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Where Names Live: Mapping Baby Name Geography and Political Culture

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about political polarization and baby naming practices in the United States (see HERE for the most recent piece). A consistent pattern kept showing up: some names appear overwhelmingly more common in Republican-leaning states, others in Democratic-leaning ones. But every time I plotted those patterns, an uncomfortable question hung over the whole exercise: how much of what I was calling “political polarization” was really just the geography of population density? After all, Democratic vote share and urbanization overlap a lot. Maybe the patterns have less to do with cultural politics and more to do with the distribution of people.

To get at that, I needed a way to peer beneath the state-level and estimate where babies with specific names actually live. The SSA data only provide state counts. But the CDC publishes county-level birth totals, and the USDA classifies every county by its degree of urbanization (see this post for more on how I attempted to put these together). If I could use the CDC county counts to distribute the SSA state numbers downward, I’d have a rough and imperfect way to estimate where babies with particular names are born. That gave me a way to see whether the patterns I’ve been writing about reflect political geography, population geography, or some mix of the two.

The strategy is simple: for each state, I calculated what proportion of births occurred in each county. Then I treated those proportions as weights, redistributing each SSA name count across counties proportionally. It’s not perfect. Babies with any given name are not literally distributed across counties in proportion to all births. But it gives us a workable baseline, a sort of null model of what geography alone would produce. When names diverge strongly from this baseline, that’s maybe evidence of political sorting rather than simple population sorting.

Then, because I have those estimates, I realized I could probably map the results at the county level. To illustrate how this works, here’s a single-name example: Walker. In my last post I showed that “Walker” (among boy names) is among the more politically asymmetric names in the U.S. To see where those babies actually live according to our estimation model, here’s the map.

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It’s sort of crazy. This is not a map of where actual “Walkers” were born in 2022, it’s as estimation of where babies given the name Walker were born. Walker is a perfect proof of concept: when the county-level estimates are mapped, an unmistakable pattern emerges. There are strong clusters of counties (many suburban and exurban, often in the South and Mountain West) where the name appears more frequently than we would expect based solely on population size.

Once that was in place, I basically applied the same logic to every name given to at least 200 babies in 2022, calculated its correlation with Trump’s 2020 state vote share, and identified those most positively and negatively associated with Republican vote. Below are the the top six Republican-leaning names.

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What’s interesting about these names (Jase, Lakelynn, Malka, Marlee, Trenton, Whitley) is how similarly they are estimated to be distributed spatially: strong clusters across the South, Appalachia, and parts of the West, with relatively little concentrated presence in major urban centers. Even holding urbanicity constant, these names are disproportionately “red.” They show clear political clustering that can’t fully be explained by urban/rural demography alone.

So, then I did the same thing for the six most Democratic-leaning names given to more than 200 babies in 2022.

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Here, Democratic-leaning names (e.g., Alina, Ethan, Luca, Maya, Mordechai, Raphael) show stronger concentrations in dense metro areas, especially on the coasts, the Southwest, the Upper Midwest, and parts of the West. And here, these patterns look more like population density, but they also show regionalized concentrations that go beyond a kind of “big cities have more babies” interpretation.

Still, the maps don’t yet tell the full story. What I really wanted to know is whether the strength of the political signal is symmetrical. Part of what struck me is the estimated numbers of babies given Republican versus Democratic names in each county. Note that the Democratic names are just a lot more common than the Republican names. Is that because the tail of that polarized naming culture is taller? Or is it because the parabola is narrower. Are Republican-leaning names just as strongly correlated with Republican vote share as Democratic-leaning names are with Democratic vote share? Or is one side culturally sorting more strongly than the other?

So I plotted the full density distributions of correlations for all names given to at least 200 babies in 2022. And this is actually really cool. It’s evidence that what I suggested initially regarding nominal polarization being more of a conservative trend than a liberal trend (HERE and HERE) is actually right.

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This figure didn’t surprise me because I’d already expected this. This was just a new way of demonstrating what that actually looks like at the population level. The Republican side of the distribution is noticeably wider: there are more names with extremely strong positive correlations with Trump vote share than there are extremely anti-Trump names on the Democratic side. Democratic-leaning names cluster closer to the middle, with fewer outliers. In other words, the political imprint of Republican naming practices appears more polarized (measured this way anyway).

Finally, I broke those same correlations out by gender to see whether boys’ names or girls’ names contribute more to the effect. I did that because, in an earlier post (HERE), I suggested that nominal polarization seemed to impact boy names more than girl names. So, I wanted to see if the trend is gendered or not.

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And here’s where it’s totally interesting. On the Republican side, boys’ names appear more polarized than girls’ names. But, on the Democratic side, the trend is reversed. There, girls’ names show somewhat stronger negative correlations than boys’. So, that suggests that among Republicans, political polarization impacts their naming of boys more than girls; and that, among Democrats, political polarization impacts their naming of girls more than boys. What??!?!?! Totally fascinating.

This helps me get a bit more around the ecological fallacy dilemma. I also love the method of estimation which allows county-level name data (just estimates of names not actual naming practices though). Not all political naming patterns are just reflections of population density. This suggests that there really are culturally and politically distinct naming practices, and those practices show different degrees of polarization across the political spectrum. Urban/rural sorting still matters. And it matters a lot. But it doesn’t explain everything. Some names carry political meaning independent of place.

I just think it’s so interesting that these patterns are embedded in this super intimate decision that parents make. Even before we know anything about these kids, their names (at scale) carry traces of the political worlds into which they were born.

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Is It Politics or Just Place? Rethinking Baby Name Polarization

If you’ve been following along, I’ve been thinking a lot (too much?) about political polarization and baby naming practices in the U.S. See HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE for my progress in thinking about this possibility. One of the issues that has emerged across those analyses is how easy it is to confuse political polarization with other forms of geographic or demographic sorting that might shape naming practices in the United States. It’s a challenge to do with the data. In a couple initial posts, I used state-level baby name data together with presidential election results to show that some names appear tightly associated with red states and others with blue states. And then, I used Trump vote share to produce a bit more variation to exploit in the analysis. But every time I made an argument from those findings, I kept circling back to a classic problem in ecological inference: if naming practices differ across places, how much of that difference might be the result of different political cultures, and how much is simply a reflection of where people live?

