Affordable Family Formation at work in the Lonely Hearts columns

John Kass writes in The Chicago Tribune:

Kevin J. McGraw, a student of finches and other birds, is working toward his doctorate in evolutionary biology at the esteemed Cornell University in New York...

It's all in his latest study, "Environmental Predictors of Geographic Variation in Human Mating Preferences," published in Ethology, a European scientific journal.

But if you don't have the latest copy of Ethology handy, let's just call his study by an earthier, more precise title:

What do women really want in a guy, anyway?

"That's what I tried to determine," McGraw said on the phone Tuesday from his Cornell office. "And so we studied the lonely-hearts ads in newspapers from many cities."

One of those newspapers was the [Chicago] Tribune. He read hundreds of personal ads from the Trib and other newspapers across the country. He examined the words in the ads, those that fell into four categories: physical attractiveness, resources, emotional stability and hobbies. The frequency of words in these categories enabled McGraw to figure out what women really want. It's scientific.

You might think big-city women want men who are gentle, kind, compassionate, sensitive.

And you'd be wrong, wrong, wrong.

In cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Miami, women don't go weak for sensitive, caring guys, no matter what anyone told you.

Cash wins. As does the big luxury car; the expensive suits; the strong, handsome jaw line; the alpha personality.

"It's a question of resources," McGraw said. "Women want what birds want. They're looking for the strong genes. They're searching for a mate that will provide what they need to raise a family.

"And in big-city environments, crowded areas with lots of people, women are attracted on average to men who will accumulate these resources."

So what happened to the sensitive male?

"The sensitive male?" McGraw asked, snickering politely.

Yeah, the sensitive male, the guy without much money, without the good looks or Scorpion King physique. You know, that caring, nurturing male, the gentle guy that women are supposed to go for?

"Well, now, the sensitive male, on average, he's not going to be able to pass on his genes in a big city," McGraw said. "He'll have to move to a small town."

Yes, it sounds cruel and harsh, but ovenbirds and finches have it tough too. It's not like men didn't already know this truth.

Birds, chicks, lions, guppies, whatever. Men are easily manipulated. The females are the ones with the power to choose.

While big-city women want power, McGraw found that in smaller towns, women tend to prize emotional stability--kindness, gentleness--in a man.

So if you are single guy without much money and you're looking for the woman of your dreams, you better move to a city of more modest size, like Montgomery, Ala.

"A female bird needs resources to complete her breeding attempts in a season, and so she's going to find a male who can provide for her," McGraw said. "We transferred that idea to humans and found, that in a dense population, women really, truly emphasize things about a man that can help her get those resources to survive and reproduce."

"It's an indicator of resources," he said. "But women also highly prize physical attractiveness. They care about emotional stability on average, throughout the survey. Only in larger, more densely populated cities, resources win out."

Happily, the women of the Chicago metropolitan area aren't all that materialistic. Well, almost.

The mercenary women of San Francisco beat them, followed by women in Los Angeles and Boston. According to the study, the women of the Chicago area are slightly greedier than the women of Miami. And that's fine with me.

Women who care more about sensitive men live in cities like Montgomery, New Orleans and St. Louis.

"The big-city girls like the sugar daddies, as people have called it," McGraw said. "And the nice guys win out in the small cities. So there's still hope."

He means, for the species.

jskass@tribune.com

Clearly, the correlation is with the cost of living, especially the cost of housing. See my article "Affordable Family Formation" on how the cost of housing, marriage, and children makes some states red and other states blue.

Judging by mass murderer Chai Vang's success with the ladies, however, perhaps when gentlemen fill out their Personal ads, they should also advertise themselves as possessing an "itchy trigger finger." That seems to set feminine hearts aflutter.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer