In The Deep End Of The Gene Pool

Yup. I've solved the dating problem by being fat, ugly and poor. Being a nice guy is just icing on the cake.

It's good to see that the jerk problem is getting more visibility, not that it will change female behavior much or at all.

I'm always reminded of my buddy in college. He wasn't a jerk in the sense of treating women badly (with the following exception.) He just had the ability to impregnate multiple women by just sharing the same air with them. He once commented with complete sincerity to a woman that had her tubes tied that he could give her another child.

My question is if evolution is based on the reproduction lottery why rapists wouldn't have such a supreme advantage that nothing else would be left?

Remember the monster in Alien which was essentially a rapist? One of the movies suggested that if even a single alien reached Earth it would wipe out the entire human population. Seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, only a real geek would include the movie Alien in a dating discussion... BTW, my girlfriend at the time never saw the movie... she spent our entire time at the movie with her head buried in my armpit!!! For it's time, it was quite the horror movie. Geeks were saying 'let it breath vacuum' from almost the first scene.

Yes, a great date movie!!!

As far as I can tell from the young people I know (I've been out of the dating scene for a long time), women want what they've always wanted: to find a man who can protect them and their children, and given them social status. This means that women want men who are physically strong, financially successful, and socially connected. The only difference is that, now that the old rules of dating have been utterly destroyed, the details of how you are supposed to behave to a date have changed; indeed, they now appear to differ from one woman to another. Men will adapt to this, of course, but that adaptation of behavior will still favor those who are strong, successful and socially connected.

"...women want what they've always wanted: to find a man who can protect them and their children, and given them social status."

Perhaps some want that but at unreasonable levels, I can't say, or maybe the article gets it right about the widespread "micromanaging" of requirements. I've had long-term relationships/common-law marriages (several years) with two women and I can't prove or disprove either: one up and left abruptly with no explanation while I was away (somewhat surreal to come home to an empty flat with missing drapes) and the other left after waking up a Saturday morning then ran off to someone the age of her dad that she had been cheating on me with for God knows how long.

Excruciating pain as the payout for doing your best in good times and bad, who wants that? Nobody.

Wasting several years on a person only to find out it's for nothing or that someone is utterly fake and false, or wasting years drudging through person after person without finding anything worth keeping and building a relationship from turns people off. That's how simple it is. Add the ease of general disengagement from other humans in a modern society and there you go: polite misanthropy.

Habitat hermit:

*horrified* That sounds awful, just awful.

The entire text of that article could be summed up in one sentence; "nice guys finish last". And it's not just in the dating scene, either, and the word "honest" could be substituted for "nice" and the point would still be valid.

An example is the large numbers of bank execs now sitting on multi-million-dollar bonuses gained by gambling (and losing) with other people's money.

The crooks and shysters among us look after their own, too; witness the $1.7 billion transferred out of Lehman Brothers' London HQ to the USA the day before they collapsed, for the express purpose of paying bonuses. Or the virtual impossibility of suing a lawyer.

Examples on the dating scene include the troglodyte drug addict that was dating Kate Moss the model instead of serving time for multiple possession and dealing charges.