Lady Pamela Widmerpool

My best friend from university days and the best man at our wedding has always disagreed with me about Anthony Powell. Like a lot of people, he sees Powell as a sort throwback and he, like Aloysius, prefers something a little more modern. In some ways, you have to see his point. Powell's explanatory style can seem terribly old-fashioned. As time goes on, however, I think Powell gets to be more convincingly "modern" than those contemporaries. What seemed modern in some others is now obviously just the fads of the time whereas some of Powell was deeply prophetic.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the character of Pamela Flitton later known as Lady Pamela Widmerpool. She is a very good portrait of a type of modern woman who can love men in the abstract but not in the flesh.

Emotional warmth in her was directed only towards the dead, men who had played some part in her life but were no more there to do so.

Not all modern women are like this but she is a common enough type that most woman can probably find latent tendencies of the type in herself and learn to fight against them. And every man should know these tendencies for the sake of our own mental health. I say this because one of the things that women like Pamela Widmerpool are very good at doing is making you think that everything that goes wrong in a relationship and in sex is your fault.

The clearest indicator of the type is her treatment of other women. Women in her life fall into one of two categories. They are either there to play a supporting role in her life or they are a rival to be feared or conquered. The two categories are fluid and she will leave a trail of angry friends in her wake who used to think they were best friends until one day she suddenly turned on them. She will also surprise you and others by suddenly turning around and becoming close friends with another woman whom she has used as a pinata up until now.

It's worth noting in passing, how many romantic comedy and chick lit heroines match the type. In these stories the heroine seems a compelling and likeable character but that is only because the writer creating the thing is making sure the heroine's twisted world view is vindicated at every step. In real life, there are women who live in a romantic comedy they write, direct and act the lead part in. This is a full time job for them and it is shocking how easily other women and men get dragged into supporting the fiction.

And she will have an unshakeable belief that what she is doing is the route to personal happiness for her. Other people's happiness isn't even on the radar except insofar as it vindicates her self image that she is doing enough that others should be happy. In her life, as in the movies, her best friend is or should be happy in her role because the script says so.

Always sexual, never intimate
No doubt some are thinking, "Surely there are men like this too?" There certainly are bad men in the world and there are men and women who are much worse than the Pamela Widmerpool type. But, those points conceded, I'd argue that there is something uniquely feminine about the type and it was a particularly brilliant stroke on Powell's part to have drawn this out as well as the fact that she is modern; the Pamela Widmerpool type could only occur in the modern world.

Where we see this most clearly is in her attitudes towards sex; she is both aggressively sexual and sexually unresponsive at the the same time. She advertizes a frank and open attitude to sex and outwardly displays a strong sexual appetite but has a limited or even (as in the specific case of Pamela) no interest in being pleased.

Usually her particular form of self-projection excluded conceding an inch in making contacts easier, outward expression, no doubt, on an inner sexual condition. She was like a royal personage. prepared to converse, but not bestowing the smallest scrap of assistance to the interlocutor, from whom all effort, every contribution of discursive vitality, must come. (Emphasis added)

The thing about this illusion is that you will fall for it every time. And it is worth noting that a big part of the reason you will fall is that you convince yourself that she is a welcome relief from or, at least, no worse than what can seem "the usual run around". Most women will respond warmly in a social way while keeping their sexual cards very close to their chest. You will think you never know where you stand with most women sexually for the very simple reason that they don't want you to know. And most women will keep this up even after a sexual relationship has begun. The Pamela Widmerpool type seems like a refreshing change because she is so direct and open.

But, while she will advertise herself as 'sex positive", she will not show any warmth, thereby putting all the responsibility for making things happen in your lap, so to speak, and what you will not see is that, from her perspective, this is the whole point of the interaction. She doesn't see intimacy and pleasure as worthwhile ends in themselves. They are always means to to the real end which is maintaining her position as the heroine of the story. She may, unlike the extreme example of Pamela, be capable of pleasure but she always will see this as a form of surrender and will dole it out grudgingly because she doesn't want to be vulnerable. (Or she may only allow herself to really let go in casual relationships while holding back with men who are committed to her.)

You, on the other hand, will make yourself increasingly vulnerable and exposed because, for you, intimacy and pleasure are the real point. She, not believing these things are worthwhile in themsleves, will remain self-confident in the face of what would seem to you to be failures if you were in her place. What is more she will support and encourage your tendency to believe that what you need to do is to always try harder. And if you ever start to push her, she will encourage you to think that you are inadequate. Ultimately, she will destroy your confidence and leave you with little sense of dignity (as she does to X Trapnel and even to Odo Stevens in the Dance).

