For two years we’ve watched as highly educated liberals come up with one reason after another for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election. Russian trolls and hackers, James Comey’s memo, hopelessness among white opioid addicts, Donald Trump’s sophisticated use of a metaphorical “dog whistle,” and on and on. Clinton’s utterly dislikable personality, inveterate deceitfulness, and demonstrable corruption still haven’t made it onto the list.
The latest theory is summed up in a headline on the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog: “How Donald Trump appeals to men secretly insecure about their manhood.” The authors—Eric Knowles, a social psychologist, and Sarah DiMuccio, a doctoral student in psychology, both at New York University—have taken a look at the data and noticed something peculiar. Actually, reverse that: They knew what they were looking for and so found it in the data. They’re social scientists, after all.
What they claim is that in places where voters largely chose Trump in 2016, and in places that similarly went for GOP candidates in 2018, there were high numbers of Google searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” “how to get girls,” “steroids,” “testosterone,” “penis enlargement,” and “Viagra.” Ergo, a disproportionately high number of Trump supporters are insecure about their status as men. Naturally the highest concentrations of these search terms were in the Deep South and Appalachia, thus confirming what most readers of the Washington Post already believed, namely that people in the country’s ickiest places voted for Trump.
Readers will want to raise obvious objections to the authors’ conclusion. For instance: The search terms they mention are typical of low-income populations, and so perhaps income status had more to do with Trump support than embarrassment about bald spots and perceived manliness. Other mysteries: Why do they assume the people who searched for Viagra online (a) voted at all and (b) voted for Trump? It seems to us likely that plenty of men with toupees and middle-age dysfunctions voted for Hillary and that these are in any case not reliable indicators of what the authors glibly call “fragile masculinity.”
Still, with silly and specious pseudo-findings like this one, Knowles and DiMuccio no doubt have stellar academic careers ahead of them. We await their study of how people who voted Democrat in ’16 were more likely to Google “pantsuit” and “lesbian chic” and so must have plumped for Hillary out of some secret need to assert their true feminist sexuality.
