Here’s a delightfully un-PC item about Mitt Romney, by NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson, that’s sure to push all the right buttons. (As I write, it’s already clear from a quick survey of Twitter that those buttons have been pushed en masse.) It begins:
What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.
It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.
You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.
Read the rest here.
6 Comments
Okay, so evolutionarily speaking, the ladies should vote Romney . . . but what about us guys, shouldn’t we be ganging up against this fellow whose threatening our potential offspring with his hordes of male descendents?
Jeffery Hodges
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Not unless we want the job ourselves.
Erm… which job?
Why, the one we’re all talking about voting on, of course.
Professor Obama? It’s President Obama.
The author might have mentioned that his two predecessors also had daughters and no sons. I guess they don’t deserve the cardigan and Fallopian tubes.
My take on this election is alpha-male vs. metrosexual. We will see what the real values of this country are by now.