In the latest result of research about modern voting trends that will surprise absolutely nobody, it turns out that men who are insecure about their masculinity—that is, who suffer from "fragile" masculinity—are more likely to be Donald Trump supporters.
No, really, go figure. Knock us over with a feather.
We began by selecting a set of search topics that we believed might be especially common among men concerned about living up to the ideals of manhood: “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” “how to get girls,” “penis enlargement,” “penis size,” “steroids,” “testosterone” and “Viagra.”
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We found that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction.”
So to be gentle about it, voting for Donald Trump is serving roughly the same signaling purposes as buying a Hummer or, cough, an assault rifle. Donald Trump is the little blue pill of aging conservatism.
Peculiarly, or not, this feature appears to be unique to Donald Trump himself. The researchers report that no such correlation exists for Mitt Romney or John McCain voters; there's something about Donald Trump personally, then, that screams out "This is the candidate for men who are concerned about the size and functionality of their man parts."
Oh, this sounds like a ripe area for research. It would be informative to know if searches for "testosterone" were correlated with panic over migrant families, or "how to get girls" was a reliable proxy search for a Fox News addiction.
In the meantime, however, we'll have to leave it with what we do know: Men who do searches for "penis enlargement" are more likely to be Trump voters than the population at large. Make of that what you, ahem, will.