No she isn't just f__ing like a man
And the people around you may support her. She may not actually be a feminist but others will invoke feminist and pseudo-feminist arguments in her favour and you will be told that she is merely giving you a taste of your own medicine. And you may believe this. There is no shortage of culture out there making heroines out of women like this. Thus the horrid expression "sex positive". And note well that the expression means a positive attitude toward sex, not toward other human beings.

Now, as I say above, the defence that will always be advanced for such a woman is that she is merely doing what men do and it is important to understand that, deplorable as some of things men are capable of doing may be, she is not doing any such thing. And you can grasp this point by a simple thought experiment.

Think of the most manipulative male swine you can imagine. Imagine a guy who wouldn't hesitate to use guilt, moral manipulation, social position, money, lies or whatever to get a woman into bed and who then dumps her before any real relationship can develop. If you've never actually known a guy like this, there is a good example here.

Now try and imagine that this guy doesn't want to actually enjoy the sex as sex? Try to imagine him getting into bed with these women and holding back on his own pleasure? It simply can't be done. The guy at the link obviously fears intimacy, he spends more time beating up on the kind of "nice guy" he is scared of being than in promoting any alternative. But the sex itself is never less than good for him.

If he fails sexually, then he fails and he will see this as his failure, although he may try to hide it. The staggering thing about a Pamela Widmerpool or a Samantha Jones is that she always sees the failure as yours and not hers. And no amount of evidence to the contrary—her whole life consists of a series of short-term relationships that never go anywhere along with a failed marriage or two after all—will ever shake her from this belief.

Now that's a typo

Courtesy of Gypsy Scholar, I've just learned about the "Wicked Bible" of 1631. It seems that printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas inadvertently left the "not" out of the commandment that normally forbids adultery so that their version seemed to order us to commit adultery. The two men were fined an extravagantly large amount of money and their license to print was taken away from them.

Not surprisingly. however, some copies were carefully preserved.

Equally not surprising, Charles 1, who was to adultery what Chloe Sevigny is to bad taste, condemned them harshly for what is, having worked in publishing, a pretty easy to make mistake. Those who punished the poor men had better pray God does judge them by the same standard. (Of course, the people who had better hope that do not make up a small club.)

If you follow the link to Gypsy Scholar (a good blog), you can see an image of the offending commandment and a much better subject heading than I came up with.

two links

I've gotten to be quite a fan of The Last Psychiatrist since learning about him from Gaius. This post is a particularly good example of him at his best: How Tolerant Are You?

And here is a fortune cookie Yeats* would have hated: Platitude Cookie Alert.


* The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

(Although I must admit I've always hated that poem.)

Another Mad Men post

It’s surprising to me that the 1960s are cool again. It is especially so when you consider the particular aspects of the 1960s that are now cool. Woodstock is not cool and Playboy is. On the other hand, it also makes perfect sense to me. I always thought the world was a better place before the revolution.

My mother died a couple of years ago and, recently, my sister sent me a bunch of photos of my mother that she had found cleaning up afterward. One was a shot of my mother and father together at a nightclub. It’s a very hip-looking nightclub and my sister was pleased to think our parents really had been as hip as she liked to think they once had been. That’s because my sisters and I are all middle-aged now and we know we aren’t hip anymore if we ever were and this sort of discovery is reassuring.

The truth, however, is that we were never as hip as our parents were.

In any case, I had a surprise in store for my sister. I said, “I think I know which club that is.” My sister was thrilled at first. She was a little less so when I told her I was pretty sure it was the Boston Playboy Club. And she was even less pleased when, with the help of Google, I found images that conclusively proved that it was.

My parents were big fans of the Playboy Club and they went fairly often. The thing is, they weren’t the sort of people you think of when you think “Playboy Club”. They were married with four children in the years when the Playboy Club was one of their favourite places to go. They were also devout Catholics and no copy of Playboy Magazine ever found its way into our house. I’m sure my father saw a copy now and then but I doubt he ever bought one except maybe when out of town on a business trip and we were never going to know if he did.

But they went to the club because it was hip and fun to go and when they stopped it was because it had stopped being cool. That was sometime in 1970 and I remember being present when my folks were having a conversation about where to go and the Playboy Club was discussed as a possibility and the two of them deciding it was no longer acceptable. They went to a Greek restaurant instead that night.

