The Great Skank Question

Monica Lewinsky. Rielle Hunter. I’d haul out the tired old Marx quote about history repeating itself as farce, but l’affaire Lewinsky was pretty farcical to begin with. As I looked at images of Hunter and Lewinsky, though, I was struck by a question:

If power is, as is so often claimed, the ultimate aphrodisiac, why aren’t these women sexier?

I’m not being gratuitously nasty, this genuinely puzzles me. And I don’t think it’s a trivial question, either. Evolutionary bio says women ought to be competing to mate with high-status males who can afford to support even the offspring from the casual fucks. Fine, I believe that — but in this game women compete mainly on good looks because that’s a fitness-to-bear signal, and you’d expect the ones who get caught in flagrante with powerful politicians to be successful competitors. That is, generally pretty hot.

But they’re not. And in the last half century the quality of politicians’ bimbos seems to have been steadily degrading, at least in the U.S. Compare Marilyn Monroe (c.1962) with Donna Rice (1984) with Monica Lewinsky (c.1996) with Reille Hunter (2008). The trend line runs from archetypal sex goddess (Monroe) to outright skank (Hunter) with, in the middle, stops at a fairly attractive woman (Rice) and a pudgy girl-child (Lewinsky) who might have had a good moment or three before way too many trips to the refrigerator.

Is there something wrong with the conventional theory of sexual selection? I’m inclined to doubt it, because there are plenty of examples that actually fit the theory. For a recent one, consider the Prime Minister President of France: bagging, extramaritally, the smokin’ hot Carla Bruni. He later chucked his wife and married Bruni, of course, but that if anything makes the bodacious Bruni a better example of a more successful competitor. Bruni even one-upped Lola Montez; I think we have not quite seen her like since the Empress Theodora.

So, what, is it just American politicians who let skanky women get at them? And why has the trend gotten worse over time?

My wife Cathy thinks it might be that American politicians tend to be prudes who boff ugly women as an expression of their conflicts about sex, but I’m not buying it; if that were the driver, you’d expect these women to have gotten better-looking over time as sexual Puritanism lost its hold, not worse.

I don’t actually have any answers to propose, I’m blogging because I think the question is interesting. Perhaps one of my commenters will suggest a predictive theory.

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Categorized as Sex

45 comments

  1. I think you’re using too small a data set and just measuring noise. In particular, Ashley Dupré (Spitzer’s prostitute) is a counterexample to your hypothesized trend.

  2. Since the mid-1900s, women have gotten a lot more open resoures to learn how to be good in bed. So have men, of course, which explains why some not-so-hot men are getting nice-looking women. So physical attractiveness is less important than being sexually satisfying.

  3. Perhaps quality hasn’t gone down, just all the politicians with hot mistresses are still getting away with it. Less than one prominent affair per decade isn’t really a good sample size for establishing a trend.

    Assuming that’s not the case, perhaps the theoretical targets of opportunity don’t match the actual possibilities. A powerful politician could have an affair with any number of attractive women, but wives, staff, and journalists are probably keeping an eye on just such a possibility from any new and nubile woman with access to the politician. Lewinsky and Hunter might have been women of access but without the level of attractiveness necessary to set off any red flags. If your only option for a reasonably secret affair is someone on staff that has unfettered access to you, and all attractive staff members are being watched closely for impropriety, a less attractive staffer may be better than none at all.

  4. Here’s my theory: good looking, power-hungry women will desire and will find a male who is available (that includes men who can be induced to leave an existing relationship). Currently, there is no way that a high profile American politician can get away with leaving his wife for a hottie, so the high profile American politician is stuck with the glory-hound also-rans.

    The French politician does not have this disability, so he is free to score the hottest available glory-hound.

  5. Of course, the key word here is prostitute, so it doesn’t serve as a counterexample to theories based on selection and competition. But it’s nonetheless instructive that Spitzer was willing to pay the going rate, and I still think the trend is just noise.

