The Psychology Of What Women Want - Rob Henderson - #929

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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 hoe, whereas some leftist women 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?

**Rob Henderson** (0:26)
Yeah, I wonder about these media trends, these headlines, because often the reason why they get so much interest is because they're at odds with our intuitions. I know you've spoken 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 splashy headline, right-wing men want the left-wing art hoe, the left-wing art hoes want the Republican MAGA bro or something, it's a little edgy, it catches us off guard. But I think there's, to the extent that it might be true, if you think about what are the qualities that women find attractive in men, sort of self-sufficiency, ambition, income, all the kinds of qualities that are associated with sort of a masculine guy, and then you look at sort of the voting patterns of men and you find that the predictors of voting for the conservative parties also tend to be the traits that women tend to find attractive.
So, if you look at self-identified, if you ask men, 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, or the less masculine they feel, the more likely they are to support a left-wing candidate. And then, and you can ask other questions about income. There was a really funny study a few years ago in the UK about height, that there's a sort of a small but significant correlation between height and voting for a conservative political party. I don't know if that would hold up today. This was like 2016, 2017, that period. But, you know, and then there's like interesting work around attitudes around like social dominance orientation and, you know, men who are sort of 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 going to 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.

**Chris Williamson** (2:39)
I notice that they didn't use right wing women are looking to date left wing men as one of the examples there.

**Rob Henderson** (2:50)
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that makes sense in general. You know, I saw this tweet going around the other day, got a lot of attention. It was something like, I want a boyfriend who looks like a Republican but isn't one, something like that. You know what, I think that's the dream is like, you know, you have all of the qualities of a sort of prototypical Republican successful guy or whatever, but then like they somehow still support the left wing and political parties, which I guess is like that incentivizes this idea. I'm sure you've come across it called woke fishing of guys who conceal their political views. Usually guys who tend to be on the right, they will adopt the political beliefs of the opposing side simply to attract women. And that wouldn't be a thing unless it had some basis in reality, unless somewhere in the world that actually paid off as a strategy.

**Chris Williamson** (3:44)
Yeah, you wrote an article about Harry Sisson.
This sneaky feminist exploiting the dating economy thing. What's the story there?

**Rob Henderson** (3:53)
Yeah, it was interesting. There was a big sort of splashy piece in the New York Post about this and a lot of people tweeting about this guy, Harry Sisson, who is, he was referred to in the New York Post as a rising star, rising Gen Z TikTok star for the Democratic National Committee or something like that. He's just sort of a left-wing guy, but there was a sort of trend going on on TikTok of these girls saying, oh, you know, Harry slid into my DMs, we were talking and I was sending him nudes. But then he turned out to, or he would say things like, you know, I'm interested in women more for their bodies. I like their minds. He also said something like, I have no roster, something, I don't have a roster.