National Review has delivered unto us a puckishly paleoconservative cover story with a very Redditesque headline: “Like a Boss.” Which is perhaps appropriate, in that the story that goes with the headline uses the faux logic of evolutionary psychology (always popular on Reddit) in order to argue that Romney, a true alpha male, should be getting something like 100% of the female vote rather than trailing Obama by ten percent in this rather important demographic.
The article, by Kevin D. Williamson — no, not the Dawson’s Creek dude — starts off terrible:
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.
And it only gets worse from there.
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.
So, yeah. As Williamson evidently figures it, Romney oozes status, so therefore women should adore him. No, really.
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.
Heck, even his sperm is macho:
It is a curious scientific fact … 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.
But Obama, meanwhile, has got the sperm of a girly man:
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
With so much going for him, Williamson wonders, why isn’t Romney doing better with the ladies?
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.
Because all women are inherently golddiggers. It’s SCIENCE!
Given that we are no longer roaming the veldt for the most part, money is a reasonable stand-in for social status. Romney’s net worth is more than that of the last eight U.S. presidents combined. He set up a trust for his grandkids and kicked in about seven times Barack Obama’s net worth, which at $11.8 million is not inconsiderable but probably less than Romney’s tax bill in a good year. If he hadn’t given away so much money to his church, charities, and grandkids, Mitt Romney would have more money than Jay-Z.
He’s big pimpin, yo!
So why aren’t the ladies lining up for him?
Well, Williamson suggests that despite his wealth, Romney doesn’t act as rich as he really is. Indeed, he’s been known to ride coach on airlines! Williamson urges Romney to fully embrace his inner pimp, because “Americans love rich people.”
Still, despite Romney’s failure to live as large as he could, given the amount of money he’s got in the bank, Williamson still thinks he’s pretty darn alpha:
Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about?
A lot, really. Do you actually follow the news? If Americans – particularly American women — love rich guy alphas so much, there’s not a lot of evidence of this in the current presidential race. Heck, every time Romney acts like the rich person he is — you may recall his comments about his good buddies the NASCAR team owners — he becomes the butt of jokes.
Could it be that people don’t actually act the way that the cavemen and/or animals in evolutionary psychology “just-do stories” do? That, perhaps, those stories are bullshit?
Indeed, Williamson’s story is such an effective rebuttal of evo-psych nonsense, it’s hard not to wonder if National Review has just trolled itself. Or us.
Romney couldn’t pay me enough to fuck, or vote for, him. Yick yick yick.
Shorter National Review:
Romney should get all the bitches because of his manly-man man sperm.
I wouldn’t fuck Mitt Romney with Ann Coulter’s cooch.
In my current district there is a really good looking dude running for Congress. Despite that, I am voting for the guy who should be routinely smacked on general principles but who will do the best job for the district.
This trope has been around since JFK because women apparently are incapable of deciding how to vote based on the issues.
Maybe I misunderstand what the definition of alpha is supposed to be. Shouldn’t killing terrorists also make you pretty fucking alpha? Is money the only measure of alpha-dom?
Mitt Romney looks like the Mayor of Whoville. Even if his policies weren’t abhorrent, you couldn’t pay me to tap that.
There’s just too much wrong with the author’s worldview to pick it all apart. I’d be shocked to learn that any Americans would ever vote across party lines because of a candidate’s perceived babeliness.
It’s a whole separate issue to explain that I find Obama most attractive when he’s being professorial and charming, not when he’s being Mr. I Killed Bin-Laden.
And that I concur with everyone else that Romney is never being attractive.
(Ann Coulter’s cooch! Bahaha that’s good.)
If Romney earns something in the $40M range, and pays a 13% effective tax rate, how could you come up with paying $11.8M in taxes?
#### I just fapped to that 100% – 65% = 45% chick math fail comment the other day. This here snafubar is worse. It gave me blue balls of the STEM smug. Gonna have to go read about how Rihanna is the only one who could ever be there for Chris Brown for like an hour.
This is definitely supposed to be funny, but theoretically humor should be used to make some sort of point. Women aren’t following their biology, therefore what? This guy does not know how to tell a joke.
Mitt Romney is the kind of guy your mother tells you you ought to marry and the thought makes you want to ralph.
Wait a minute wait a minute… he’d get every woman’s vote, except for the freaks of nature like Demi Moore, right? Because he just admitted earlier in the article that not all women date guys who are older and more accomplished than they.
Ahahahahahahahahaha, this is fantastic. Keep up the good work, Steele; you keep finding new and hilarious ways to ruin the written word.
I’m no mathemagician, but I’m pretty sure Romney’s fortune isn’t so massive that it can be divided up into 100 million parts and still make him rich.
(Also, this is like the worst possible way to illustrate your point. You used a clumsy metaphor – why is Mitt Romney the ONLY one cloning himself in this scenario, exactly, leaving aside the the logistics that prevent it from actually working like you imply? And the sentence structure is just terrible; it’s not immediately obvious why 100 million men would be celibate, because you don’t specify that he cloned himself 100 million times, and the second half of the sentence ends up looking like a non sequitur until the reader muddles through a rereading.)
Oh yeah, baby. Makes me feel like overthrowing Mitt and redistributing his wealth.
Obviously Romney would clone himself 100 million times, thus giving us 100 million American male incels. Right?
By the way, anyone who thinks a bunch of men siring all sons is a good thing, has never heard of the Monkey Island Disaster.
Seriously, the entire article ignores the fact that Obama is currently by legal definition the most alpha human in the country, with the highest status by virtue of being president (he is also rich aside from his income as president, although I read somewhere that even if you combined the wealth of the last 7 presidents including the Bushes they’d still have less money than Mittens). If your thesis is “women want the alpha male” you can’t ignore the actual alpha male and then try to stick to that thesis.
It was pretty obvious this article was a Gawker-style linkbait, intended to get people outraged and clicking. The timing in the week of Akingate, however, was a bit unfortunate.
I love how Steele still thinks it was misandry that kept him out of a writing career.
Or maybe Romney clones himself once, the clone and the original then gain superpowers and battle it out for the title of President. This results in an apolocalyptic scenario with zombies, nukes and shit.
American society collapses, forcing people to try to survive in the harsh environment through scavenging. The total number of American make zombies is 100 million, and no one wants to have sexytimes with them.
*male
Possibly your mother but mine told me to stay away from Republicans.
@Shade
Welp, I’ve just found the premise for my next Shadowrun or WoD campaign.
The author of that article seems to think women vote with their vaginas. Dude, neither women nor voting machines work that way.
“Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men”
great. More of this ‘women are GROOOOSS when they are over 12 yrs old’ bullshit PLUS, dating an older woman is ‘subordination’??!!
Dafuq?
Given the choice between sex with Obama and sex with Romney, I’d have sex with Obama for the following reasons:
1. Obama would be happy to use a condom, for me to use my birth control.
2. If the control failed, Obama would be happy for me to have an abortion, if I wanted one.
3. Obama seems like the kind of guy who would be happy to negotiate both date and sexual circumstances so that we are both happy.
I do have one reason for not having sex with Obama, and that is he is happily married.
As for Romney? I’d sew up my vagina before having sex with him.