hiester.com

The postcard you see here belongs to my wife. You probably think that this a humorous and ironic way of declaring that men are neither sensitive nor caring. There’s plenty of evidence to support this claim. For instance, in a recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer science writer Faye Flam writes about a study on kissing conducted by George Gallup at the University of Albany. Flam writes:

More than half the students reported that kissing an object of desire could mysteriously kill the attraction. It wasn’t necessarily technique that made the difference, but something more elemental. “Sometimes their whole perception changed as a result of a single kiss,” says Gallup, whose paper was published in a recent issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Men, naturally, reported that even if the kiss was a turnoff, it wouldn’t stop them from pursuing sex.

There you have it. Scientific confirmation that men are really just lust-driven lizard-brained bipeds preoccupied with the prospect of sexual pleasure at all times in all places. It would seem that higher order concepts like sensitivity and caring are beyond our reach. We are staggering through the desert, just looking for a drink of water while clubbing approaching vultures and you want us to act like we’re having high tea with the Queen?

But wait! Keep reading the column and you learn that sensitivity and caring just might be biologically embedded into men without their conscious awareness. Flam reports:

Sex itself transmits some manipulative chemical messages, according to a more controversial paper Gallup published several years ago. He found women who had sex without condoms suffered less depression than those who had sex with them, attributing the difference to antidepressant chemicals in semen.

I wonder if the guy in the postcard is George Gallup.