  6. Well, let’s be fair, here; compare their wives as well. JFK’s wife was bangable in her own right and he had an attractive mistress. Clinton’s wife, on the other hand, was fifteen miles on the wrong side of Harpytown, and he had an unattractive mistress. In both cases, the mistress was more attractive than the wife, for certain.

    Maybe modern politicians just have shitty taste. I mean, the wives of John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, 3 of the last 4 Democrat nominees for president, have been annoying, shrill bitches, and John McCain’s wife couldn’t look less friendly if she was carrying the disembodied head of a schoolboy. (Laura Bush, while not hot by any measure, at least doesn’t look like she’s a contrarian shrew.)

  7. Perhaps women no longer seeing American politicians as the most powerful people in the country, as opposed to the corporate leaders of the military industrial complex, has something to do with it.

  8. >John McCain’s wife couldn’t look less friendly if she was carrying the disembodied head of a schoolboy.

    I dunno. She doesn’t look too bad in this picture. And she elicited what is IMO the funniest comment about a politician’s wife ever a few months ago, when some guy in Denmark compared the Clintons and the Obamas vs. the McCains in this wise:

    On one side we have a lawyer who is a bitch who is also married to a lawyer going against a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is also a lawyer.

    On the other side we have a war hero married to a wealthy lady with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.

    Why Is this even a contest?

  9. Seduction isn’t about good looks but about the personality.
    I guess a not so beautiful girl doing blowjobs and being able to propose an interesting sex life is way better than a goddess just lying on the bed.

    Other point : i’m french, and it’s our president who’s married to Carla Bruni. Our Prime minister is married to an english “normal” woman. (Well, i find her attractive, too.)

  10. Other point :
    You might have encountered that : when one is brillant, it is hard to find a mate with the same type of brillance, able to understand you. Same thing when looking for a mistress. So you’re ok to accept the most bangable in the reduced pool of compatible understanding persons.

  11. First the disclaimer –as far as I know I’m not related (at least in any direct sense) to Cindy McCain-Hensley.

    Now the (possible, sorta) corollary to the question posed by esr:

    Has anyone noticed that the women that are rape victims are rarely hot babes? I’m not opining on whether the rape happened or not –I’m in favor of taking the accusation for what it’s worth –something that warrants looking into.

    My question is like the inverse or mirror of esr; why does it *seem* that no hot babes are out there claiming rape (or at least only a rather small % of those publicly claiming rape –I’ve never seen even one). You’d think it would be the archetype sex bombs that would be the ‘target’ for this (well, for lack of a better word), activity?

    I have no data links to back my opine up, this just seems to be the case from casual observation in the news, etc., still I think the two questions are likely related in some way.

  12. Maybe high status is an aphrodisiac but being a spineless kind of guy who’d sell his mother for votes – and politics in general kinda breeds that type – is a turn-off. After all, women are turned on by men who radiate reliability, who can be expected to be there and provide protection when needed.

  13. I think its a matter of changing perceptions of the status and
    prestige of high office. In Kennedey’s day it was a big deal to be president,
    but a lot of slime has been tracked through the oval office since then.
    Politicians are (for the most part rightly) viewed as scum today.

  14. It seems that beautiful, ambitious women have better things to do than to have some politician take a roll in the hay with them. Before the feminist movement opened up for careers for women, seducing a politician may very well have been the only thing they could do. The king’s court (and its modern versions) was a female ghetto. Now that women are free to pursue their ambitions and become managers, entrepreneurs, and other successful careers, it seems that only the bottom-feeders are left.

  15. I’ll add my vote to the “it’s just noise” pile – Elizabeth Kucinich springs to mind as an example of a politician’s hot mate. And Hillary Clinton wasn’t that bad looking when Bill met her in college. JFK was a dedicated tail-chaser, so sheer statistics dictate that at least some of the women he slept with would be unusually attractive :-)

    But if there is anything in it, I reckon it’s just down to availability – people tend to have relationships with those around them, and the women drawn to careers as political staffers are probably mostly going to be average-looking, because there’s no particular selection pressure for them to be anything else.

