A Truly Great Spoof of Science Reporting, via Feministe

At last, science has produced the case for cougars. As Madonna understands intuitively, nature clearly intends aging women—whether married, divorced, or single; on vacation in Cancún or just killing time on line at the DMV—to snatch up passing youths in our talons and gestate a race of supersmart children. Who themselves, I presume, will be smart enough to self-select their partners likewise, forming a superrace of egghead Demis and Ashtons, a Cleopatran paradise of trophy studs and December–May embryos. Denying this is denying biology itself, and far be it for me to deny biology!

Now, I admit, my theory makes little sense. For one, the study, at least as described in the Times, suggests that the findings about older mothers—which were part of a reanalysis of a study conducted from 1959 to 1965—were likely due to social factors, i.e., “more nurturing home environments associated with the generally higher income and education levels of older mothers.”

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But why not jump to conclusions? We do it every time a study comes out that confirms a cultural bias in the opposite direction—any bit of data that contributes to the portrait of women as desperate for an early sell date, while their roguish counterparts seek ever younger and more symmetrical reproductive targets. But the larger issue is that even the most nuanced scientific data tend to transform, in the popular consciousness, into “magazine science,” all caveats excised in the name of that greater sociobiological theme: that men and women are the way they are because this is the way they have to be.

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