{"id":345,"date":"2008-08-13T22:19:34","date_gmt":"2008-08-14T03:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=345"},"modified":"2010-07-19T02:30:36","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T07:30:36","slug":"the-great-skank-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"The Great Skank Question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Monica Lewinsky.  Rielle Hunter.  I&#8217;d haul out the tired old Marx quote about history repeating itself as farce, but l&#8217;affaire Lewinsky was pretty farcical to begin with.  As I looked at <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;q=ReilleHunter&#038;um=1&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;sa=N&#038;tab=wi\">images of Hunter<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;q=Monica+Lewinsky&#038;um=1&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=image_result_group&#038;resnum=1&#038;ct=title\">Lewinsky<\/a>, though, I was struck by a question:<\/p>\n<p>If power is, as is so often claimed, the ultimate aphrodisiac, <em>why aren&#8217;t these women sexier?<\/em>  <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not being gratuitously nasty, this genuinely puzzles me.  And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;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 &mdash;  but in this game women compete mainly on good looks because that&#8217;s a fitness-to-bear signal, and you&#8217;d expect the ones who get caught in flagrante with powerful politicians to be successful competitors. That is, generally pretty hot.<\/p>\n<p>But they&#8217;re not.  And in the last half century the quality of politicians&#8217; bimbos seems to have been steadily degrading, at least in the U.S.  Compare <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;q=Marilyn+Monroe&#038;um=1&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=image_result_group&#038;resnum=1&#038;ct=title\">Marilyn Monroe<\/a> (c.1962) with <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;q=Donna+Rice&#038;um=1&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=image_result_group&#038;resnum=1&#038;ct=title\">Donna Rice<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n<p>Is there something wrong with the conventional theory of sexual selection?  I&#8217;m inclined to doubt it, because there are plenty of examples that actually fit the theory. For a recent one, consider the <s>Prime Minister<\/s> President of France: bagging, extramaritally, the smokin&#8217; hot <a href=\"http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?hl=en&#038;q=Carla+Bruni&#038;um=1&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=image_result_group&#038;resnum=1&#038;ct=title\">Carla Bruni<\/a>.  He later chucked his wife and married Bruni, of course, but that if anything makes the bodacious Bruni a better example of a <em>more<\/em> successful competitor.  Bruni even one-upped Lola Montez; I think we have not quite seen her like since the Empress Theodora.<\/p>\n<p>So, what, is it just American politicians who let skanky women get at them?  And why has the trend gotten worse over time?<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m not buying it; if that were the driver, you&#8217;d expect these women to have gotten better-looking over time as sexual Puritanism lost its hold, not worse.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t actually have any answers to propose, I&#8217;m blogging because I think the question is interesting.  Perhaps one of my commenters will suggest a predictive theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monica Lewinsky. Rielle Hunter. I&#8217;d haul out the tired old Marx quote about history repeating itself as farce, but l&#8217;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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=345\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Great Skank Question<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2371,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/2371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}