Why Women Say They Want One Thing But Date Another - Rob Henderson

"Left-wing women are learning to love right-wing men. Political division has become a sexual fetish. Today, in online political fandoms, people behind enemy lines are often seen as potential sexual conquests. Right-wing men want a liberal art ho, whereas some leftist women," (laughs) "lust after the right-wing anon. It's hard to pin down discourse like this sometimes, but this trend is also substantiated in studies about the dating patterns of progressive women." What do you think about that?

Yeah. I, uh, you know, I, I wonder about these sort of media trends, these headlines, um, because often the reason why they get, uh, so much interest is because they're sort of at odds with our intuitions, right? And I know you've, you've spoken w- with plenty of people about this idea of assortative mating. We tend to be attracted to people who are somewhat similar to ourselves, so then when you have this flashy headline, you know, "Right-wing men want the left-wing art ho. The left-wing art hos want the Republican MAGA bro," or something, you know, it's, it's a little edgy. It's a little... Catches us off guard. But I think there's, you know, to, to the extent that it might be true, you know, if, if you think about what are the qualities that women find attractive in men, sort of self-sufficiency, ambition, income, uh, you know, you... All, all the kinds of qualities that, that are associated with sort of an, a masculine guy. Um, and then you look at sort of the voting patterns of men, and you find that the predictors of, of voting for the conservative parties are, a- also tend to be the traits that women tend to find attractive. So if you look at, um, uh, self-identified, uh, if you ask men, you know, "How, how masculine do you feel?" versus "How feminine do you feel?" The higher men rate themselves as masculine, the more likely they are to support a conservative political candidate, uh, and the more, uh... Or the less masculine they feel, th- the more likely they are to su- support a left-wing candidate.

Mm-hmm.

And then, um, and you can ask other questions about, uh, income. There was a really funny study a few years ago, um, in the UK about height, that, uh, there's a sort of a small but significant correlation between height and voting for conservative political parties.

(laughs)

Uh, I don't know if that would hold up today. This was, like, 2016, 2017, that period.

Yeah.

But, uh, you know, and, and then there's, like, interesting work around, um, attitudes around, like, social dominance orientation and, you know, men who are sort of, uh, uh, sure of themselves, confident, go out into the world, achieve something. They also tend to like things like low taxes, and they tend to like things like, you know, a strong military, police. All those kinds of things kind of cluster together. And so it would make sense, I think, that women, regardless of political orientation, even if they explicitly, when you ask them about politics, they're gonna say, "I don't like this or that party," but then they start to list out the qualities that they enjoy, you know, those just tend to cluster more on the right side of the political spectrum.