Just listen to the advertising during Rush Limbaugh or other right wing radio shows… The advertisers know this, its no big secret…
A pair of researchers in New York last year had an idea. They were curious how the current political moment could be explained by insecurity — specifically, by male insecurity, the sense among some men that they aren’t meeting societal expectations for their gender.
To measure this, the researchers looked at Google searches for terms associated with that insecurity — erectile dysfunction, hair loss, “how to get girls,” etc. — and cross-referenced the frequency of those searches with voting patterns in 2016 and 2018.
“We found that support for [President] Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as ‘erectile dysfunction,’ ” the researchers wrote in an article for The Post. “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.’ ”
That correlation didn’t hold when looking at support for Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008.
The response to this study at Fox News was predictable. A series of guests disparaged the research, including one psychotherapist who suggested that the lack of a McCain correlation was particularly odd.
“Most people, men and women, would say that John McCain is the height of masculinity — about as manly as you can get,” he said. “ . . . He was a war hero who epitomized fearlessness in the face of his captors. What about Trump is more masculine than McCain?”
That’s not the point, of course. The point is not that Trump manifested a manliness that others didn’t. It’s that he spoke to the cultural concerns that these men purportedly shared. That his rhetoric addressed making these men great again.
