“Girls don’t like boys
Girls like cars and money”
– Good Charlotte, “Boys and Girls”
In the movie Weird Science, Anthony Michael Hall utters one of the all-time classic dating lies when speaking of his imaginary girlfriend*. “She’s from Canada, you wouldn’t know her.” And the conventional wisdom that men regularly lie about their sexual experience is so commonly held that it has a noun of its own, locker-room talk.
But except in the case of big-talking junior-high kids desperate to score approval points by impressing their peers, I never bought that line. For one thing, men don’t talk about sex in anywhere near the gory detail that women do. And for another, I have never known a single sexually active woman to tell the truth about her past. I don’t know if women think men’s relative lack of verbal skills equates to an equivalent deficiency of memory, but I always found it amusing to hear how a girlfriend’s stories would inevitably evolve over time.
The strangest thing is that it’s not as if I was an insecure control freak who demanded to know everything about a girl’s history. Quite the opposite, actually – 10 years ago I founded a band signed to the label that has gotten a lot of recent press thanks to the New York Times customarily inept reporting, Steve Gottlieb’s TVT Records, and like most young guys who find themselves in the music industry, I was far more interested in the immediate present than the dusty past.
But when a girl asks you a loaded question of this kind, it’s only natural to respond in like manner. And by the way, guys, the correct answer is: “I don’t know, I’ve just never viewed a woman as some kind of trophy …”
The way women tend to hide their little flings from their friends has always made me suspicious about the veracity of the fair sex. Women, it seems, must walk a tight rope, balanced precariously between what they want to do to attract men, and what will provoke other women to speak badly about them. It’s not an easy thing to do, whereas if a man can drink beer, talk about football and hold his own in a fight, he’s all right with most guys, even if he’s a transvestite homosexual poet.
So, I was interested to see that the Journal of Sex Research – which despite its name appears not to be an invention of Penthouse Forum or media hoaxer Joey Skaggs – has recently released a study which supports my suspicions: It’s the girls who are lying, not the guys. The study found that women’s stories change in keeping with the chances they’ll get caught out, as the number of reported notches in a girl’s lipstick case increase 69 percent when she thinks she’s hooked up to a lie detector.
Speaking of lies, the answers reported by both men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 also exploded the notion that everyone is having wildly promiscuous sex. The polygraph-compelled answers indicated an average of only 4.2 partners per individual, which is significantly lower than one would imagine from watching television or reading the covers of women’s magazines.
And perhaps young women are taking their deceitful cue from their favorite magazines. Liza Featherstone of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote: “It is the lifestyle magazines like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire and others that most often run the most features dedicated to sex and relationship conundrums … Just about everyone interviewed for this story said that these stories were embellished.”
There are some interesting implications to this story. First, conservatives should take heart from it, not only because young adults are far less promiscuous than advertised, but particularly because women still feel this pressure to lie. The culture will not be entirely lost until women, the traditional defenders of civilization, see no need to hide their abandonment of morality from other women.
Second, if it is indeed true that it is not men, but women, who disproportionately lie about sex, this would demolish the already creaking feminist gynomyth that a woman accusing a man of sexual assault is inherently credible. If supporting studies show similar conclusions about a female predilection for sexual duplicity, justice will require the courts to assume a bias toward the accused in the all-too-common he said-she said case sans evidence.
Which would no doubt hearten Kobe Bryant and his defenders, if not the rest of the NBA.
*Hall’s geek character in The Breakfast Club also makes a comment about a Canadian girlfriend.