We forget the astonishing degree to which magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy drove the culture back in those days. It was a culture that was urban, decidedly not ethnic and a culture that was much more optimistic than we are today. The members of this culture were people for whom the word “plastic” had positive connotations. It was a culture that mocked the idea of authentic ethnic identity and preferred made-up cultures such as Tiki culture to "the real thing". They were scared of nuclear weapons (arguably, with more reason than we are) but they believed nuclear energy could and would work.

Yes there was a certain fraud to it and you can see it right in the these lines of the oft-quoted introduction to the first issue of Playboy:

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion of Nietzsche, jazz, sex.

Never mind that Hugh Hefner never read a page of Nietzsche in his life, just note that jazz is what supposedly gets discussed but mood music is what gets listened to. But so what? They were hypocrites about some things just like we are now. The thing that makes it so compelling now is not the things they pretended to be but what they actually were. Nowadays that mood music sounds a lot better than the more “authentic” rock music that came later.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, in an interview with The New Yorker said:

The big villain on “Mad Men” is history. No matter what happens to these people’s lives, you know what’s coming next, and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to help these people feel like they’re any less subject to the throes of history.

She thinks we are living through a similar moment now. Here’s another possibility, we look back at that time and we can’t help but think that something went deeply wrong somewhere. History is the villain beacuse it robbed us of all that promise and hope.

That’s where all the criticism of the fans of Mad Men and its many imitators falls apart. The critic says, these people just don’t get how bad it was before feminism but they are talking to a generation who will mostly be working in service industry jobs where women are expected to be sex objects. Is it a bad thing that women were expected to present themselves as sex objects back then as depicted in season one of Mad Men? Well, if your answer is yes, you can’t seriously pretend it’s better today. Women who worked as bunnies were all taught to dip so that the top of their uniforms wouldn’t gape open. The young women who work at the neighbourhood pub all pointedly do bend over so I can see their breasts and do so as if their jobs depend on it (and they probably do).

More next Tuesday.

Sort of political Monday

How liberals should argue crime issues
Clifford Olson died last week. If you are fortunate enough to have never heard of him, he was a serial killer.

A friend of mine used to edit the Solicitor General's correspondence to Clifford Olson. While he was in jail, Olson wrote to the SG quite regularly. I don't think my friend was supposed to tell me about this but the task was interesting and, in a way, amusing. You see, Canada is a good liberal country and, as such, we try to rehabilitate criminals rather than just punish them. Well, actually we don't seriously try to rehabilitate anyone (a point I'll get back to) but we like to pretend we do because that makes us feel better about ourselves. We pretend so hard that the laws and regulations governing the prison system give inmates what is, for all intents and purposes a right to rehabilitation. And Olson had figured this out and was attempting to use these laws and regulations to game the system.

And there lay the trick in the writing and editing of this correspondence. The letters couldn't tell the truth, which was that no one was even vaguely interested in rehabilitating Olson. They had to play the game. Anyway, the Olson's death got me thinking about liberals and crime. You see, if there is any issue where liberals consistently alienate voters they cannot afford to lose, it's crime. Conservatives, on the other hand, know that anytime they pass "tough on crime" legislation, that liberals will over-react and come across as strident, ineffectual wimps who have nothing better to do but coddle criminals.

And this will be true even if the legislation that conservatives are proposing is stupid, pointless and unfair. More often than not, the legislation is all those things.

This is a situation where everybody loses. New legislation should be subjected to serious debate and that will never happen until liberals learn to argue more effectively here. So, as a general public service, here is what you guys are doing wrong.

Bad argument #1: We don't need to do anything about crime because crime rates are going down.
This always gets trotted out like it's conclusive. Why would it be? Suppose I said, "Fewer and fewer people are dying of cancer so lets cut back on funding research". Or how about, "The number of wars has been steadily declining over the last century so let's stop making efforts to avoid wars". Would you expect anyone to buy that?

Don't even think this argument and never, ever, ever, say it out loud.

Crime is a problem even if there isn't much. To get a notion of this, imagine that there had only been one murder in the entire history of humanity. Would that diminish the social and political importance of that murder? No it would not. To the contrary, every school kid would be taught the story of that one murder. There is a reason why the story of Cain and Abel has such power.

And notice that Abel is a supremely non-compelling character. Nobody in the history of the world ever shed a tear for that wimp. The story's power has nothing to do with pity for the victim and everything to do with our deep fear of the crime. Much like we all have dreams of falling, we all fear murder even though the chances of it happening to us are incredibly slim.