  16. A possible factor in this: could be that less attractive women are less familiar with having affairs, so aren’t as sophisticated about keeping them secret. Thus, you are more likely to actually find out about them.

  17. Vaughan, I think you underestimate -by a long shot- the power represented by the Presidence of the US, and of High Office in general. Even if viewed as scum, they commandeer a lot of pork and power. It is still a big deal to be the president, moreso in the US

  18. >After all, women are turned on by men who radiate reliability, who can be expected to be there and provide protection when needed.

    Usually. They go for hypermasculine studboys when they’re cheating, in order to capture immunoglobulin diversity and sexy-son effects. I don’t think Silky Pony Edwards quite falls in that category, though.

  19. for the politicos, these women are *available*.
    for the women, these men are *interesting* (and, perhaps “powerful”)

    Now, put Lewinsky and “Ma” Clinton on the stand, and see who you pick for a round of ‘hide the cigar’.

    BTW Nicolas Sarkozy (the President of France) divorced Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz to marry Bruni. She’s not bad.
    http://images.google.com/images?q=cecilia+ciganer-albeniz

    And before Cecilia, Marie Dominique-Culioli:
    http://images.google.com/images?q=Marie-Dominique+Culioli

    So maybe he just pulls better than Clinton, et al.

    “Love lasts a long time, but burning desire – two to three weeks” — Carla Bruni

  20. Offtopic: something you might want to blog about: http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm
    (Srsly. Not my usual kind of stuff, rather typically your kind of stuff but with an interesting twist.)

    Ontopic: immunoglobulin diversity … this kind of evolutionary psychology is sort of like comparing books by their production costs. A valid point if you are a publisher but in all the other cases you are probably more interested in their contents. Similarly, no doubt, this kind of depiction of humans as evolutionary survival machines is valid, but whatever is truly interesting and human about us (say, conscious decision-making, free will) tends to be beyond it.

  21. Honestly, I didn’t think Rielle Hunter was that bad. Not real good either, but pretty good for a pansy like John Edwards. I’m not Brad Pitt and I don’t think a man should have to be, but geez…that spineless and an asshole too? I know women like jerks, but isn’t the whole idea that the jerks are supposed to be STRONGER than nice guys?

  22. Not only is the general point a bit light on datapoints, but only two of the girls mentioned can be classed as “outright skanks”, and of those, only one fits the category well. So I’m also on the “not enough data” side

  23. Assuming we know enough to extrapolate, is it possible that more women are being faithful to existing partners? If so, that would make the old broader evolutionary strategy a new niche strategy pursued more by less attractive women with fewer good options.

    Not sure I buy my own premise in this day and age, but it is the case that overall promiscuity is actually falling slightly in the US even as skimpy dress and slutty behavior increases in the media and popular culture. Its also conceivable that cohabitation and serial monogamy takes people away from classic affairs, though I’m even less sure about that.

  24. Hello Miles, good to see you again! To cut a long story short, Ms. Kucinich is an admirably altruistic, idealistic person who really loves to help others, and I think that might be the reason she chose the omega-male Kucinich. And that’s strange. Because in my vocabulary being an altruist means using your own resources to help others, not resources taken from others by force. By definition altruistic politics cannot exist, because politics is an exercise of force. That politicians can deceive voters into believing they are good people is one thing, but can he even deceive his wife? I mean, Ms. Kucinich is a genuine, true good person, and Mr. Kucinich is a typical Leftie politician who taxes the income of other people away by force, and then acts like a big unselfish philantrope with it – a truly disgusting roleplay. How could he convince Ms. Kucinich that he is a good person, worthy for the loving attention for someone who worked with Mother Teresa?