The United States is profoundly sorted along an urban–rural axis. And many political and cultural indicators vary with population density. So if a name shows up more often in states that lean Democratic, is that because Democratic parents tend to like the name, or because highly urbanized places tend to like the name and urban places are also much more apt to vote Democratic? It’s tricky. The early ways I tried to examine whether “nominal polarization” was happening couldn’t fully disentangle these possibilities. Baby name data can be broken down by state, but not further than that at the national level. But the state is too coarse a unit to separate political culture from geographic context. Maddeningly, that is just the format of the baby name data as the Social Security Administration provides them. So, the more I looked at the patterns, the more I wondered whether I was just brushing up against the limits of the data.

It’s actually moments like these when I’m reminded part of what I love about sociology (and the social sciences more generally). Sometimes, you just have to get a little creative given the data that exist. I genuinely enjoy trying to get creative because of data limitations. Every time I’ve ever experienced this, I’ve learned something new.

What I really need is more spatial resolution than state-level name data provides. But, as I said, the Social Security Administration does not release county-level or city-level baby name data. So, we have to work around that fact. And thinking about it this way actually helped. I can’t actually see how many Liams or Harpers were born in each county. It’s just not a knowable fact. But, I can see how many births occurred in each county in a given year. The CDC’s WONDER database (HERE) publishes county-level data on annual births. And those data, paired with USDA’s definitions of “urban” and “rural” counties (via the 2023 Rural–Urban Continuum Codes, HERE), enables us to estimate how urban or rural the births associated with any given baby name likely are.

Think about it this way: if a name accounts for 1% of all births in a state, I’m basically estimating that it accounts for about 1% of each county’s births within that state. This is not a formal null hypothesis (because this is not a hypothesis test in the statistical sense). But it sort of functions like a null-hypothesis test. Conceptually, we’re proceeding from a null model and then examining whether and how the data depart from that model in systematic ways that might suggest political forces at work. It’s not perfect. But it’s far more geographically sensitive than treating every state as internally homogeneous. And critically, it gives us a way to test whether the patterns that look political are actually just spatial, or not.

So, I downloaded all U.S. county births from the CDC for 2022 (the most recent year available for these data) and calculated for each county what share of births it contributed to its state. Then, using that weight, I estimated the number of babies with each name who were likely born in urban versus rural counties (using USDA definitions and data). Finally, I merged these estimates with 2020 presidential vote shares for Trump at the state level to create two measures for every name in the country: (1) how urban its likely distribution is, and (2) how strongly that same distribution correlates with proportional 2020 vote share to Trump. Taken together, these measures allow us to ask the question at the heart of the ecological fallacy concern: are names that appear “politically polarized” simply reflecting the urban–rural geography of the United States? Ahhhh!

So, if a county accounted for 12% of all births in a state, then I assigned 12% of that state’s babies with a given name to that county. This assumes that, within each state, the relative distribution of babies with a particular name follows the overall distribution of births across counties. Is that true in a literal sense? Absolutely not. As just one example of a reason this can’t possibly be true, some names are more common among particular racial, ethnic, or class groups, and those groups are unevenly distributed geographically. But for what I’m trying to understand here, that’s actually the point. This method intentionally holds constant all compositional differences within states so that any name’s predicted urban–rural pattern reflects only the geography of birth counts, not the social or demographic clustering that could already be shaping a name’s popularity. What this gives us is a kind of conservative baseline: a picture of how “urban” or “rural” a name would appear if it were distributed evenly across a state’s actual population. From here, deviations from this baseline (for example, strong correlations with Trump vote share) become meaningful indicators that political or cultural sorting matters above and beyond simple population geography.

The method is effectively a proportional allocation model and it relies on the empirical fact that county birth patterns change very little year to year (which is sort of sociologically fascinating in its own right). We are basically assuming that births are the only thing that matters, and then checking whether the actual naming patterns line up with that assumption. So, while the model cannot tell us the exact number of Harpers born in Maricopa County relative to Montgomery County, it does provide a consistent, demographically grounded way to estimate each name’s urban or rural profile. This is not perfect and far from precise. But, I think it’s precise enough for what we need in evaluating whether the political polarization in names I previously found is really just a disguised form of urban–rural sorting.

The figure below visualizes the urban–rural dimension alone. Each data point on the graph is a name, its horizontal position reflects the estimated proportion of its births occurring in urban counties, and its vertical position reflects its commonness. Most names appear on the right side of the plot. This makes sense given that most Americans live in metropolitan counties. But there is meaningful variation. Some names are concentrated in America’s densest urban centers, while others are distributed across the urban–rural spectrum. And it follows a roughly normal distribution. So, this shows us that even without politics, we can see that certain naming practices seem to reflect spatial cultural patterns. People having babies in large cities do not choose names in exactly the same ways as people having babies in small towns.

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So this tells us something we suspected: that there are urban and rural patterns of choosing baby names. This came up because many of the names my previous analyses produced among the “most polarized” felt culturally rural (e.g., Stetson, Dawson, Wrenleigh…).

Now we need to know how much of those differences explain what appeared to be political polarization in naming practices?

So next, we have to fold political behavior into the equation. The figure below uses the urban-rural measure above and then brings politics back into our analysis. Here, the horizontal axis again reflects the estimated urban share of a name’s births (similar to above), but the vertical axis below now shows how strongly a name’s state-level distribution correlates with Trump’s share of the vote in 2020. Note: I truncated the x-axis at 50% urban because basically all the data are on that side of the figure and it helps us look at the variation we have more intentionally.

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The downward slope is super interesting. Moving from left to right (from more rural to more urban names) the correlation with Trump support tends to drop. Urban names are, on average, less associated with states that voted heavily for Trump. But the real story (from my perspective and interest) is in all the noise around that trend. Even holding estimated urban share of births constant, there is quite a bit of variation in the political correlation. Lots of names with very similar proportionally urban profiles differ dramatically in their political associations. Similarly, some names with very different estimated proportionally urban profiles fall in line with each other on the vertical axis (our measure of political polarization).

This is the point. Place matters a lot. It matters a lot more than I had previously been able to acknowledge in the state-level work. But this suggests that place does not explain everything. I.e., geographic sorting is absolutely happening with baby naming; but it cannot explain all of this variation. Once we approximate the urban–rural distribution of each name, a meaningful political signal remains. That suggests that there are naming practices that are not just products of where people live, but also of the political cultures nested within those places. Basically, a good portion of name-based polarization appears to be actual political polarization, not merely geographic sorting that appears “political.” If naming were only an urban–rural phenomenon, our estimates should have no relationship to state-level political patterns. That the actual data diverge from this proposition in systematic ways suggests that politics (i.e., not just geography) is also structuring baby naming practices… at least in 2022.