The only desirable crime rate is zero and don't argue otherwise for you are arguing against human nature. You cannot win that argument, so stop trying.

Bad argument #2: Liberals are inconsistent on crime.
While the caricature is that liberals are soft on crime in general, the truth is that there are some sorts of crime that liberals are very hard on. Think of, for example, campus rape, sexual harassment and human rights violations. If you want a clear example of how tough-on-crime legislation can do serious damage, you could not come up with a better example than what happened with the crazy explosion of accusations of child sexual abuse in day care centers and schools back in the 1990s. Likewise you might have a look at the people whose lives were ruined by "memories" of sexual abuse from early childhood supposedly "recovered" during therapy. A lot of liberals pushed very hard to have bad laws passed and prosecuted in these areas in a rush to judgment that has more than a passing resemblance to the Salem witch trials when looked at in hindsight.

And notice what is happening here. If you are an upper-middle class person with a college education (and most liberals are), the odds of your being a victim of violent crime or even theft are pretty slim. And even if you are a victim of theft, it won't have that serious an impact on you. Unless you fall victim of a Bernie Madoff, the chances of someone stealing enough from you to really hurt are slim. The kinds of crime that liberals are reflexively hard on just happen to be the kinds of crimes liberals most fear. The crimes they don't want to be hard on just happen to be the crime that the poor and the lower middle class fear most.

The Bernie Madoff case underlines this. You don't find many examples of liberals worrying that Madoff will be subjected to too harsh a punishment. Quite the contrary, when people like Bernie Madoff, Conrad Black and Ken Lay get charged, liberals fantasize about seeing them dehumanized by the justice system.

If you ever want to see just how much damage a crime like theft or vandalism can do, visit a poor neighbourhood where people are most vulnerable to these crimes. Visit a neighbourhood where people hesitate to buy the things they really want because they think these things will just be stolen from them. Visit a neighbourhood where no one puts any effort into giving their house or business any curb appeal because the odds of someone coming along and spray painting it are pretty high.

Bad argument #3: Thinking that the only thing that matters is the actual crimes
Again, liberals have no problem seeing the problem with issues such as campus rape  or human rights. With campus rape, we all grasp that the problem is not just the relatively small and declining number of women who actually get raped. We all grasp that it affects the quality of life of all women on campus that they have to fear this happening to them. We also grasp that a relatively small number of human rights abuses will tend affect thousands more people who are not directly subjected to the abuse.

And yet, with violent crime and theft, we forget this.

And anyone who comes from a tough neighbourhood can also tell you that violent criminals are very economic with their violence. There is a multiplier effect for violence and this is something even the stupidest schoolyard bully can figure out. The damage done here is much more extensive than the convict-able crimes.

By treating some crimes as more serious than others, liberals are, whether they realize it or not, really sending a message that some victims matter more than others. This is a mind-boggling stupid thing to so when you are trying to win votes from an aging population.

Bad argument #4: Rehabilitation
 Rehabilitation is not the alternative. Look, if you seriously claim to be arguing based on facts, then you cannot even begin to pretend that there is anything that even looks like compelling evidence that rehabilitation works.

And if liberals really cared even the remotest bit about the welfare of convicted criminals, we'd be hearing about prison rape every single day. We don't.

Put the two together and you can begin to see a massive weakness in the liberal position. There is a government monopoly at work here and it is a government monopoly that is heavily unionized. The same people whose jobs depend on the maintenance of ineffective rehabilitation programs are also the one who do such a poor job of protecting inmates from violent, dehumanizing crimes such as rape at the hands of other inmates. These are the people who need to be held accountable if you honestly claim to want to help criminals turn their lives around and the sad truth is that liberals are doing less than nothing to  enure there is accountability here.

The real liberal position
The thing about all these bad arguments is that they all stem from the same root problem: liberals are not willing to be honest with themselves or others about what they really believe. The real liberal stance is not that being tough on crime will be ineffective or hurt criminals. The real liberal position is that they are perfectly willing to tolerate a certain level of certain types of crime.

Liberals will, for example, argue that the war on drugs is pointless and that people are being pointlessly hurt by it and there is some merit to those arguments. But the truth is that liberals are in favour of recreational drug use. As I've pointed out before, arguments about legalization of marijuana are never about what the people who make them really want. Legalization advocates talk about the cost of enforcement, they talk about the benefits to people with terminal diseases and they talk about all the useful clothing, paper  and other products that can be made from hemp. They never acknowledge that the real point of their arguments is they they want the right to sit around and get blasted.

