'Exquisite irony' exposed as MAGA men struggle to find love

MAGA men are struggling to find love — and it's a trope that isn't going away.

Salon's Andy Zeisler writes Tuesday that "after all the sexual assault and reflective misogyny, the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the promise to protect women 'whether they like it or not' — why liberal women don’t want to date Trump supporters is akin to asking Why don’t you want to be with someone who hates everything you stand for?'"

The writer focuses on a series of reports focusing on the challenge for Trump voters to find dates, including a recent Washington Post story featuring an interview with a D.C. woman who said she hoped to meet a conservative man. She found it wasn't what she had expected.

“I felt like, being in conservative politics, there would be more, like, masculine men in the conservative movement,” Morgan Housley, 29, told The Post, adding, “and I find that a lot of them aren’t as masculine as I would have hoped.”

The reality is that MAGA men aren't up to par for conservative or liberal women, and "the fact that these stories remain evergreen speaks to an ambient cultural misogyny that still sees women as accessories to men, of course, but they also speak to a persistent belief, endemic to popular culture, that relationships are inherently oppositional."

From "witty banter" to "opposing sides" there is a reason these stories carry on. It speaks not only to the reality of how hard dating while MAGA is, but the "there is an exquisite irony that the same men who have spent the last decade signal-boosting a circle jerk of masculinist propaganda are now being told that they are insufficiently high-value. But corporate media has committed too hard to this narrative for too long to just let it go that easily."

And, there's another common theme.

"That is, of course, the goal of every attempt to portray Trump voters as romantic martyrs. The premise of all the digital ink devoted to finding the hidden depths in men who support Trump is that they must in some way be profoundly misunderstood, that their embrace of bigotry and megalomania is not nearly as much of a problem as people who find it repellent," Zeisler writes. "Mentions of polarization and extreme ideology imply that liberal, anti-MAGA voters are being similarly shunned on the apps and the Washington Post just doesn’t want to cover it. Lamenting the loneliness of people who take pride in alienating others requires recasting antisocial behavior as political bravery."

But that's not actually happening.

"One of the defining themes of romance narratives in any medium is that (spoiler alert) heterosexual women are at any given time ready to compromise their principles, desert their passions and become unrecognizable to themselves for the love of a man, but they can have some intellectual sparring and political-argument foreplay as a treat," Zeisler writes.