Why Getting Off To Anime Porn Is Shorthand For Supporting Donald Trump

On Tuesday evening, GOP consultant Rick Wilson made Twitter waves with his claim that Donald Trump supporters are mostly “single men who masturbate to anime.”

This is an intentionally incendiary statement that Wilson says he made distinctly to troll Trump’s followers. First of all, as any anime fan will let you know, it’s called *clears throat* hentai, a specific genre of X-rated Japanese animated cartoons. But what’s interesting is that in order to intentionally make people angry, Wilson targeted anime geeks as his insult.

Passionate geeks have always been a target for society’s anxiety. In the ‘80s, when concern about Satanism was at an all time high, Dungeons & Dragons players were at the center of a moral panic, just as comic books were in the 1950s. During Star Trek’s heyday, fans of the show were described as obsessive and gross in articles published as early as 1975.

Today, the line between pop culture and nerd culture has never been so slim. Our collective society freaks out over Star Wars and geeks out about Harry Potter. But anime, with its foreign roots and cross-cultural learning curve, remains on the fringes. And this political jape indicates that poking fun at anime fans is still fair play.

In November, New York Magazine columnist Max Read observed that among himself and his friends, Twitter followers with anime avatar photos tended to be the most fervent supporters of Gamergate and similar conservative political movements. This passion, needless to say, came with a barrage of harassment toward anyone who disagreed with them.

“If you are besieged by trolls and are also okay with blocking people who might be extremely intelligent and engaging and also fervent otaku… the ‘anime avatar’ is a mostly though not entirely reliable indicator of trolldom, and block anyone you see with one,” Read wrote, perilously close to false syllogisming all over himself.

Read’s confirmation bias is that people with anime avatars spend more time online, and therefore, are less socially adjusted. It’s the same way Wilson’s statement uses “anime” as a shorthand for an unsavory, unlikeable person who also doesn’t share your political views. It doesn’t help that—and I say this as somebody who often has a anime avatar—there are indeed people with anime avatars who harass, just like harassers with every other type of avatar.

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Of course, Wilson isn’t insulting anime fans, but an even more specific niche—men who masturbate to anime porn (apparently he forgot about the women who do this, too). That would be millennials.

While most people don’t talk about their porn viewing habits, and for good reason, PornHub’s 2015 survey tells us all we need to know. Among 18 to 34-year-old viewers, “cartoon” and “hentai” are the 13th and 17th most popular porn searches, and millennials are 131% more likely to search for “anime” than older browsers. While anime fans certainly don't all masturbate to hentai, it can be pretty well assumed that these hentai viewers all fall into the larger anime fan group.

If anything, Wilson ought to be courting the vote of anime-porn masturbators in order to get some much needed millennial blood into the Republican voting bloc, especially in a time when millennials identify Democrat more strongly than any other generation.

Anime fans definitely do enjoy Donald Trump, if the Trump As Anime parody Twitter account—and countless image macros that come up when you Google “Trump anime”—are any indication. But perhaps not in the way that Wilson thinks. It’s a shorthand insult of the likes that has been thrown at geeks for generations, and about as accurate as always.