Very interesting article in National Review.
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Normally, the NPR demographic is receptive to the wit and wisdom of Bill Hicks (another ugly and seldom-spoken truth: Bill Hicks had neither wit nor wisdom). Not so much in this case. When I shared Hicks’s observation, the host, Michel Martin, said my remark found her “trying to contain violent impulses” of her own. When I attempted to explain to her that there is a significant body of scholarly work on the subject of the relative sexual success of men with certain personality characteristics — aggression, narcissism, manipulativeness: jerkiness, in a word — she dismissed the assertion as being “based on, I don’t know, some novels that you read.”
Unfortunately for me, I read a great deal more social-science literature than fiction these days, and, while I could not pick Rihanna or Chris Brown out of a police lineup, I know more about domestic violence than I have ever wanted to.
The most frequently cited (and probably the most controversial) research on the “Chicks Dig Jerks” thesis is the “Dark Triad” work of Professor Peter Jonason of the University of South Alabama. The Dark Triad is a combination of psychological traits — subclinical psychopathology, subclinical narcissism, and what Professor Jonason calls “Machiavellianism” — that are, he believes, in fact a unitary phenomenon associated with a higher level of sexual success, defined in the literature as a larger number of total lifetime sexual partners. The correlation of the Dark Triad with larger numbers of sexual partners holds true for both men and women, but the effect is much more pronounced in men. This is unsurprising, inasmuch as men’s relative preference for larger numbers of short-term sexual relationships and women’s relative preference for long-term relationships is, as Professor Jonason notes, “one of the most consistent and strongest sex differences in the field.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...illiamson?pg=1