Likewise, liberals rail against efforts to be tough on thieves because the truth is that liberals want to weaken legal protections on property rights generally (with the singular exception of intellectual property rights which, for obvious reasons of self interest, they want to see toughened).

Likewise, liberals are not terribly keen about doing anything about youth gangs made up of visible minorities because they believe these gangs are a regrettable but understandable response to racism.

And I could keep going and going. But I think this is enough to make the point that what liberals believe to be a reasoned and principled stand on crime is actually a mass of self-interest and prejudice.

What should liberals do about it? Well, you have two choices. You could simply be pragmatic and ask yourself what sort of positions are most likely to get you votes. If you do that, you will essentially adopt the conservative tough-on-crime stance. That would work.

The other alternative is that you could develop a genuinely principled position. That would mean taking on some very solidly entrenched interests in the judicial community as well as the public service unions. It may or may not work. No one has ever tried it before so it is hard to say.

Good luck.

Womanly virtues Friday

What women can learn about feelings from men who won't talk about feelings
"I have no idea what is going on in there."

At one point or another, most women will say something like that to a man. And it's such a commonplace observation to say that women are in touch with feelings and that men aren't that it may seems ludicrous to suggest that men are, in fact, better at managing their feelings than women.

And yet the measurable evidence is unequivocal. Women are far more likely to need therapy than men. Women are far more likely to suffer from depression than men. Women suffer from far more stress-related illnesses.

Women are certainly better judges of how to respond to and respect other people's feelings but women, especially young women, manage their own feelings the way teenage boys drive cars. They are far too confident in their ability to handle everything that comes at them and they drive too fast and take too many chances.

In order to draw out some of the differences in the ways men understand feelings, let me give you a trivial example of a trick that lots of guys use to gauge women's feelings. It is a trick and it may offend you but is so common that I'm tempted to say that every single heterosexual guy in the history of the universe has used it. It's probably been used on you. You've certainly seen it happen.

Here goes. A couple are talking. They have been a couple for a while. Maybe they are all alone and maybe they are with others; it doesn't matter the trick works either way. And at some point the guy makes a suggestive remark and the woman responds.

That's the whole trick.

Now most people watch the woman when this happens but force yourself to watch the man the next time you see it. If she reacts badly, you'll see disappointment. If she reacts positively, you can see him deciding that this weekend is looking pretty good after all. Either way, it will hit you that the woman probably doesn't have a clue what really just happened or why.

Okay, that's pretty simple and even crude. What does it tell us us about the way men understand feelings?

First of all it tells us that men think observing your behaviour is a better guide to figuring out how you are feeling than what you tell us. Does that offend you? It shouldn't because it's true and you already know it's true. You see it in other people all the time. People (both women and men) are not reliable witnesses to their own feelings.

Your feelings aren't something you see when you "look deep inside yourself" they are the lens that you see everything through. We only have a vague idea of how much that lens is or is not distorting what we are seeing. When you are feeling impatient there is a very good chance you don't know that. From your perspective, other people are being stupid and inefficient. When you are in the mood for love you don't necessarily notice anything about yourself. From your perspective, the suggestive remark he has just made is clever and funny even though you'd hate the exact same remark if you weren't ready to be aroused.

Second, it tells us that feelings change. The same woman who says, "Why do you say things like that when you know it disgusts me," on Friday, will respond with a devious smile and an equally suggestive reply of her own next Wednesday.

Finally, it tells us that we can change our feelings. What guys do is figure out what your feelings are and then modify ours to fit. We don't do this perfectly. We'd rather you responded positively to the suggestive remark every time but we can swallow our disappointment and then we can start working up our enthusiasm to do something else.

What can you take away from this?

Most trivially, you can see from the first point why men hate answering questions about our feelings. We try to figure out what your feelings are right now rather than asking you and we expect you to try to figure us out rather than asking. We also value your independent judgment about what you can figure out about our feelings (provided it's given in a  sensitive way).

We can see that you like sitting around talking about feelings but we don't think it accomplishes any more important than our sitting around talking about sports does.

From the second comes what is perhaps the most important lesson: human feelings change all the time. You don't learn any deep truths about other people or about yourself from talking about feelings.  That's like deciding whether you'd like the climate in Denver based on the weather report as of 4 o'clock on a random Tuesday. It's not just that the weather report is often wrong, it's that we have no way of knowing whether this report is typical or unusual weather.