I feel like this moves the idea forward an important step. It makes it possible to see where ecological fallacy risks were hiding in the earlier work and shows that the political pattern survives a more refined spatial analysis. So what’s next? I’m still thinking about it. But I think a good start would be to begin looking at specific names that are outliers using this method, at the gendered differences in these distributions I found earlier, and at whether and how these patterns have changed over time like I looked at previously. But for now, just here we see something new and important: the politics of baby names are partly about place and partly about something else entirely.

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Weapon Baby Names, Political Polarization, and American Masculinities

A BuzzFeed article recently came out claiming that “weapon baby names” are trending. The piece frames the pattern as quirky and slightly absurd—kids named Cannon, Gatlin, Arrow, Gunner, or Trigger, riding shotgun on a cultural moment that supposedly fuses ruggedness with baby-naming whimsy (pun intended). I’ve become mildly obsessed with assessing the extent to which political polarization might impact baby naming practices (“nominal polarization”) – see HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. A short version of my discoveries so far are: (1) this is absolutely happening, (2) it’s a much larger cultural phenomenon on the right than the left, (3) it impacts boy names more than girl names, and (4) it’s more challenging to separate from geographic sorting than it might initially seem.

But behind the clickbait is something I find sociologically fascinating: the rise of weapon-themed baby names is gendered, historical, and, as you might have expected from this collection of posts… politically polarized. And the pattern isn’t new. Once you look past the novelty framing, you start to see a cluster of naming practices that reflect changing ideals of masculinity, regional cultural identities, and the partisan cultural restructuring of American life.

So I pulled the full set of U.S. baby name data (1880–2024), merged it with state-level election results from the last three U.S. Presidential elections using Trump vote share by state to get more variation on polarization (see HERE for a more on this methodological decision if you’re interested), and attempted to further map out out what’s actually going on.

Before getting into trends or politics, it’s worth looking at who gets these names. BuzzFeed presents the pattern as a quirky cultural moment, but the gender story is unmistakable: these names are overwhelmingly assigned to boys. Of course they are. But still; we should pause to assess how crazy it is that that even feels “obvious.” Below, I took some of the most common I found, charting the share of children ever given the name. Only one is a “girl” name (and a variation of “Kimberly” and may not register to some who select the name as a firearms manufacturer).

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Names like Wesson, Gunner, Cannon, Maverick, Gauge, Colt, Cannon, Barrett (two “t’s”), Gatlin, and Archer are essentially 100% boy names. A few (Remington, Arrow) have some usage among girls, but the pattern is clear: weapon names overwhelmingly operate as masculine cultural objects. It’s a sad statement about the endurance of the cultural relationship between masculinity and violence. These names borrow heavily from frontier imagery, military vocabulary, gun-brand identities, and action-hero aesthetics.

The BuzzFeed article suggested that weapon names were a very recent phenomenon (emerging in the last quarter century alone). It’s not completely true that weapon-themed names are purely a post-2020 fad like the BuzzFeed article suggests. Some, like Colt, have more than a century of usage. Others emerged sharply in the post-1990 period, mirroring changes in surname-style boys’ names, country music influence, and the rise of action-adventure naming conventions. But their uptick is a decidedly contemporary pattern.

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What’s striking to me is just how similar most of these figures are. It’s an interesting visualization of how baby names follow cultural trends. Most of the lines on the above figure appear strongly correlated with each other (they rise and fall together) suggesting they are part of the same cultural trend and moment.

The BuzzFeed list catches the trend mid-stream, but beneath the surface is a longer cultural evolution tied to American masculinities.

Once we look at state-level naming rates and merge them with Trump vote share (2016–2024), the pattern sharpens dramatically: many weapon-inspired names are highly partisan (the names Cannon, Gunner, and Gatlin on the figure below show this relationship most clearly). Below are scatterplots for all weapon-themed names I found and analyzed. Each point is a state; the x-axis is average Trump vote share; the y-axis is the per-10,000 birth rate for each name.

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Aside from those highly correlated names, other names, like Remington, Maverick, Archer, are more mixed but still lean conservative. Kimber probably fits here too (also interesting to see that West Virginia is a huge outlier on the Kimber figure). A couple names, like Arrow, appear less politically sorted but still show clear geographic tendencies. And, if I’m being honest, I sort of feel like “Arrow” hits different. I could imagine Gweneth Paltrow selecting the name for a child, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear Joe Rogan suggest the name either. And then there’s “Trigger.” Thankfully, almost no one selects that name for their child. But, those small collection of people who do, live in Texas.

To make this pattern clearer, here’s a ranking of weapon names by their correlation with Trump vote share statewide (2016–2024).

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The results fall into three broad groups: (1) highly polarized gun-brand names (Gunner, Cannon, Gatlin), (2) more moderately polarized frontier/outdoors names (Colt, Ruger, Wesson, Barrett, Gauge), (3) lower or mixed partisan names (Archer, Arrow, Maverick, Remington). The consistency of this pattern points to something deeper than naming whimsy. It’s difficult not to consider names like some of these as cultural signals situated inside broader political and regional identities.

To get a clearer sense of structure, I tried something new (for me). I clustered the names in two ways—first using hierarchical clustering (a dendrogram) and then using a 2D distance map (MDS). The combined figure below shows both.

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The dendrogram (above on the left) groups names based on how similarly they’re used across states, and in your figure, three clear cultural clusters emerge. So, for instance, names that cluster on the same “branch” are drawn from the same cultural “neighborhood.” On the left, Cannon, Gatlin, Gauge, Arrow, Trigger, Ruger, and Wesson form a tight cluster on the bottom of that figure. These names are closely tied to gun-industry branding and appear together in the same deeply conservative states in recent elections, reflecting a strong “tactical” or gun-brand masculinity. Within that branch, Arrow and Trigger cluster together (two names used far less widely but culturally linked through hunting, sport, and frontier symbolism). Above, Wesson and Ruger are more connected with each other than those other names. You can see the the dendrogram sorted the names into two general branches. That’s interesting in and of itself, suggesting, possibly, different cultural branches of American masculinity and regional patterning, each with its own political and geographic footprint.

The MDS map (above on the right) translates state-level naming similarities into a two-dimensional space, making the underlying spatial structuring easier to see. Names that cluster near one another in this space tend to be used in the same kinds of places and may reflect similar cultural meanings. One very tight grouping (Wesson, Gatlin, Ruger, Cannon, Gauge, Trigger, Arrow, and to a lesser extent, Gunner) are one cluster. Another more loose grouping is comprised by Kimber, Remington, Archer, Barrett, and Colt. And Maverick appears all on his own.