  25. Monica and Rielle are in essence groupies, and groupies are generally more willing than beautiful. It’s not a mystery when narcissistic politicians fall for worshipful groupies.

    But Rielle (apparently pronounced “Riley,” oddly) isn’t that bad looking, IMHO. But then, while she repels me on a political/personality level, I also think Hillary wasn’t bad for a while there.

    Re Clinton and Monica, one more factor: He’s an “if it’s female and breathing” sort of guy. If you did a lineup of his partners, I suspect it would be all over the map looks-wise.

  26. One correction: Cecelia Sarkozy left him,not vice versa.

    Another comment. Kennedy, like Clinton, was a sexual glutton. Many of his women were fairly ordinary. OTOH Clinton had some lookers in his string: Gennifer Flowers, for instance.

    The dynamics of the Edwards-Hunter relationship will (I think) remain mysterious. Edwards does not appear to have a history of playing around (it surely would have been exposed in the present eruption). However, his wife’s illness probably shut down their marital sex life. I don’t think he went looking for a substitute. But… after an extended period of abstinence, he may have been (without even being aware of it himself) ripe for seduction by an aggressive woman. It would be interesting to know which of them made the first move. I would guess her: her New Age thinking could easily rationalize the relationship as some sort of cosmic connection, and his money and power would be much more attractive than her looks. It’s also possible that Edwards’ previous sexual experience was pretty much plain vanilla, while Hunter (in her New Age explorations) learned exotic sexual techniques that basically knocked him silly.

    It may be relevant that Edwards insisted the affair began while his wife’s cancer was in remission. It’s extremely likely that their sex life stopped while she was ill and in intense treatment. It’s also possible that it remained stopped after she recovered – her health was still fragile, she was 57 years old, and she had had two children only 7 and 9 years before. The Edwardses decided to have those children after their eldest son died in a crash. It seems likely that they needed fertility treatments, and such treatments mess with a woman’s hormonal system. Throw in menopause and cancer treatment, and it seems likely Mrs. Edwards’ interest in sex might never recover. But Edwards might feel unfairly denied – once she was “healthy – and thus able to rationalize his conduct, where “cheating” on a sick woman could not be rationalized.

  27. >If power is, as is so often claimed, the ultimate aphrodisiac, why aren’t these women sexier?

    heh. i noticed the same thing a while back. exceptions prove the rule (in the old english sense of “prove”: test), and this rule clearly was not a complete description.

    i do actually have a predictive theory. and it directly answers this question. it’s part of a much larger framework i’ve developed over the years which is now up to about 90% descriptive and 80% predictive (i’m still squirrelling away at the exceptions — there are a couple that suggest i need to drop the current level of underlying-fundamentals to a further level of depth — my framework is like moving from “4 elements” to “atoms”; the next step is like going from protons to quarks, with unfortunately the same level of opacity for most people). i’ll never be able to publish it because (a) looking at the length required to communicate even trivial concepts by say Popper or Dawkins, i’d have to spend 2-5 years doing nothing but writing, and (b) i would never be able to work again and quite likely would be killed within 6mths of publication — it lays bare many deeply cherished illusions, several of which are held by groups with a history of killing for even minor infractions. salman rushdie and the danish cartoonists spring immediately to mind, regarding one group.

     
    but basically:
    status is the ultimate aphrodisiac for women, not power. for example, rock stars pull groupies regardless of their appearance.
    power is only a measure of status.
    high status people have power over others because others (choose to) adapt their behaviour accordingly. at a fundamental level, status gives the owner power but the reverse is not (necessarily) true. to put it another way via examples, you can tumble from power when your (perceived) status changes, but you do not automatically become high status by acquiring power (eg, by buying a gun).

    status is a fundamental drive of humans at a DNA level. as group animals, we preferentially select for status.

