Yesterday I was reading a story at the Telegraph website and noticed a couple of intriguing "Editor’s Choice" headline links.
One intrigued the contrarian in me: "’Bad boys’ have more success with women."
This seemed counter-intuitive to me. Most of the women I know want good men, not "bad boys." As for the guys in my circle of male friends here in NJ, while I won’t deny we have our faults, I’m not sure we’re really what one would consider "bad boys." Yet on the whole we all seem to be pretty spectacularly successful with women: Nearly all of us are happily married to our first and only wives, all devout women and good mothers, with three to six kids. Most of our wives are committed homeschoolers. How much more success could a man possibly hope for?
Certainly I, blissfully married to a domestic and maternal goddess as I am, consider myself supremely successful on this front. (We have five, with number six on the way.) Still, could I be missing something? Could some form of "bad boy" behavior somehow give me even more success? I clicked the link.
Imagine my disappointment. "Secrets of James Bond’s success with women unravelled," the headline blared. The lede: "According to a new study, men who are narcissistic, thrill-seeking liars and all round ‘bad boys’ tend to have the greatest success finding more sexual partners."
Oh. Is that all. "More sexual partners." Talk about bait and switch. I thought it was about "more success with women." Like James flipping Bond is more "successful" with women than I am. Puh-lease.
And what’s the science behind this discovery? The story goes on:
Scientists believe that the root of their good fortune is simply that they try it on with more women, therefore by the law of averages are likely to ensnare more.
They say these type of men adopt a more predatory, scatter gun approach to conquests and have more of a desire to try new things which helps when it comes to meeting women, according to the study highlighted by New Scientist magazine.
Sooo… "bad boys" have lower standards, and the more women a guy is willing to sleep with, the more willing women he’s likely to get. Thanks for that startling news flash.
Now, here’s the kicker.
I went to the New Scientist website looking for the article. And right there, under "Latest Headlines," was the following blurb:
Church provides hope of faithful spouses
People use the religious community’s mating market to find a life partner who will provide a large family but won’t cheat, finds a study
Hey, maybe New Scientist does have something to say about "success with women" after all.
Here’s the interesting part of the story:
Weeden suggests that looking for partners within a religious community reduces the risk of adultery in couples adopting a monogamous, high-fertility mating strategy as there is a large fitness cost if the marriage fails: men risk losing substantial investment if the woman cheats; women risk being abandoned with a large brood and fewer resources to care for them.
"Religious groups make this deal more plausible to both partners," Weeden says. "You surround yourself with people who strongly believe that one of the worst things you can do is to abandon your spouse or sleep around."
Now, there’s some reductionistic nonsense here, in that the article suggests that churchgoing is largely or entirely a function of reproductive strategy. If that were the case, celibacy would be a really, really strange phenomenon.
So, did the Telegraph run this second story on why churchgoing guys have more success with women? I did a search at the Telegraph on "church" and couldn’t find it.
What I did find was that practically all recent "church"-related stories at the Telegraph were about controveries over homosexuality … particularly the recent Anglican clerical "gay wedding" flap.
Hm. Homosexuality and gay weddings … in church. And churchgoing is supposed to correlate with … reproductive strategy … Excuse me, my head hurts.
Getting back to the New Scientist story on churchgoing, the researcher observes: "Hardly any of the students in our study were regular churchgoers… but those who saw themselves as having many kids in stable marriages were the ones who were anticipating regular church attendance in the future." This, he argues, supports his reductionist interpretation that churchgoing is largely about reproductive strategy.
Yet, once again, what do we know about correlation and causation? It couldn’t possibly be, could it, that it’s the religious students who see themselves potentially with families, rather than the family-prone students who see themselves as likely church-goers?
Of course, a researcher who thinks in purely Darwinian terms would never ask that question.
Which is another way of saying that the Darwinian qua Darwinian can never fully understand religion … or success with women.
