Girls Love Those Stinky Shirts, Part I

I was browsing through an issue of The Economist I found in (where else?) the restroom when I learned something that helped the world make sense.

"What's a girl to do when faced with the choice between a powerful action man who has great DNA but is likely to love her and leave her, and a carpet-and-slippers kind of bloke who will hang around and bring up the kids but may not be Mr Right in the genes department? Well, ideally, she should fool the latter into bringing up the former's children."
- The Economist, "The Smell of Power"

A-HA! Now we're getting somewhere! Why do men cheat on loving, beautiful women? Because men are pigs, we all knew that. Put in a slightly nicer way, men are genetically inclined to attempt to spread their DNA around as much as possible, and may the best DNA win. Just the way we're wired. But women? How often have we heard this story: "Can you believe that Stacia cheated on her loving husband? And not only that, she's now pregant, with HIS baby! Why would she do this?"

To find out, they conducted another of my favorite studies, where they have men wear T-shirts for a few days and then have women smell each shirt and decide which odor they like the best. And indeed, the women did like the smell of that pushy, aggressive jerk that's going to treat her like crap:

"The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males' scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate. Which, given previous studies that show dominant men are indeed more likely than others to leave a woman holding the baby, makes perfect sense."

It turns out that Stacia was trying the old bait 'n' switch, and now she's holding her head in her hands, wondering why on earth she was SO STUPID...

Well, wonder no more. In a way, it's comforting... "So Bill, your wife's knocked up with the child of a football star? Well, she was just following a leftover bit of instinct, it's nothing personal."

You might wonder why I entitled this entry with "Part I". It's because there is sooooo much to talk about here, I'm sure I will have more to say on this later. Such as, it turns out that women really ARE attracted to men's armpits, for starters...