CNN removes story on hormonal female voters after major backlash

AFP Photo / Ethan Miller

The hard-working editors at CNN were forced to remove an article from the network’s website this week after being called-out by critics who viewed a story they published on women voters as sexist, to say the least.

On CNN.com this week, the network posed the age-old question, "Do hormones drive women's votes?" In order to get some answers, they turned to a study from the University of Texas, San Antonio that concluded the biological inner workings of women throughout various stages of their menstrual cycle had an identifiable effect on which way they make up their hysterical and easily influential minds on Election Day.

“The researchers found that during the fertile time of the month, when levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney, by a margin of at least 20 percent,” Kristina Durante of the University of Texas told CNN of her work. “This seems to be the driver behind the researchers' overall observation that single women were inclined toward Obama and committed women leaned toward Romney,” the network reported.

According to Durante, “I think [women are] overcompensating for the increase of the hormones motivating them to have sex with other men.”

“It's a way of convincing themselves that they're not the type to give in to such sexual urges,” CNN interpreted her explanation.

Durante’s work was never released to the public, though, and the obviously insane “WTF?” factor made CNN’s hard-hitting election piece the subject of spontaneous chastising across the Web.

"CNN should be embarrassed for even asking whether hormones drive women's votes, much less publishing a post about it,” MSNBC's Jamil Smith tweeted in response. Kat Stoeffel of New York Magazine asked on her part, "What if there’s an accident at the hormone factory and we wind up electing Michael Fassbender and doing unspeakable things to Medicaid?"

Only hours after the content went live on CNN.com, the website’s editors were driven to removing the article and replacing it with an explanation:

“A post previously published in this space regarding a study about how hormones may influence voting choices has been removed. After further review it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN.”

According to the researchers, they came to their conclusion after conducting online interviews with 275 women at various stages of the cycle about their political tendencies at that specific time. Elizabeth Landau, the author of the piece, defended herself on Twitter after her article was deleted by writing, “For the record, I was reporting on a study to be published in a peer-reviewed journal & included skepticism. I did not conduct the study.”

Susan Carroll, a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, told Jezebel.com that she had her doubts though about the alleged legitimacy of the study. “There is absolutely no reason to expect that women's hormones affect how they vote any more than there is a reason to suggest that variations in testosterone levels are responsible for variations in the debate performances of Obama and Romney," they quoted her as saying.

Science-speak aside, though, Gallup suggests that there is a noticeable gap in how differing genders plan to vote, but thankfully they don’t bother to make it an issue of biological bullshitting. As of this week, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney leads President Barack Obama by 14 points among likely male voters, while the incumbent has an eight percentage point lead over his opponent among women who plan to vote during next month’s election.