    sexually dimorphic humans: speaking in extreme corner-point language: males are genetically cheap and compete in the real world (acting as the group:world interface; the darwinian selection drive), females compete in the social world (acting WITHIN the group; the intra-group selection drive). you can see this daily in micro: males in rut tend to signal/show-off physical prowess and tend to select for females displaying high reproductive ability (especially: narrow waists (without deception (fat): symptomatic of strong flexible abdominal muscles, which typically implies effortless childbirth — note dancers’ experiences)); females in rut tend to signal/show-off reproductive receptiveness/ability and to select for males regarded as high status (or displaying power), “cheap” females look to male regard, most females look to female regard. interestingly, females out of rut select for men according to the accepted current anthropological theory’s predictive norm: nurturers.

    so that’s the pure drive in micro, in isolation of context.

    but context absolutely determines available-options. i may strongly desire fresh water but in a desert i’ll drink brackish.
    a high status man may have his choice of females, but he can only choose from those around him.

    are those around him representative of the species as a whole?

    we have to look to social processes, which determine group members (or vice versa…).

    politics is not a pure status game: it is bundled with various administrative and legislative duties (its status, like medicine and law, derives from the power those activities have over other people). (modern art is the only pure status game on the planet, and in the non-game world money is pure (externalised) status.) and like any social game, it is strongly affected by the usual social processes of exclusionism (elitism). and the longer the social-world is insulated from the real-world, the greater the impact of the social processes relative to the real-world influences.
    here’s a key point, re western politicians’ choice of mistresses: most of the west has been insulated in its home territory from sudden real-world impingements for a spectacularly long time –over 50 years– so the social processes have gathered unusual momentum. in the sense of wealth insulating societies from real-world perspective, the syndrome is much older again.
    you will have noticed that it is increasingly unlikely nowadays for latecomers to politics to be able to gain useful entry: if you haven’t thrown yourself into the political environment by university (or even in high-school, in america; c.f. “wealth”, above), you are unlikely ever to gain real traction in that domain. and don’t forget that politicians are merely the most-visible tip of a much larger political infrastructure surrounding and supporting them. at an exponentially increasing rate, western politicians are far less likely to have “normal” social interactions with people who have not dedicated their lives to politics. reading descriptions of normal 50s occurrences in western political life, you are struck by how much more widely and casually they integrated with wider society than they do today.

    in a (self)selected group, the normal proportions of humanity are typically not found. in politics, the admin/legislative implications of real-world responsibility for actions tend to actively disinterest (anti-interest?) most females. so only a subset of females actively throws itself into that domain. they tend not to be females who can gain attention (=status) without the hard effort associated with playing the political game. that is, they tend to be less beautiful than average.

    so when assessing the beauty of the acquired female interest, you should look less to the average of the whole population, and specifically to the average of the females in the group that politicians move within.

  28. >(modern art is the only pure status game on the planet, and in the non-game world money is pure (externalised) status.)

    note the beauty of most women surrounding and seeking to attach themselves to high-status artists or high-wealth men tends to be extremely high relative to the average of the species.

  29. Saltation,

    Interesting theory. Seems to have an overlap with one of the things I’m trying to figure out: why are some nations, cultures more successful than others (in the sense of wealth, freedom, rights etc.), why are there failed states etc. To cut a long story short: status envy. It’s a bitch. Status envy is when you don’t want to go for win-win, you go for win-lose, because status is a zero-sum game. It’s REALLY destructive. It kills trust and voluntary cooperation, creates corruption etc. But why does have Western culture less of it than the country I was born in, Hungary, or South America, Arabs, etc.? That’s the big question I could not figure out yet, but I found a couple of interesting articles.

    For starters:

    http://www.slate.com/id/2174706/fr/flyout

    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2007/jan/15/00007/

    When the Moderate-Liberal Slate and the harcore Paleocon Steve Sailer pretty much agree in something, you know you found something important.

