Men's Behavior Labeled 'Aggressive' if They Don't Let Women Win

I found this article at Fortune entitled “Study Finds Trump’s Election Made Men More Aggressive Towards Women” to be laughable:

A researcher from Donald Trump’s alma mater found proof that the president’s election is altering how men behave.

Wharton assistant professor Corinne Low, an economist focused on communication styles, noticed “extremely stark” differences between how men negotiated with female adversaries before and after the presidential race.

In a paper called “Trumping Norms,” set to be published in the May issue of American Economics Review, Low and her co-author Jennie Huang compare the negotiation tactics used by participants in a controlled lab experiment. In the study, pairs of participants were given $20 to split between them, with only two splits are available: one person can get $15 and the other can get $5, or vice versa. If they can’t agree, both get nothing….

Before the election, men were “less likely to use such tough strategies against female than against male partners, displaying what could be classified as ‘chivalry’ toward female partners,” write Low and Huang in the paper. Post-election, however, men became more aggressive, an the researchers believe may be related to election of the new commander-in-chief.

“The general increase in aggression, and decrease in effective coordination, coupled with the specific increase of aggression towards women, suggests that the Trump election may have fractured community norms of civility and chivalry,” the researchers conclude.

So let’s get this straight: Before the election, men were letting the women in the study win, and treated their male partners as though they could take care of themselves. Notice there was little explanation about the men being more “aggressive” towards other men than they were towards women. After the election, the men stopped letting women win as often, and somehow this is seen as “aggressive.” There may be many reasons for the change in behavior besides “aggression.” Or maybe not letting women win is seen as “aggression” by biased researchers.

There may be all kinds of explanations for why the men stopped letting women win as often. Perhaps Trump’s win made the men feel more egalitarian and they believe that women can stand up for themselves, which seems less chauvinistic then letting women win. Notice that the researches didn’t view the men treating the women more equally as positive, as they were too busy trying to make the men’s behavior seem negative. Maybe the men were so used to women getting their way that they just let them and once Trump won, they felt that men didn’t have to acquiesce to Democrats (and women) as much.

Or maybe this so-called “aggression” is a good thing — men are fed up with women dominating and demanding rights for themselves while they throw men who aren’t their sycophants under the bus.

But the real lesson here is men can’t win: if they are chivalrous towards women, they are sexist pigs, but with Trump as president, they are aggressive assholes who are shouting down women for the crime of not letting them win.

Notice how men are always at fault? Which of course is the point of most social science research these days. It’s pitiful junk science used to validate Democratic talking points.