I’d suggest that, contrary to BuzzFeed, weapon names are probably not best understood as part of a single unified cultural trend. They fall into at least two meaningful clusters (three if you count Maverick separately). Maybe these are distinct subcultures of masculinity. One set of names are highly partisan, very tightly clustered, and seem strongly tied to gun-rights identities and deep-red states. A second set of names feel connected to rural/frontier symbolism, cowboy aesthetics, and hunting culture (“frontier chic” as I previously suggested). If Maverick is part of a separate trend, I’d say it feels more influenced by cowboy cultural revivalism (helping explain why the name Wyatt has regained popularity). The clusters suggest to me that “weapon names” maybe aren’t a single phenomenon. They’re a set of related but distinct naming styles tied to investments in different strands of American masculine identity.

Weapon names are right in the middle of this polarization project. So, I had to write something. They sit at the intersection of gender, politics, and regional cultural identity. As a genre of politically polarized baby names, weapon names are almost exclusively given to boys, highly clustered geographically, deeply correlated with partisan political behaviors, and as I’m suggesting here, they are organized into several symbolic clusters.

Baby names don’t cause political sorting, but they reflect it in ways that are patterned and culturally revealing. And once you see these clusters, the pattern starts looking like a snapshot of a larger transformation in the cultural politics of naming.

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Chipocalypse Now: Hard Bodies, Soft Lies, and the Multiple Masculinities of Trump’s AI Politics

On September 6, 2025, Donald Trump posted a meme developed by his social media team to Truth Social more ridiculous than his Superman post I wrote about previously. In the AI generated image, helicopters soar over a burning Chicago skyline, his face grafted onto the body of a military commander, and the words Chipocalypse Now emblazoned across the top. The caption read, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning… Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” It was absurd. It was also deadly serious. A head of state declares war on a city in his own nation.

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The cultural reference is obvious, but should be seen as dangerous and disgusting. Trump’s meme borrows from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a film that has become cultural shorthand for the chaos and cruelty of the Vietnam War. The original line, Lt. Colonel Kilgore’s infamous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, is probably among the most chilling expressions of militarized masculinity in American cinema. Trump’s casual reframing of napalm as deportations is not satire; it’s a performance of strength through violence, dressed in pop-culture drag.

It made me think of Susan Jeffords’ book, Hard Bodies (1994), where she argued that the Reagan era cultivated a political style rooted in muscular invulnerability. Action heroes of that age (like Rambo, Rocky, and the Terminator) became allegories of national power, their hard bodies standing in for the body politic. As Jeffords suggested, the harder the cinematic body, the more it masked anxieties about weakness, loss, and defeat, particularly after the humiliation of Vietnam. Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” post is a twenty-first century reference to that same style. Only now, instead of Hollywood action stars, we have AI-generated social media war mongering. The body is still “hard,” but its hardness is manufactured out of pixels and prompts, proof that the fantasy itself is doing the political work.

This is not simply nostalgia for the Vietnam War film canon, though of course, that’s here too. It is a reactivation of what Cynthia Enloe described as the deep militarization of political culture, where strength, control, and violence are normalized as masculine virtues. Trump’s meme makes deportation a battlefield and immigrants an invading force, discursively framing Chicago as the site of war. The cinematic reference gives it legitimacy, but the deeper work, for me anyway, is ideological: it discursively folds immigration enforcement into the genre of war, where this type of masculine authority appears always already justified, even necessary.

Some of Lauren Berlant’s work helps illuminate the affective charge of this move, too. Politics here is not about empirical reality (e.g., Chicago’s crime rates are not up; they’re down) but about fantasy and feelings. The meme stages the world not as it is, but as it Trumps encourages it to be felt: dangerous, chaotic, and in need of a strongman’s violent command. This is how fantasy and fantastical discourses become tools of authoritarian governance.

Seen historically, Trump’s AI “Chipocalypse Now” post belongs to that lineage of media Jeffords identified, but it also signals a shift. The “hard body” once required sweat, muscles, and celluloid. Now it can be generated in seconds. Its corporeality is perhaps more manufactured here. The function, however, is the same: to compensate for fragility with spectacle, to reassert authority by staging control. What Superman Trump did for heroic masculinity, “Chipocalypse Now” Trump attempts for militarized masculinity. Both are efforts to resolve a legitimacy problem, not through policy but performance. They remind us that in the contemporary United States, authoritarian masculinity is less about reality than about design: hard bodies built on soft lies.

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The Cultural Work of “Crisis Talk”

Last year, I coauthored a piece with Ian Anthony, “On the Crisis of (White) Masculinity: Victimization Discourse and Transformations in Racialized Forms of Gender Inequality” (HERE for a PDF on Soc ArXiv). In it, we examine how white masculinity is repeatedly described as being “in crisis”; not just today, but over and over again across the past two centuries. From late 19th-century anxieties about “overcivilization” to post-World War II handwringing about men falling behind in schools and families, to more recent narratives about disenfranchised “forgotten” men, the idea that masculinity is under threat is certainly nothing new. What we argue is that this recycling of crisis discourse is not evidence of actual marginalization, not on its own anyway. Instead, we suggest that “crisis” operates as a political discourse, one that frames white men as victims at precisely moments when their structural dominance changes, is called into question, and/or publicly challenged.

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But, crisis discourse does more than misdiagnose power; it repackages power. Through such discourse, we argue that white masculinity recenters itself through the language of grievance, vulnerability, and loss. The discourse performs a kind of ideological sleight of hand recoding dominance as dispossession.

Since publishing the article, I’ve been reading more work by Jennifer Nash and heard her work referenced on Tressie McMillan Cottam’s IG account. Cottam was engaging Nash’s powerful book, Birthing Black Mothers. Here, Nash engages with unpacking crisis discourse as applied to Black mothers in a different way. And it’s got me thinking through the different kinds of work that discourses of crisis can do. Cottom discussed her analysis (on IG) of the work, connecting it with discourses surrounding loneliness among men as either a “crisis” or “epidemic” are doing. It’s connected.

Nash is interested in a different figure than Cottam and Anthony and I are discussing; she focusses her analysis on the figure of the Black mother. But Nash identifies a similar dynamic: crisis is not simply a description of harm; it’s a representational mode that structures who gets seen, how, and to what end(s). In Nash’s account, Black mothers are made visible largely through discourses of “crisis”—poverty, trauma, maternal mortality, surveillance. Nash argues that it is through these frames of suffering and precarity that Black maternal life becomes politically legible (see also Dawn Dow’s work here). Nash’s critique is not that these conditions aren’t real, but that the reliance on crisis as the dominant frame effectively flattens the lives and possibilities of Black mothers. She suggests that it also has the effect of limiting our collective political imagination by restricting Black motherhood to an affective script of pain, loss, and risk.

That argument shifted how I was thinking about Anthony and my project. While Nash writes about a group structurally marginalized, and we write about a group structurally dominant, we both suggest that “crisis” discourse is far from neutral. It is always doing something: calling certain subjects into visibility, shielding others from scrutiny, assigning blame, distributing empathy. Nash’s book asks what else might be possible if we loosened the grip that crisis has on how we recognize Black motherhood? Reading her and thinking through my own raises a parallel question for me: what would it mean to refuse white masculinity’s persistent recourse to “crisis” as its primary mode of self-understanding?

Right now, one of the most visible versions of that crisis discourse is the so-called “crisis of men’s loneliness.” It’s a theme that has gained considerable traction in mainstream media over the past few years. This is what Cottam was discussing in a few posts in IG. The story goes something like this: men today have fewer close friendships than in generations past. They’re emotionally isolated, romantically disconnected, and cut off from social support systems. This “emotional recession” is frequently linked to broader anxieties about things like men’s declining marriage rates, their shrinking presence in higher education, or their growing susceptibility to online radicalization and political extremism.

Some of this is undoubtedly true. Social isolation and loneliness are pressing public health issues, and gendered patterns may shape how those problems manifest. But as the narrative gets taken up, it starts to follow a now-familiar script: men as uniquely victimized by modernity. When this happens, things like feminism, gender equality, changing family roles, therapeutic culture, emotional literacy become the (often unspoken) culprits. And the whole discourse implicitly suggests certain kinds of solutions to the problem, as constructed. The solution? Restore something. Help men reclaim their lost sense of purpose, their “rightful place”, their emotional anchoring. Here, “crisis” reasserts itself, not as an opportunity for transformation, but as a way to resecure the center.

This is exactly the pattern Ian Anthony and I identify in our article: the notion that masculinity is in crisis because inequalities are newly made visible and challenged. It’s a subtle but powerful inversion of cause and effect. The problem isn’t that men are alone; it’s that we’ve historically treated emotional independence, stoicism, and self-containment as virtues of masculinity. Loneliness isn’t a betrayal of manhood, it’s a consequence.

Okay… but back to Nash. In Birthing Black Mothers, Nash doesn’t argue against attending to crisis. She argues against allowing crisis to be the only story we tell. What would it mean, she asks, to narrate Black maternal life through affective registers of joy, beauty, and relational creativity, not just pain? Could we ask a similar question in Ian Anthony and my analysis? What if we resisted the temptation to cast loneliness as a “crisis of masculinity”, and instead saw it as a consequence of patriarchy? What if we stopped diagnosing emotional isolation as something that happened to men and instead understood it as something masculinity helps produce?

In both cases, the move is to complicate the work discourses of “crisis” do. Sometimes they opens space for recognition. Other times, the discourse deflects responsibility. In some contexts, “crisis” calls attention to long-ignored harms. In others, it rebrands privilege as grievance. The task is to stay alert to these differences. This requires us to ask not only who is in crisis, but what crisis makes possible, and for whom.

Nash refuses to let trauma be the dominant narrative of Black mothers’ lives. But Nash also refuses the politics that come with crisis: the state programs that only recognize pain, the media frames that only elevate suffering, the solidarity that only materializes in moments of tragedy. Maybe Nash’s refusal resonates when considering discourses of white masculinity as “in crisis” as well; not because we want to replace it with a better story about men, but because we want to ask why that story keeps being told in the first place.

In a followup post, Cottam reads from Nash’s book where she is in conversation with Berlant’s framing of crisis discourse as a “redefinitional tactic” (HERE on IG). I looked for the direct quote in my copy and couldn’t find the exact page. So, this is my transcription from Cottam’s post: “The deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a ‘redefinitional tactic’, an inflationary, distorting, and misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event, because as a structural or predictable condition, it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis implicitly calls for” (Nash).

So I’m still thinking about “crisis” talk. Not just as a claim, but as a discursive move or affective genre. Discourses of “crisis” are often mobilized as though they are merely descriptive. But discourses shape how we see and make sense of the world, identify “problems”, and often imply certain kinds of solutions. When “crisis” operates in ways that purport to be merely descriptive, we fail to appreciate how discourses of crisis might also be seen as a mode of governance.

I have long been convinced that if we want to understand what power is doing, it’s smart to pay close attention to when and where it declares itself wounded.

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Superman Trump and the Crisis of Masculinity by Design

On July 10, 2025, the official White House X account posted an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as Superman. He’s shown in the red-and-blue suit, cape flowing, mid-flight. The caption reads: “A TRUMP PRESIDENCY | TRUTH | JUSTICE | AND THE AMERICAN WAY | SUPERMAN”. It’s the kind of image that might circulate in the meme-iverse of fringe Trump fandom, buried in the corners of Telegram or Truth Social. But this came from the White House’s official feed. It would be easy to write it off as absurd. It is absurd. And it’s also clearly just a drop in the bucket when it comes to issues facing the world today as a direct result on this administration. But it is also politically revealing.

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In some ways, the post joined the chorus of Trump co-opting pop cultural events not actually about him at all – like awkwardly staying on stage while the men’s FIFA world cup team celebrated their win. Here, the image taps into one of the most enduring symbols of American masculinity. Superman is not just a superhero. He is the archetype of superheroes. Strong but humble. Invincible but principled. Masculine in the most “traditional” sense. There’s a reason Superman has historically been invoked as a stand-in for ideal American manhood: he is disciplined, powerful, and morally clear. He saves, protects, and never wavers. And while media suggested conservative Americans were up in arms about how “woke” the new Superman movie is, Trump’s social media team attempts to casually co-opt the symbolism and cultural moment in a tweet.

But this image isn’t just about symbolism. It’s also about simulation. It wasn’t drawn, photographed, or staged. It was generated with AI. An AI system produced the “perfect” masculine body that Donald Trump does not have and cannot perform. It smoothed over the folds of reality (his age, his body, his record), and replaced them with a glossy, stylized icon. The result is a fantasy, and not the subtle type. When masculinity falters in real life, it tends to reassert itself through exaggerated visuals. But this digital exaggeration is more than just algorithmically generated; it’s also government-endorsed by being shared on the official White House social media account.

There’s a long tradition of authoritarian leaders curating strongman imagery. Putin rides shirtless on horseback. Bolsonaro poses with rifles and flags. Modi is photographed bathed in sunlight or gazing skyward. This list goes on and on and on. In each case, these images aren’t accidental. They are cultivated spectacles of power, designed to visually affirm a leader’s control, virility, and dominance. Trump longs to be part of this tradition, though his attempts have frequently relied on tabloid bravado, pop-cultural remixing, and now, apparently, state-sponsored meme production.

This is also a shift in genre. What once emerged from fringe Twitter accounts now comes from the institutional center. The tools of meme culture (irony, exaggeration, digital rendering) have been taken up by official state communications. That shift matters. It reveals how masculinity is being remade not just through discourse but by design. Here, AI becomes a tool of gendered propaganda. The digitally enhanced body becomes the battleground for political fantasy.

This kind of visual exaggeration surfaces when masculinity feels under threat. The more fragile the man, the more muscular the metaphor. Trump as Superman is not just an image of strength. It is a response to weakness. And that weakness is not just his. It is symbolic of a broader crisis of masculine authority in a world that no longer guarantees it. The image offers reassurance. It tells a story of stability, control, and heroism. But it only needs to tell that story because something underneath it feels uncertain.

Political scientist Valerie Sperling has written extensively about how authoritarian and would-be authoritarian leaders (from Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump) use masculinity to shore up legitimacy, distract from failures, and assert dominance. In Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (2015), Sperling shows how “strongman” performances often emerge as compensatory displays when political insecurity looms. Her more recent work on Trump, Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (2020), extends this analysis, tracing how appeals to “traditional” masculinity function as both cultural provocation and political strategy.

In this light, the Superman image is not just strange or provocative. It ought to be seen as diagnostic. It tells us something important about the current moment, the tools available to political actors, and the gendered aesthetics of state power. It is masculinity by design. Manufactured, broadcast, and branded. And like many branded things, here too it is less about what it actually is and much more about what it wants to be seen to be.

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Backlash or Baseline? Contemporary Misogyny and the Meaning of the Incel Surge

I recently shared a post visualizing global patterns in incel forum activity (HERE) mapping where this particular brand of online misogyny thrives, and charting how the language in these spaces has intensified in recent years. The goal wasn’t just to show geographic distribution but to raise questions about what this digital subculture might mean politically, emotionally, and historically.

When I shared it online, a gender violence scholar whose work I have long admired (Nicole Bedera) shared a really thoughtful critique. She asked if this should really count as “backlash.” Maybe, Bedera suggested, it’s not so much a reaction to shifts toward gender equality as it is the same misogyny Sweden always had—just more visible now. It’s an important question. And, since I’m writing a book with Kristen Barber with a chapter that zooms in on the so-called “Nordic paradox,” I’ve been reading more about it. It made me reflect on what it would actually mean to call something like this a backlash. What would we need to see?

The idea of backlash, at least in the feminist sense, was famously crystallized by Susan Faludi in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Faludi argued that each wave of feminist progress tends to provoke a cultural counter-wave—what she called a “retrenchment”—wherein anxieties about changing gender norms find expression in everything from politics to pop culture. Faludi’s brilliance, though, wasn’t just in naming a reactive pattern; what was so powerful for me when I first read it was how she documented how that reaction is often disguised as progress. She showed how empowerment discourses are coopted and rerouted, even as deeper inequalities persist. If we apply that lens to the incel phenomenon, the question becomes: is this a new kind of reaction to feminist gains, or simply the same old patriarchal script rewritten for a digital stage? I think this does qualify as “backlash,” but Bedera’s questions made me rethink what I mean by that. I’m grappling with it and writing about some of what I’ve been thinking and reading to consider this questinon.

To explore this, as Bedera aptly suggests, we have to look backward. We have to go back before incel forums, before Reddit bans, before the manosphere as we know it. What did misogyny look like before feminist political reforms in this region? The Nordic countries today are often held up as models of gender equality. Before the 1970s, gender-based violence there was both widespread and institutionally invisible. Domestic violence was often treated as a private matter. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized. And women’s presence in the labor market, higher education, and politics was much more limited. What changed with the institutionalization of feminist policies wasn’t just law or policy; it was also legibility. Naming violence made it visible. Building shelters made harm count. Creating metrics, funding research, passing consent laws. All of this stuff mattered. These things didn’t create the problem of misogyny. They made it harder to ignore.

That distinction matters, because it shifts how we make sense of the current landscape. The violent speech on incel forums—mapped in my earlier post and documented in studies like those from the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI)—has intensified in both volume and extremity over the past decade. But is that a spike against equality? Or a continuation of a longer-standing power structure, now under new kinds of public scrutiny? This is a really important question, and like so many questions that involve looking back in time, offers challenges when trying to answer it meaningfully.

In The Violences of Men, Jeff Hearn argued that men’s violence must be understood not just as a set of behaviors but as a mode of social organization—one that sustains masculine dominance across domains, from family to state to selfhood. For Hearn, violence is not merely a symptom of inequality; it’s one of its operating systems. The incel community (with its rage, its entitlement, its glorification of harm, and all the rest) is arguably not a distortion of masculinity, but an exaggerated reflection of its more violent logics. If that’s the case, then backlash may not be a break from history, but a reiteration: a reassertion of power in new narrative form.

I have also been rereading some of Rosalind Gill’s work. In Mediated Intimacy, Gill offers a useful frame for understanding what’s new here. Gill traces how today’s cultural moment is saturated with contradictory messages. Women are told to be empowered, but not too assertive; desirable, but not demanding; independent, but not threatening. In that sense, the digital spaces of the incel world may be less an anomaly than an affective byproduct of postfeminist culture itself—one where feminist language circulates widely, but the structural transformations it calls for remain partial and uneven. This is something I have also considered in some of my work on “hybrid hegemonic masculinities.” When the promises of gender equality are not matched by lived experience (especially, for instance, for men navigating precarity, loneliness, and deeply held and felt perceptions of loss), what emerges is not always liberation. Sometimes, it’s grievance.

I do think that this may still count as backlash. But I don’t think that in the narrow sense of a return to some more misogynistic “before.” Rather, it’s backlash as intensification: a reactive and often ritualized performance of patriarchal grievance, shaped by both the gains of feminism and the instability of contemporary configurations of masculinity. It’s not that men have lost power, but as Demetrakis Demetriou, C.J. Pascoe, and I all argue in work on hybrid configurations of masculinity, the cultural scripts that once justified that power are unraveling. Yet, they are somehow simultaneously being rewoven in different ways by different groups. And some men are trying to write new ones—louder, crueler, and more nihilistic.