    Steve Dutch nails it very well:
    http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM

    And this one is pure gold too, a military advisor explains why do Arabs lose wars – mainly because of destructive competition for status between their officers:
    http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/deatkine_arabs1.html

    Edward C. Banfield – PDF, long, but interesting: the causes of poverty in Southern Italy, basically, destructive envy:
    http://www.kevinrkosar.com/Edward-C-Banfield/Edward-C-Banfield-Moral-Basis-of-a-Backward-Society.pdf

    And even Fukuyama too seems to have stopped bullshitting about the end of history and started to look into it:
    http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Social-Virtues-Creation-Prosperity/dp/0684825252/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213619611&sr=8-1

    This stuff is something hot, I think – it explains a lot, people with very different worldviews tend to agree with it, and there was very little (well-known) reserach into it. I recommend reading these – at least the top two articles and then the rest if they whetted your appetite.

    Is it compatible with what you found?

  30. I propose the cause of this trend is the increased scrutiny by the press. Kennedy got away with his pecadillos with widespread knowledge of the press. But, back then, you didn’t tell. Now the press are on any such rumor like a heyna on a lion’s leftovers. What that means is that the opportunity for modern pecadillos is smaller, consequently, the choices available are smaller. What you see then is that the pols are boffing ordinary looking girls, because they are the ones who happen to be on hand when the drapes are drawn.

  31. > Now the press are on any such rumor like a heyna on a lion’s leftovers.

    If you are a Republican, yes. If you’re a Democrat, the mainstream press will bend over backwards to cover for you.

    Or did you miss the part of the story in which the Edwards-Hunter scandal was widely reported in the blogosphere, but the only newspaper that would touch it was the National Enquirer? Only after the Enquirer had been covering the story for weeks and had been proven right beyond any reasonable doubt, did the newspapers and networks concede that yes, maybe there was a story worth investigating.

    On the other hand, the New York Times was happy to publish a story accusing John McCain of infidelity, based on nothing but the unsubstantiated innuendos of two anonymous sources.

  32. Rielle Hunter isn’t un-sexy. She doesn’t have Monica’s distinct Tracy Turnblad nature, for instance. And she’s something of a prominent social figure, having been the inspiration for a character in Generation X literature. (I know social status is a huge sexiness factor for men, but it works for women as well.)

    In Willy’s case, I would concur with PapayaSF: he’s a sex addict.

    The reason why these reports tend to come out about Republicans and not Democrats is because Republican voters stereotypically favor strict sexual morals and are more concerned with the morality of their politicians; a sex scandal involving a Repub is big news because it’s more about hypocrisy and violating the ethical trust of the voter base than sex, or even infidelity per se. Democrats tend to favor more sexually liberal practices, so a sex scandal involving a Democrat is somehow more OK because indulging your sexual desires is more in line with Democratic values, and to Dems what you do in the bedroom doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t affect the policies you support on the floor of Congress or in the Oval Office.

    (I was kind of a conservative once, and now I’m a libertarian whom many would consider a librul. I think I’ve got something of a handle on both psychological modalities.)

    Something that still demands an explanation: Why in the hell did Prince Charles cheat on the hottie Lady Di for that hag Camilla Parker-Bowles? That defies everything we think we know about sexuality.

  33. Jeff: “Something that still demands an explanation: Why in the hell did Prince Charles cheat on the hottie Lady Di for that hag Camilla Parker-Bowles? That defies everything we think we know about sexuality.”

    It sounds as if you had never been in a relationship where anything beyond sex mattered. Perhaps the Charles/Camilla affair (and relationship) brings to light some underlying wrong assumptions about that.

  34. Shenpen: good to see you too :-) It’s fun to see all the old crowd crawling out of the woodwork…

    I don’t think you’re right about Kucinich: I think he genuinely believes he’s doing the Right Thing. From the leftist (or simply non-libertarian) perspective, he’s legitimately taxing those who can afford it to improve the lives of the worse-off: no hypocrisy involved. The way he’s stuck to his campaign to impeach Bush in spite of the damage it’s probably doing to his standing within the Democratic Party also argues that he believes in what he’s doing. You may think that taxation is fundamentally immoral, but please accept that that’s a fringe position. As for the hot wife: he’s a committed idealist, and chicks dig that. Ask any revolutionary. And he’s hardly an “omega male” – he may be short, but he is a Congressman…

    BTW, Mother Teresa probably wasn’t as perfect as is commonly believed.

