Nice Guys Finish Last, Again

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, March 10, 2010)

“Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell …”
         -- “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1854, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, a man feels the need to gird his loins as best he can -- preferably with Kevlar -- and venture into the minefields of the gender wars, unmindful of the Bouncing Betties that might emasculate him. Walk with me.

Not long ago I read an article on LiveScience.com with the title, “Spiritual Women Have More Sex.” For many men, this succinct headline tells them all they need or want to know about the article’s topic. And it would do well on a billboard in flashing red neon lights against a black background. Think of the Sunday attendance if churches began using it as the basis for an advertising campaign.

But it is also a headline that gives too much of a take-away, and with this sort of a take-away, many men would decide there was no need to read further.

That would be a shame, because in the sixth paragraph of the article there is an additional take-away that at first seems only mildly amusing: Spiritual men do not have more sex; they have less.

The explanation for this is that for spirituality as measured in terms of connectedness, universality and prayer fulfillment, women see “spiritual sex” as an avenue of transcendence.

“Believing one is intimately tied to other human beings and that interconnectedness and harmony are indispensible may lead one to believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or transcendent quality in itself,” wrote Jessica Burris, one of the researchers at the University of Kentucky involved in the study that found the correlation.

Men, on the other hand, “might not view spirituality as sexual because they biologically don’t think of sex as a gateway to emotional intimacy,” the LiveScience.com article said.

But an individual man, given enough time, eventually is going to come around to an obvious question not addressed by the article: Just who are all these spiritual women getting it on with?

Because, I guarantee you, that having read just the headline and having tried going to mass, meditation groups and Wiccan gatherings to pose as a spiritual lamb – and not getting anywhere – he will have gone back to the article to read that bit about spiritual men, and he will be stumped. The article offers no leads about who exactly is getting transcendental with these women.

However, in the time honored tradition of a journalist filling in the gaps of a story by making it up, er, making an educated guess (with the assistance of Google), I’m going to offer an answer.

Consider the following two additional pieces of the puzzle: One, Genghis Kahn started off as a minor warlord in northeast Asia around 1200 A.D. and went on to found the Mongolian Empire, which his sons and grandsons turned into the largest empire ever. Along the way, he and his descendants were so prolific that people with strands of Kahn DNA today number about 17,000,000. Two, the thinker and philosopher Confucius, who lived around 500 B.C. and whose teachings have profoundly influenced China, the Koreas, Japan and Vietnam, today has descendants numbering around 1,500,000.

Let’s be bluntly clear. Confucius, who was pretty much a rock star among the spiritual, philosopher set of guys, with a 1,700-year head start, still cannot muster even a tenth of the lineal descendants of the appealing bad-boy that Genghis Kahn must have been.

The obvious inference is that if spiritual men aren’t keeping pace with their female counterparts, then the spiritual women must be going for Type A warlords. So, not only are us nice, sensitive, spiritual guys losing the cheerleaders, models and TV idol wannabes to the musclemen, we are also losing out on the types of women that, by rights and inclination, ought to be our bread and butter.

For procreative success then, the apparent proper strategy is not to go all pious and prayerfully meditative at candle-lit séances; the proper strategy is to don your leathers and sit on a motorbike out front and maybe bite the heads off a few chickens. That seems to put you in like Flint.

And the underlying reason for all this irrationality? The only clue I have is from another news report, this one from Reuters about how recent research found that marriages in the United States generally last longer than live-in relationships. The results of the study are unimportant, though; what’s telling is that this one was conducted by the U.S. CDC.

You got it: Love is a subject to be studied by the Centers for Disease Control.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi