Episode Summary Many people expected that Donald Trump's fate would be decided by women last year. It was, after all, the first presidential race since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court had decided to roll back a national right to abortion.But Trump upended that possibility by deciding to run a campaign that was focused very heavily on men and trying to attract the votes of men who didn’t commonly participate in voting.That’s why I wanted to bring Juliana Menasce Horowitz onto the show today. She’s a senior associate director of research at the Pew Research Center where she and several colleagues have come out with a very interesting report about how gender is presented in American society and how people think they present in that regard.The transcript of this audio-only episode is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch and get unlimited access.Related Content—Tradwives, Instagram farmers, and performative gender roles—Male pop-culture is obsolete, and men are suffering because of it—Trump, Nietzsche, and the politics of gendered religious despair—Seeing the bigger story behind Moms for Liberty’s narrative—Yes, fitness and politics have a history—How an oversharing Christian blogger inadvertently documented his own radicalizationAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:15 — Less of a partisan divide on whether men are valued for being caring11:57 — Why the Pew Research Center no longer uses terms like “Baby Boomer” or “Gen Z”20:07 — The challenge of sampling smaller demographic groups27:04 — Does self-reporting introduce error in polling?30:16 — Age differences in self-perception of femininity and masculinity32:43 — Influence of family and media on gender identity37:10 — Role of religion and coaches in gender identity38:29 — Marital status and gender identity41:40 — Societal acceptance of non-traditional gender roles46:26 — Republican voters seem to think hobbies are biologically based52:06 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: You have so many interesting findings in the report here, but one that really stands out in particular is that the Republican men that you talk to really seem to see the topic of masculinity and being a man quite a bit differently compared to other demographic groups.JULIANA HOROWITZ: Yeah, sure. So yeah, that's something that we sought throughout the report. We asked several questions about, um, you know, to, to sort of get at some of the topics that have been out there in the, in the public discourse and the political narrative about men and masculinity.And one of the things that we wanted to look at is whether the public perceives masculinity as being under attack. And so we asked the question about, um, you know, about whether people think other people in the [00:02:00] US have mostly positive or negative views of men who are manly or masculine. And, and for the most part, Americans don't see masculinity as being under attack based on that question. But Republican men were the most likely to say that people in the US have mostly negative views of men who are mainly or masculine. Um, and then we also asked some other questions that got at, um, you know, different traits that people think society does or doesn't value in men. And personal ratings of masculinity and femininity. So basically how people see themselves and through, you know, throughout the survey, through all these different topics, including the self ratings Republican men really stand out in being different from democratic men and from Republican women and democratic women,SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they do. And just zooming out on the question a little bit. So only 25% of the entire sample said that people have a mostly negative viewpoint of manly or masculine men, but among Republican men, that was 45% who said that?And that was, as you said, pretty unusual. So what was the finding with Republican women? What did they think on that same topic?HOROWITZ: Right, so among Republican women, we saw that about a quarter of Republican women said that people have mostly negative views, um, compared to 20% of democratic men and only 13% of Democratic women. So Republican women and democratic men actually had fairly similar views on this. And then democratic women were the least likely to see masculinity as being under attack. Under attack. And one of the things that's interesting too, is that for those who say, especially for Republicans actually, who say that people have negative views of men who are masculine, um, the vast majority of those Republicans say that that's a bad thing, right? So it's bad that people have ...
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Jun 23 202510 mins
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