  35. Hello Miles,

    well actually I’m not a harcore Libertarian, I’m rather out to discover multiple alternatives to the currently ruling Progressive paradigms. But yeah, I tend to be pro-small government. Anyway, yes, you are right, it’s quite possible and considering this career-risking impeachment thing, even very likely K. actually does believe in what he does, and thus can radiate an air of idealism which can be charming. And actually now I remember that some of my friends in high school went to hard-left demonstrations mainly because the chicks liked it… hmmm.

    Actually this might be something very important, it could explain some irrationalities in the current age. If the assumption holds true that being an idealist with other people’s resources like the leftist politician, intellectual or activist does gives one a good amount of sex appeal and being an charitable with one’s own resources (see: Bill Gates, $38bn in the foundation – holy shit) somehow isn’t, then that could explain a lot of why leftist ideologies have such a strong appeal. After all that $38bn is just seen as “giving back” so gives no idealism points and thus no sex appeal points. Though why is it seen as just “giving back” is exactly because of ideological reasons, so my reasoning can be circular here. Hm, maybe the causality is circularly self-reinforcing too: ideology defines idealism, idealism grants sex appeal, sex appeal encourages others to subscribe to that ideology. Hm. Maybe.

  36. By the way, if we are looking into evolutionary explanations of human behaviour – of which I have certain reservations on the objective-subjective level, but it’s a fascinating subject nevertheless – would someone who knows more about this stuff than me take a look at this site, that attempts to explain the differences between Liberalism and Conservativism in evolutionary neuroscience and tell whether it looks like quack pseudo-science or good stuff? http://neuropolitics.org/archives2008.asp

  37. Cause the process is two way. Maybe the male player seeks a sleek player, but he also looks for one that will be convenient and play by the rules. No running to the press or the Mrs. But at least a serviceable rig.

    Then there is her gig. Some of these old players are more like the walrus than JFK in his prime. The gals follow the money and the power. And sometimes it leads to…….Teddy Kennedy? Water seeks it’s level.

  38. Good point, you would think that the president of the United States of America could have anyone of his choosing and Lewinsky is a puzzle. Not the most attractive woman and yet in this predicament with president Clinton.

    What is most sad is that he and anyone else who is in a position of power like this could not or do not refrain from abusing their position.

    I don’t know how many men could truly be men in this situation and just say no to the hordes of women throwing themselves at the these types of powerful people.

    It is nice to be average I guess.

  39. I somehow agree with Jo; the politicians choose not so attractive women because they know how greatful they will be for the attention they are giving them! and beautiful girls are high maintainence; our politicians are too busy running (or ruining depending on which side you are) our country to have time for such girls!

  40. Greg Thomas – Could not agree more. Isn’t the question who is the hunted and who is the prey though? The politician could be the hunter out to snag his prey using his power as a kick. similarly the woman of choice may well be hunting a politician for the perceived power their position holds.

  41. “The king’s court (and its modern versions) was a female ghetto. Now that women are free to pursue their ambitions and become managers, entrepreneurs, and other successful careers, it seems that only the bottom-feeders are left.” – David

    Well said and I agree. This is the best theory so far in my opinion. Women who know better and can do better won’t waste time luring politicians who are mostly scum.

  42. @Greg Thomas, yes a shame that those in power so often feel powerless to refrain from abusing their positions.

    As someone once said, Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely?

    Now who said that?

    HP.

  43. This is the best theory so far in my opinion. Women who know better and can do better won’t waste time luring politicians who are mostly scum.

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