Conservative Voters and the Messy "Down There"

Source: Author, 2018

President Trump wants to legally eliminate the classification “transgender” and narrow the federal definition of gender to two choices—male or female. Under this proposal, gender would be regarded as an unchangeable biological condition determined by the genitalia visible at birth.

Why erase "transgender" from legal doctrine now? And why has no liberal president ever asked for this shift, no matter how religious they were? Is Trump just hoping to drum up support for conservative legislators in advance of the midterm elections? And why are both homophobia and transphobia more common in red states, anyway?

Follow the Genitalia

At first blush, one part of the answer to all of these questions may be that conservative voters don’t like to think about what’s between people’s legs, or so I surmise from the results of a Cornell and Yale study published in 2008 in the journal Cognition and Emotion.

That study demonstrated that political conservatives get disgusted more easily than liberals do, and are particularly sensitive to matters of “purity.”

Source: Copyright, 2018, the author

The study had two phases. In Phase 1, participants used four-point scales to rank their agreement with statements like, ‘‘I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public restroom, even when it appears clean.” Participants also ranked how disgusted they would be in various un-hygienic scenarios, such as, ‘‘You take a sip of soda and then realize that you picked up the wrong can, which a stranger had been drinking out of.’’ In this first phase of the study, researchers found that religious affiliation didn’t seem to affect how readily someone became disgusted. But political affiliation did. Conservatives were more easily creeped out.

In Phase 2, participants were tested for disgust sensitivity and were also asked to rate their agreement with statements about 10 hot-button political topics—gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labor unions, bombing Iran, welfare, the Iraq war, affirmative action, tax cuts, and the death penalty.

Once again, researchers found that participants who were more easily disgusted held more conservative views. But the relationship between disgust and conservatism was only statistically significant regarding taxes (easily disgusted people favored lower ones) and two "purity" topics, gay marriage and abortion.

What Does and Doesn’t Disgust Conservatives

Being easily disgusted did not make people recoil from the idea of bombing Iran, or seem to elevate concern about gun deaths in the U.S., or the application of the death penalty. But easily disgusted people did rile at the ideas of abortion and gay marriage, the only two of the 10 topics that had anything to do with sexuality.

My bet, then, is that Trump is right if he’s assumed that more-queasy conservative voters will like the idea of altogether squelching conversations about gender identity. They don’t want to be forced to even think about toilet seats, or soda cans with someone else’s saliva, much less the messy “down there.”

But can someone from the red states of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, Indiana, or Oklahoma please help me understand why, in 2017, people from those locales spent more time than people from any blue states at PornHub, the Internet’s most popular porn site?