Dog Bites Man in Sexuality Study

There is a study out from Rutgers University that posits that women are more attracted to macho men and that the modest metrosexual meme (allegedly) typified by Hugh Grant and Alan Alda was just a flash in the pan.


Absent having a copy of the study at hand it is usually hard to meaningfully challenge the conclusions of any statistical analysis (and I am not going to subscribe to Psychology of Men and Masculinity just to find the foundation to rip this one apart) but one challenge to the validity of this study simply leaps off the screen: I’m not sure that the sample size is either large enough or representative enough to make the results reliable. As near as one can tell, this experiment tallied the responses of only 230 individuals, (130 female) to simulated job interviews and that right there limits the impact of the study, for at most it tells us of the relative attractiveness of macho men among volunteers to be found in and around Rutgers, New Jersey.

But even if it was a national study with a standard deviation of .05 this truly isn’t a man bites dog sort of story. Women have been attracted to macho men since Grog first smashed an ibex in the head and drug it over to Angelique’s cave. It worked for Grog and for many men foreplay has not evolved much further.

It’s no surprise that the emotional triggers of attractiveness that were hardwired into our brain one-hundred thousand years ago still work. In the right environment and with the right woman “Me Tarzan, you Jane” is still a great pick-up line, but don’t forget that what works in the jungle (or TGI Fridays  @9) doesn’t necessarily work in the home for one simple reason: we don’t live in the jungle.

Our environment has changed. The relationship our brains were hardwired to encourage, where the Grogs of the world would feed and inseminate the Angeliques with little or no concept of responsibility, commitment or even survival past twenty-five is not an effective relationship paradigm in today’s world.

Okay, for some guys that remains a viable paradigm: live large with several baby-mammas and either die young or get incarcerated for life.

But for the rest of us, those of us who want to live past forty, those of us who want to live to see their grandchildren and great-grandchildren the key to building long-term successful relationship, men and women alike, is in recognizing and letting go of those atavistic survival skills that worked for Grog and Angelique.

Thus the real value of the study isn’t to prove the point that macho men are more sexually attractive to some women, but to remind us that we, all of us,(or at least some of us in New Jersey) are still at times controlled by the irrational brain, the amygdala, and that our evolution as a species, but more importantly as individuals, is dependent on our ability to recognize this propensity in ourselves so that we can control it when it becomes destructive to ourselves, our intimate relationships and our families.

It’s called personal gtrowth.