Saturday, October 18, 2008

What happened in my office the other day: I am in the habit of telling my students that, on average, women are more prosocial than men. Look at any list of crime stats broken out by gender. Even prostitution arrests are 40% male, and how often do they arrest the Johns?

But maybe I'll stop telling them this after an incident the other day. Two students were in my office. One was a really nice guy with cerebal palsy. The other was a very attractive young woman who is recently divorced with young children. The three of us were swapping stories, and I learned that this woman gets no child support from her ex, but she loves to go out and get drunk--she appears to be making up for a youth lost to motherhood. She has no money, so she always insists that her friends pay.

You can probably see where this is headed. This girl starts flirting with the guy. He's eating it up and telling stories about what a tough guy he is--you know he hasn't been with a woman in years--and before you know it, she has given him her number, and they plan to go out with her friends the following night. Who do you suppose is going to pay for drinks?

Now I could couple this story with my recent observation that women love Obama--a man who sits in his peaceful way looking on the million babies aborted each year--or I could, of course, mention the Caylee Anthony case, but I'll just end by saying that I won't feel like praising women much in class next time.

10 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:26 AM

    Everyone's selfish, and there are extremes of selfishness in both genders. However, female selfishness doesn't usually lead to bodies, and naturally doesn't usually get punished.

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  2. Anonymous12:20 PM

    yup. women are more prosocial in that they don't do much of the really nasty antisocial things like murder. But they're just as *selfish* as men. Also note that since the optimum scenario for women's genes is raising a large brood to maturity, whereas the optimum scenario for men's is squirting in every woman in the world and running away, women have more of an incentive to behave in a way that keeps society together.

    Besides, you shouldn't make a group judgment about a class of people based on one example. That's like those liberals who say gender differences in math ability don't exist because their father's mother's uncle's nephew's former roommate is a female mathematician. ;)

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  3. On a slightly tangential note, check back with the kids in 20 years and see what the results look like.

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  4. Anonymous9:41 PM

    Not sure how this makes her a bad person, except for her being a bad mother for getting drunk so much.

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  5. Anonymous2:32 AM

    That story was a little anti-climactic - quite frankly, getting free drinks strikes me as rather innocuous. I'm not getting why this woman is such a bad person either. I'm more concerned about this non-child support paying ex, since I suspect tax-payers are taking up the slack.

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  6. Anonymous3:00 AM

    Also note that since the optimum scenario for women's genes is raising a large brood to maturity, whereas the optimum scenario for men's is squirting in every woman in the world and running away, women have more of an incentive to behave in a way that keeps society together.

    I'm not convinced that's optimal for males. It seems to me a high number of hbd-ers have jumped aboard the hbd bandwagon simply in order to be able to take swipes at society from the cutting edge of sociology: you, conservative white man, you're deluding yourself thinking you have it made with your four bedrooom home and two kids and church on Sunday; face it, man, you're trapped; your genes are screaming to impregnate the whole block but you won't admit it to yourself; conservative prick, phony; pass me the bong.

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  7. Anonymous9:06 AM

    Actually, as Sailer has pointed out, conservative white men have more kids and hence are evolutionarily more successful. The Roissy types who run around boinking tend to use contraception to avoid getting hit with child support families. Really, the most successful from the evolutionary point of view are those big families out in the boonies with nine kids.

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  8. Anonymous1:03 PM

    sfg, that wasn't my point. Why should we serve evolution? Evolution doesn't care about us, so why should we care about evolution? It's like cheering Economic Growth for itself rather than what it can do for us. Evolution may decide the winners in a demographics-is-destiny sense, but taking orders from evolution strikes me as a perfectly idiotic way to achieve the much sought after "good life."

    I don't mean to say we should igore evolution. I mean we should fit its findings to our purposes, not ourselves to its. The backwoods bumpkin with nine kids may "win," but surely the cultivated man with but two would be the better example to emulate. Some groups, I suppose, do play the firstest with the mostest reproductive contest and that, imo, should be sufficient grounds to exclude them from a society. For those of who do believe in government (and I certainly do, despite whatever "conservative" impression I may have given), I'm hard pressed to think of a more important role for government than to assume control of reproduction levels. (The need is urgent in Europe.)

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  9. Anonymous9:34 AM

    whereas the optimum scenario for men's is squirting in every woman in the world and running away, women have more of an incentive to behave in a way that keeps society together.

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    ROFL. Three cheers for blindness of womens faults!

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  10. I have a cousin with cerebral palsy, which is not fun. His family has a little money. I figure that if one night he showed up at his favorite bar with some cute women and dropped a few hundred dollars on them in front of the regulars, he could lie happily to his cronies about what happened later that night for years, and he'd consider it money well spent.

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