MAGA misogyny

It's not really about Taylor Swift

On Wednesday, Fox Sports Radio host Colin Cowherd provided one of the most insightful commentaries on the right-wing attack on Taylor Swift imaginable. After I posted the clip on my Threads feed, a few people commented about Cowherd’s past rhetoric, though agreeing with his analysis. I’m woefully ignorant of sports commentary—I love playing and watching sports but have long felt men spend way too much brain power and emotion discussing them—and so this was my first interaction with the man.

Cowherd opens the segment by calling out the haters who claim they “only want to watch football.” He references the popularity of Super Bowl commercials, then drops a jarring stat: in a three-and-a-half hour television broadcast, only 18 minutes of actual football are shown on screen. Yet viewers stay tuned. 

Then he segues to the heart of the issue, first referencing all the men that men love seeing at professional sports games: Jack Nicholson at Lakers games (a cultural phenomenon so embedded in basketball consciousness that Winning Time regularly featured Jack courtside); Spike Lee at Knicks games; Eminem flipping off Kansas City fans (before the Detroit Lions blew it in the second half against the 49ers).

The broader point: men have no problem seeing other men at games. Spotting celebrities is a sport in itself. The real issue is that Taylor Swift is a woman.

That’s where Cowherd’s monologue hits the mark. He says that 50 percent of men never experience intimacy with a woman, meaning that the other half engage in multiple intimate relationships. I’m not sure where he pulled this statistic from, so I looked around.

A 2019 survey found that roughly half of men under 30 say they’ve never experienced sex. Sex and intimacy can be quite different things, depending on the context. For example, some of those men might pay sex workers, which would not qualify as intimate in the relationship sense. You can also argue that relationships that include sex are not necessarily intimate (if you’re defining intimacy as an emotional state between consenting adults, not just as a physical act).

In 2022, research found that between 25-50 percent of heterosexual relationships do not include sex; that number skews highest toward Generation Z. Cowherd might have been pulling from the higher end of the statistic. There’s some debate over how important sex is for intimacy and mental health, but this tends to focus on couples in longstanding relationships.

Cowherd’s broader point stands: the aggression and vitriol expressed by predominantly young men over a beautiful woman “in their territory” says way more about those men than it does about Taylor Swift. 

You don’t have to be a Swiftie to understand this social problem. Sure, there are multiple causes: excessive distribution and consumption of pornography (which predominantly provides an unrealistic sense of what sex entails); an emphasis on dating apps, which selects for certain people over others; and this startling research that shows the political divide between men and women in their twenties. 

Simply put, younger women are leaning liberal while younger men are moving right.

The top red flags in a partner? 

• Identifying as a MAGA Republican

• Saying “All Lives Matter”

• Listening to Joe Rogan

• Being unconcerned with politics 

Meanwhile, the top green flags include reading, making informed financial decisions, and supporting Black Lives Matter.

Even podcasts have become a battlefield.

Thirty-six percent of men and 32% of women are likely to listen to podcasts, but when asked for their views on some of the most popular podcasts in the US, men most commonly report listening to The Joe Rogan Experience and The Ben Shapiro Show, while women favor the New York Times’s The Daily and Ira Glass’s This American Life. Not only are women less likely to listen to Joe Rogan, 55% think listening to him is a red flag in a potential partner.

Considering Rogan’s misogynistic takes on women, it’s no surprise that, as Cowherd remarked, so many sad and lonely men exist. Their loathing of Taylor Swift has nothing to do with football or music. It’s about the women they’ll never have.

And that should worry us all.