why Hillary Clinton lost was American misogyny; women who voted for Trump were, of course, suffering from internalized misogyny.