As often happens, enlightenment came from an article in New Scientist (2 August 2008), about "Men Behaving Badly..." (the title of the article) in the Review section. The teaser says, "This explanation for why men attempt abysmal pick-up lines to bag a date points the finger at evolution." And then it hit me: Republicans are men. They are just trying to pick up voters for a one-night stand. Election night.
"Men Behaving Badly..." is a review of The Score: How the quest for sex has shaped the modern man by Faye Flam. I’ll be up-front with you (no lies here): I haven’t read the book. But then, I probably don’t need to. Some pieces of truth are self-proving. See if you don’t agree.
Flam posits that modern man is both "a lying, scheming philanderer and a protective, fatherly companion". He doesn’t have the equipment or stamina of many animals, but what he lacks in the size of one organ he makes up in size of another. To get mates, many animals turn to deception. Even birds use their brains:
Chickens use a series of simple calling sounds to communicate information, from predator sightings to food locations. [One study] found that males will sound a food call, even when there is no food in sight, just to lure a choice hen close enough to be jumped. Apparently, it works like a charm.
This got me thinking. Perhaps the Republican Party, still an old boys club at heart, must think that getting voters is like getting women for the night. You only actually need them for a short period of time to propagate your genes, so why go to the hard work of telling them the truth and then having to live up to it? It’s so much simpler to lie. Just lie well enough, egregiously enough, with mirth and a slight swagger, and you might hit the jackpot! You might get enough votes on the only day of the year that it counts. November 4.
The Score puts it all in perfect perspective. Roosters lie about food, male humans just lie.
The book centres on a "Seduction Boot Camp", a seminar for which men pay more than $2000 to learn techniques for bagging attractive women. Here are a few tips from the book for men [obviously studied by John McCain]: Enter a bar with female friends, so as to look extra-desirable. Be mildly rude to the women you’ve targeted. Improve on your natural looks.
In McCain’s case, he tried to improve on his natural looks by getting his image rebroadcast on a screen thirty meters high. He picked not one, but two women to appear with, a wholesale deception intended to make him look something less than dangerous. I won’t comment on his attempts to be a little rude to women. I suspect that they would be far better at identifying those instances than me.
Why aren’t the Democrats lying? I think something happened to their lying circuits, and it appears to have happened back in the ’60s. It appears that this is coincident with the feminist movement and the transformation of the Democratic Party into a true big-tent, with women actually getting some modicum of power (a little more each year, almost enough this year to make it possible to get a qualified woman presidential candidate). With women exerting more power, it’s hard to use male mating behavior to score on those one-day stands we call elections. Maybe you get a little more female mating behavior, things like talking through the issues (to make sure your potential mate isn’t some fly-by-night who talks big but can’t deliver).
This could be where the gender gap comes from, too. Women voters are slowly learning that Democrats have stowed the trickery and Republicans haven’t (as a gross generalization). They’ve developed some skepticism that makes it harder these days for politicians to promise the sky on election eve and then slip out the back door the next day. If you’re the one who gets left with the big belly, you have to be careful to evaluate the offers.
Men don’t have as much skin in the game, but frankly, we need to learn to do that evaluation, too. A lot of Republicans have proven that they don’t really care if you’re a man or a woman. Once they get what they want from you (your vote), they got all they came for. You’ve just been had.
Republicans, of course, would deny that they are lying. They would deny that they are attempting to pick up voters only for election day. They would deny that men use "creative interpretation of the facts" to pick up women. They would deny that evolution ever happened, so they would deny that it’s an explanation for why they are lying to the public. They would deny that their party is an old-boys club. They would deny that the globe is warming or that they are the father of that warming.
Trouble is, sometimes it’s just too big of a whopper to be believed.
(Articles from New Scientist are available with a paid subscription. Faye Flam’s book is published by Penguin, ISBN 9781583333129. Reviewed by Deborah Blum for New Scientist.)