As It Turns Out, You Haven't Come a Long Way, Baby

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 28, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Gloria Steinem's not going to like this, not at all. Despite 35 years of rampant feminism, people in the United States and abroad in Britain are thinking like, well, they're thinking like they always did. Indeed, it is as if almost four decades of unrelenting attacks on "male chauvinism" hadn't happened.

First comes a study that shows aggressive behavior makes boys popular (just as it always has). Researchers looked at 452 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade boys in 59 classrooms in Chicago and in North Carolina and found "that highly aggressive boys can be among the most popular and socially connected children in elementary classrooms," according to the study, which appeared in the American Psychological Association's publication Developmental Psychology.

"These boys may internalize the idea that aggression, popularity and control naturally go together, and they may not hesitate to use physical aggression as a social strategy because it has always worked in the past," one of the researchers told Reuters.

The second study, also reported by Reuters, comes from Europe where Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool, and colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw studied the medical records of 4,400 Polish men between the ages of 25 and 60, and what they found was that, when it comes to men, women prefer the tall ones. Usually.

Tall men are more sexually attractive and have more children than shorter men, said the study. "They tend to have more children, presumably because they are more attractive. They are more likely to get married, and whether they get married or not they are more likely to produce offspring," researcher Dunbar told Reuters. It's enough to make you wonder what Ma Kettle ever saw in Pa Kettle.