This is part of why I have invested more in learning about data visualizations. In the last post, I didn’t mean to suggest that a single map of some work tracking incel traffic around the world might answer all the important questions, but I think it helps us see where something is coalescing. If the terrain of misogyny is changing, then we need ways to trace not just where it’s going, but what it’s reacting to, what it remembers, and what it misremembers. We can’t see that on a map.

Not all backlash is loud. But some of it screams. And what we do with that noise will shape some of what comes next.

I really think the Nordic Paradox is a critical issue for scholars of gender inequality to be learning about. It helps us learn more about when feminist-inspired social transformations have feminist consequences, and when they fail to live up to their own politics. I’m still thinking. If you’re reading and you know of databases that might help me look back in time on the scale that would be necessary to look into this further, I’d be very interested.

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Mapping Misogyny: Global Patterns in Incel Forum Activity

I just got back from a really incredible conference hosted at Stockholm University, “Men and Masculinities in Transition.” Scholars from all around the world came to present work and learn with each other. It was fun for me because I got to meet many scholars whose work I’ve long admired, but never met in person. At one panel on online misogyny of different kinds, Lucas Gottzén introduced the panel and he shared that Sweden has the highest number of incels per capita of any nation in the world in his panel introduction. I was sort of shocked–both because of the claim and because it seems a difficult fact to know. I asked him about it afterwards and he shared that he read it in a Swedish report. It seemed unremarkable to many others listening. But I have been thinking about it since I left.

I think I tracked down the source of the claim (and, because I love data visuals, I put together a couple figures for this post). I think it first emerged with a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate titled “The Incelosphere.” The authors scraped over a million posts from the most active incel subforum on the internet from early 2021 through mid-2022. The content was what you’d expect (hostile, bitter, and often outright violent). But what stayed with me wasn’t the content. It was the geography.

The report relies on IP address data to estimate where the forum’s visitors were located. That allowed them to map the activity. If you map overall visits, the United States accounts for virtually half of the site’s traffic. But… when adjusted for population, the U.S. is third, behind Sweden and Ecuador. As Gottzén said, Sweden stands out most with more than two times as many visits per capita as the United States.

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Scholars who study gender, inequalities, and masculinities in Sweden seemed unsurprised by this. But, it is and should be something presented with a certain level of surprise. Sweden is often held up as a model of gender equality. Why would it also be a hotspot for online misogyny?

When I started looking for this figure, I first discovered a really interesting dissertation by Luise Bendfeldt at Uppsala University, “A Frontrunner in Gender Equality and a Hotspot for Incels?” You can read the dissertation summary online and two of the three chapters are published as articles. Among other things, Bendfeldt takes the CCDH’s forum traffic data and uses it to raise a deeper question: could the prominence of gender equality in Swedish political culture actually be part of the explanation? Her argument is that the country’s public commitment to feminist policies and norms may provoke a reaction (a sense of loss or displacement) that finds expression in online spaces like incel forums—a “backlash” argument.

Benfeldt found that, in Sweden, public responses to incel violence tend to be depoliticized. As Bendfeldt documents, media accounts and official narratives tend to frame these acts as isolated, individualized, or mental-health-related. (Scholarship on mass shootings in the U.S. has come to similar conclusions.) The gendered, ideological nature of incel discourse gets pushed aside. What’s often publicly framed as personal tragedy, in other words, is more accurately made sense of as political backlash.

That framework resonated with me and the reading I’ve been doing more generally on the “Nordic paradox.” But it also made me think of a new article we just recently published at Men and Masculinities, that directly engages these shifting dynamics. In their 2025 piece, “Mapping the (Neo)Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research,” Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood argue that we’re witnessing the emergence of a “neo-manosphere”: a global, networked, and increasingly fragmented ecosystem of men’s grievance(s).

What distinguishes the neo-manosphere, Gerrand, et al. argue, isn’t just ideological. It has to do with its affective structure – though they don’t use this term. It’s not just angry; it’s ironic, performative, and hard to pin down. The communities that make it up (e.g., incels, pickup artists, men’s rights activists) don’t operate in silos. They cross-pollinate, adapt, morph across platforms. And they’re not bounded by nation-states, even if the conditions that produce them often are.

Bringing that lens back to the CCDH data, it becomes clear that what we’re seeing isn’t just a count of forum visits. The CCDH report offers us a window into masculinity under strain. Sweden’s numbers shouldn’t just be seen as surprising. We should interpret them as a signal. They remind us that backlash doesn’t always emerge in places hostile to gender equality. Sometimes it flourishes where that equality is most visible, most institutionalized, most taken for granted.

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The two figures I made and the CCDH report more generally offer a snapshot that is already dated. But it was a a novel attempt (for me anyway) to get a handle on something slippery. The more I worked on them, the more I saw how the data, the thesis, and the theoretical work all hang together. They point to a geography of grievance that is at once global and local. A growing digital ecosystem of reaction feeds this community and is constantly shifting. A structure of feeling taking form through memes, rants, analytics dashboards, and occasionally, violence. We need to keep tracking it; and we’ll continue to need new tools to do so.

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SSA, Sex, Gender, and Population Dynamics

One of the foundational facts of human reproduction is that slightly more boys than girls are born each year (all else equal). This is known as the “natural sex ratio” at birth—around 105-106 boys for every 100 girls, or a boy-to-girl ratio of about 1.05-1.06. Because of that, demographers can spot when too many or too few girls or boys are being born (it’s among the ways sex-selective pregnancy terminations in larger numbers were first identified in some parts of the world). Anyway, I’m giving a guest lecture in a colleague’s research methods class about how sociologists ask and answer questions with a pile of baby name data and I stumbled on something I’d never thought to look for in the SSA data before (cue dramatic music).

I was calculating rates of babies given top 10-20 boy and girl names for a table and figure for the lecture, and I looked at the denominators. They looked more off comparing boy and girl denominators for the same years than I thought they should be. The figure below uses SSA name data going back to 1880. The top panel shows the total numbers of boys and girls born each year as recorded in the SSA baby name data. Below that, I just charted the denominators of babies classfied as “M” and “F” against each other, producing a “boy-to-girl ratio” for the database. The gray dashed line represents the “natural sex ratio” (a stable line hovering just above 1.05). It was a weird demography question… so I emailed Philip Cohen. He produced a figure charting the overall numbers in the SSA database to numbers of births recorded by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) – HERE. So, I added that chart below the other two.

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The data are sort of all over the place in the early years, especially in the earliest years (1880 through roughly 1955). In 1880, the SSA recorded more than 122 boys born for every 100 girls. But that plummets quickly and then recovers again by mid-century. That doesn’t mean that far more boys (and then girls) were actually born. It means that far more boys were recorded in these data. Only by the middle of the 20th century does the ratio start to converge on the natural sex ratio and start to approximate what we’d expect from NCHS data.

Full disclosure: I imagine someone else has written something on this. I have no idea. I literally just noticed it. This made me want to investigate. Why does the data look this way??? A short history of what I learned below.

In the United States, nearly everyone ends up with a Social Security number. It’s issued on a flimsy piece of paper you’re somehow supposed to safeguard for your entire life. Alongside this system, the Social Security Administration publishes yearly baby name data, tracking how often each name is used, separated by gender and birth year back to 1880. But, the Social Security program did not actually begin until 1935 (marked on the charts above). So, the administration began much later than the name record they have starts. To build that database, the government worked backwards, using information from people alive when the program started (1935). That’s why the data begin in 1880—and why there’s a noticeable jump in counts starting in the mid-1930s, as seen in the chart below. It’s just not something I’d ever wondered about. Philip shared this information with me in an email.

Okay… so what? Part of what that means is that any people included for the year 1880 were 55 when they signed up for social security cards in 1935. In 1880, there are too many boys recorded as having been born. Way too many: ~1.2 for every 1 girl. But that changes very quickly and by 1900, there are almost half as many boys recorded as girls. So, perhaps not everyone signed up for social security. Fine. But why the gender bias? One explanation Philip proposed was that survivor bias might be a factor – women might simply have been more likely to survive to 1935 because men die earlier. But, there may also have been gendered incentives for women to sign up like if it was required for them to receive survivor benefits of some sort or something.

Whatever the cause, the effect is clear: the earliest years of SSA baby name data reflect a sharp, overrepresentation of boys and then a little over half a century of overrepresentation of girls. It’s a reminder that even apparently simple statistics—like the number of babies born—are shaped by deeper social processes. Data don’t always just reflect reality; they’re created within it. Naming, like record-keeping, is a cultural practice. And when we look closely at the traces it leaves, we sometimes find ourselves looking not just at what happened, but at what got counted—and that means we’ll miss what didn’t get counted.

So… how might this matter for baby name data. I don’t fully know. But, it made me think of Philip’s tracking of the decline of the name “Mary” among baby girls over the period SSA data records (see HERE for a recent update). Cohen notes that 1961 marks the last year that “Mary” was the most popular girls name. Between 1880 and 1961, it was the most popular girls name in the U.S…. according to SSA. And, I’m not necessarily questioning that. But, by 1910, the SSA baby name data record only approximately 20% of the births recorded by the National Center for Health Statistics. Maybe there’s “something about Mary” at the movie suggests and the reason Mary’s and Michael’s and other names classified by SSA data as the most popular in that period of history were simply the most popular among those who signed up.

Maybe more has been written on this. I tried to look it up and was surprised fewer people make a big deal out of it than I was able to find because it seems a big issue with an important dataset for a lot of scholarship. If someone reading is aware of more about this that I was not able to find, I’d be interested.

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“Oaklee, Oakley, Oakleigh”: Baby Naming, Politics, and Rural Revival?

I’ve been writing about looking into whether baby names might be becoming politically polarized in the U.S. (see HERE, HERE, and HERE if you’re interested). Since then, a couple things happened. First, the 2024 baby name data were released by SSA, which seems nothing short of miraculous under teh current circumstances and administration. Second, my colleague Sarah Thébaud shared this NPR story with me about conservative naming practices by looking at names starting with “Oak-“. The piece digs into the growing popularity of names like Oaklee, Oakley, Oakleigh, etc. tying them to trends in rural America and a sort of “frontier chic” naming aesthetic.

That framing aligns with some of the work I’ve been doing looking at the politics of baby names, and I had already been tracking this cluster of names starting with “Oak-.” What’s especially striking about this group isn’t just how fast some of these names have taken off. It’s also interesting where they’ve taken off. But, just start with the speed of the uptake. Below charts the rates (among boy and girl births respectively) each year for names starting with the prefix “Oak-” (including the name that is simply “Oak”). Of note here is that basically all of them emerged very recently. Names that were given to fewer than 5 children in a given year or less than 5 times in any state are not recorded. So, the NPR story interviews an “Oaklee” who grew up in the 90s. But she would have been pretty unusual at that time. Amazingly, the scholar who NPR got to comment on this is a linguistic professor who has studied naming practices among Latter-day Saints (Utah has a lot of “Oak-” names) whose name is, I kid you not, Dallin D. Oaks!!!

Today, not all Oak-names are equally common. Oakley stands far above the rest, especially for girls, but it has paved the way for a whole wave of rhyming and stylistic kin: Oaklyn, Oaklynn, Oaklee, Oakleigh, even Oaklan and Oaks. Some are well-established. Others are just getting started.

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But it’s also interesting where they emerged. I thought it would be interesting to see if all the “Oak-” names have a common origin. So, I mapped all of the states by the first year of appearance for each name (note: SSA classifies names as “m” and “f” for boys and girls, even though we don’t actually know the sex, just their sex assignment at birth). These maps offer a really basic way of looking at cultural diffusion (noting that, again, the trend will only show up after at least 5 children received a name in a given state in a given year). The diffusion patterns look interesting. Many of these names first show up in conservative or rural-leaning states—often in the Mountain West or the South—before expanding more broadly.

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I don’t know if people selecting these names would call it “frontier chic,” but I think it fits the trend. It feels accurate and describes some of the trend I’ve noted previously. What’s interesting to me here is that these aren’t just rustic-sounding names. It’s a naming style that’s regionally patterned, politically inflected, and apparently expanding. In an era when baby names are increasingly tied to identity, taste, and worldview, Oaklee and her cousins may tell us a little something about the cultural terrain of conservative America.

There aren’t enough of most of these names to do the same analysis I did with other potentially conservative names. So, I tried something else. I downloaded the state voter share that voted for Trump in every state in the 2024 election. And then I pooled all of the “Oak-” names together and took the rate of all of the names in each state between 2012 and 2024 (the whole period) so that we could make a scatterplot of Oak naming rates over a 13-year period and contemporary measure of conservativism (2024 Trump vote share). Then I plotted those against each other on the scatterplot below.

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There’s a pretty noticeable partisan pattern. States where Donald Trump received more of the vote in 2024 tend to be the same states where Oak-starting names were the most common between 2012 and 2014. And, as 2024 Trump voter share increases, the rate of Oak- names increases steadily.

It’s still hard to tear class, rurality, and politics apart here. But, it’s still interesting and continues to support the notion that if nominal partisanship is in fact a phenomenon, it might be more of a conservative phenomenon than a liberal one. Totally interesting.