Kay S. Hymowitz from City Journal (a great magazine put out by the New York based conservative think tank Manhattan Institute) discusses the problems feminists are having reconciling their ideology with findings in evolutionary psychology.
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Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa discusses the surprising factors that may determine whether your child is a boy or girl, such as your beauty, brains, money and level of sexual promiscuity.
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Hara Estroff Marano at Psychology Today discusses what jealousy teaches us about ourselves.
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Adam Sachs at GQ discusses the “sweet spot,” the perfect dating age range for men:
Somewhere between puberty and Cialis is that perfect moment in a single man’s life when he can date the broadest age group, when he can sleep with 23-year-olds—and their mothers—without being called a creep. He just has to know the rules
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The Italian Mama’s Boy problem.
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The title of this Evolutionary Psychology Journal article says it all, “Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities, and Emotional Commitment.” Yeah, I know: duh. But still, not a bad piece. Some key excerpts:
Much empirical work has documented how mate preferences shift according to context. Women pursuing short-term mating compared to long-term mating, for example, increase the importance they place on a man’s physical attractiveness, sex appeal, muscularity, and extravagant and immediate resource displays…Women pursuing long-term mating, in contrast, place greater importance on resource acquisition potential, such as “has a promising career” and “has good financial prospects”…
So if your goal is a one-night stand, focus on making yourself look as good as you can rather than bragging about your job. And vice versa is what you’re looking for is a wife.
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Psychology Today discusses what kissing means to men vs. what kissing means to women.
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You know how your parents and Hollywood always tell you that it’s okay to be a nerd when you’re younger? Because when you’ll grow up you’ll be successful and the popular kids will be working at the gas station? Turns out it’s a lie. According to a paper called “Popularity” by the Institute for Social & Economic Research, men who had been popular as high school seniors were making more money 35 years later than their less popular peers, even after controlling for family background and intelligence:
One additional friendship nomination in high school is associated with a 2 percent higher
wage 35 years later. This is roughly equivalent to almost half the gain from an extra year of
education. Shifting somebody from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of the school popularity
distribution – in other words, turning a social reject into a star – would be predicted to yield
him a 10 percent wage advantage. This work emphasizes the critical importance of the early
development of social skills alongside cognitive and productive skills as a basis for economic
success in adult life.
So to all those who say social intelligence isn’t as important in the long run as book smarts, think again.
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The difference between male desperation and female desperation, as described by Nando Pelusi, Ph.D. in Psychology Today:
Men and women are needy in different ways. Men get obsessed before they land a partner; women get obsessed after they find one. Men and women alike become desperate for a guarantee of love, but that desperation kicks in, roughly speaking, at different points in the relationship.
I’ve seen neediness arise even when men and women do not particularly care for the person they’re needy about.
Also:
Men and women have different unconscious reproductive motives. In casual relationships, more women than men want to know where the relationship is going and obsess about the long-term potential, because women have a lot more at stake reproductively. Women may take longer to get emotionally involved, but once they pass the threshold, they’re in. Female vigilance is evident in a woman’s tendency to test her partner at a relationship’s start—acting coy or simply being wary of his intentions—and then get obsessive once committed.
Men, by contrast, usually start out at peak emotional investment because they have a lot to gain from immediate coupling. Twenty minutes of intense pleasure does not compare to the years spent raising children. A man’s neediness stems from falling in love at first sight. Men are much more likely to agonize over how to get a woman than how to keep her…
This behavior qualifies as needy when the guy suspects the relationship is going nowhere but can’t put the brakes on. The needy approach may work, but at great emotional cost. Ironically, such behavior subverts a man’s goal, because women generally lose interest in guys who get clingy and act more like a butler than a boyfriend.
The article also makes a great distinction between strong desire and neediness:
Desire and neediness are not on the same continuum; wanting someone or something with all your heart does not by definition mean that you’re needy. You can want something passionately without turning it into an absolute necessity. A desire says, “I’d like to make this work because I really like and love this person—and I hope we click.” A need says, “This relationship must work out, or else I’m a loser and I’ll be single forever.”
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Stephen Benedict-Mason discusses “The Monogamy Hoax.” My favorite part is the subheading: “Marriage…the root cause of divorce.” Ha.
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In an article that rubbed many online commentators the wrong way, Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic, while going through her own divorce, reevaluates the whole institution of marriage and finds it comes up lacking in today’s world.
Although a lot of people railed against this article and dismissed it entirely as feminist crap, I think that too many people threw out the baby with the bathwater on this one. Regardless on how you feel about her ultimate conclusion or whether you feel her tone was needlessly callous, she does make some good observations about Americans and marriage:
I sense you picking up the first stone to hurl, even if you yourself may be twice or even three times divorced. Such a contradiction turns out to be uniquely American. Just because marriage didn’t work for us doesn’t mean we don’t believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn’t mean our hearts don’t lift at the sight of our daughters’ Tiffany-blue wedding invitations. After all, we can easily arrange to sit far from our exes, across the flower-bedecked aisle, so as not to roil the festive day. Just because we know that nearly half of U.S. marriages end in divorce—including perhaps even those of our own parents (my dearest childhood wish was not just that my parents would divorce, but also that my raging father would burst into flames)—doesn’t mean we aren’t confident ours is the one that will beat the odds. At least that is the attitudinal yin/yang described by Andrew J. Cherlin in his scrupulously argued Marriage-Go-Round: compared with our western European counterparts, Americans are far more credulous about marriage. In World Values Surveys taken at the turn of the millennium, fewer Americans agreed with the statement “Marriage is an outdated institution” than citizens of any other Western country surveyed (compare the U.S.’s tiny 10 percent with France’s 36 percent). We are also more religious—more Americans (60 percent) say they attend religious services once a month than do the Vatican-centric Italians (54 percent) or, no surprise, the laissez-faire French (12 percent). At the same time, Americans endure the highest divorce rate in the Western world. In short, although we say we love religion and marriage, Cherlin notes, “religious Americans are more likely to divorce than secular Swedes.”
Cherlin believes the reason for this paradox is that Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to a Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a “divorce culture,” it may be partly because we are a “marriage culture,” since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe. Hence Cherlin’s cautionary advice consists of two words—“Slow down”
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New York magazine’s Sex Diaries project is a fascinating documentation of the current dating scene for today’s young urbanites. Like a train wreck you can’t look away. You can read them all here.
The magazine also did a piece about their own project and highlighted some of the best of the lot.