The last tells us something terribly important about love. The feelings of love are just a symptom. The real spring of love is the commitment you make and nurture. When in doubt go back to the promises you have made and remake them rather than trusting how you feel right now as a measure of your love. Then use that commitment to change your feelings.

And you can do that. Your feelings will follow your behaviour if you are consistent and persistent about it.

Manly Thor's Day Special

If the meek inherit the earth, who will drive the big trucks?
Repeat after me: sometimes men are right and women are wrong!

I use the plural here advisedly because I mean that sometimes men in general are more likely to be right than women in general are. Most men are better at navigating than most women are and no amount of cheap shots about men not asking for directions will change that. Most men are also better at managing their feelings than most women and no amount of complaining about how men don't like to talk about their feelings will ever change that.

(BTW: there is a powerful clue here about how human beings fail. If you quickly give in and ask for directions, you'll never figure out how to find your way around and if you always talk about your feelings, you'll never figure out how to control them.)

Anyway, another thing women tend to be wrong about is testosterone. It's become a favourite bête noir in a certain kind of lazy, post-feminist thinking. Latest case in point, Margaret Wente (who, I should acknowledge, is often worth reading on other subjects). Responding to ads about new testosterone drugs she writes:

I really hope men ignore those ads. Of course they won’t, because testosterone is the core of their identity. But society has too much of it. Less testosterone is good for family life and good for the entire world. Men with lower levels of testosterone are nicer, more social and less aggressive. They’re a lot less likely to go out, get drunk and wrap their car around a tree.

It's not that that isn't factually true.  The problem is that it is factually selective. Because men who have less testosterone are also less likely to do hard physical labour, less likely to train for and work in dangerous jobs such as firefighting, police, operating powerful machinery and the military, and they will be less likely to push the boundaries to create new products and services.

Rather simplistically, Wente also concludes that the recent financial crisis is a consequence of testosterone:

 On the dark side, testosterone is implicated in the world’s financial woes. Perhaps you’ve noticed that not a single woman was involved with the reckless speculation that led to the debacle of 2008, and to the European banking crisis of today.

Actually, women voted heavily in favour of candidates who  passed all sorts of laws that hamstrung the "evil, testosterone-driven bankers" who were turning mortgages down based on applicants' credit histories and that sort of "niceness" had as much to do with the financial crisis as testosterone-driven speculation did.

But, as long as we're at it, if you want to get upset about all the bad things you think testosterone-driven behaviour in the market did, you also have to give credit for all the good it has done. To paraphrase a line from Camille Paglia: Hey honey, you'd be living in a mud hut if it weren't for testosterone.

As long as I got my rant up here, a final shot on this gem of a paragraph:

New research has found that men’s testosterone levels plummet as soon as they become fathers. (Not all fathers welcome this news, as you can imagine.) This explains why even the wildest and most reckless guys are tamed by fatherhood. According to the research, men who are involved in child care have testosterone levels that are lower still. No one knows exactly why this happens, but it makes evolutionary sense. “The real take-home message is that male parental care is important,” Peter Ellison, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, told The New York Times. “It’s important enough that it’s actually shaped the physiology of men.”

This would be very touching if we didn't live in a society where the value of male parental care has been systematically demeaned  for decades now.  A society where the law says that a woman is the only one who gets to decide whether she is going to carry her child to term and yet , if she does so decide, gives the man no choice but to be financially responsible for that child and will throw him in jail if he fails. A society where two thirds of divorces are triggered by women and yet the child custody law is heavily rigged in women's favour.

Wente has, in fact, got the real point exactly backwards. Evolutionary biology has recognized the importance of fatherhood, women have not and need to be reminded.

(By the way, a note to any women who have a man in their life who regularly puts his more testosterone-driven interests on hold to make their relationship work. If you really appreciate this guy, you should regularly make time to put on your best clothes, flirt with the guy and then give him a really good ... ah ... time.)

And, as long as I'm on this subject, testosterone is really good for women too. You may want to try exercising more, especially resistance exercise such as weight-lifting (as opposed to wimpy, girlie stuff like Yoga). Those things will drive your testosterone level up and will make you more assertive and less likely to be exploited, it will give you more energy so you'll be in a better mood and you'll get  a long better with friends, family and colleages and finally, it will increase your sex drive thereby improving your relationship with the man in your life.

Testosterone, it makes you a happier and better person. "Nice", on the other hand,  is derived from a Latin word meaning ignorant. It first meant, a simple-minded or feeble person. That we now have a culture where women such as Margaret Wente think they prefer "nicer men" says much more, and nothing good, about modern women than it says about testosterone-driven men.