A Male / Female Unscientific Survey

The other day, on TV, I stumbled into a rather weird little survey on the just how powerful was a woman's prettiness on a man's attraction to her.  The survey was a segment on one of those shows featuring the glories of home decoration, the wonders of modern cookware, and how best to improve familial relations.

Now normally I would have fled the channel. I thought the survey question bordered on the ludicrous, but lingered to hear the result. The program I was much more interested in, a documentary on Bell's Theorem and quantum entanglement,* had a few minutes to go before being aired, and I already knew the result of the survey.

Or thought I did. Men fall for the pretty every time. This view was supported heavily by the (almost all female) audience.

Not so, came the answer.

The survey done by some Bureau of Statistics somewhere -- the show's host was a tad vague at this point -- indicated that some 70% of men looked for other attributes in women before  beauty.

When I thought about it, I realized that the discrepancy between the audience's results and those of the actual survey was not surprising. On these types of talk shows, men are often written off without any regard for their ability to suss out the qualities mentioned in the survey: intelligence, kindness, wit, and a good sense of humour.

Given the above, a woman with these qualities would be highly successful in the partnership milieu. Being pretty would help, but it wouldn't be the be all and end all. (Unless she were ten feet tall, came with two club feet, and possessed facial features equivalent to a relief map of Montenegro. Then, yes, perhaps all bets would be off.)

And if the survey's designer was not named in the TV show, I can give a sturdier prop to the survey's findings. Here I turn to Marcel Proust, who in one of his letters wrote, "Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination."

It is for insights like these that the good Marcel and his A La Recherche De Temps Perdu will remain a classic for a very, very long time.

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* Don't ask. Suffice it to say that Bell's Theorem was cited by Einstein as "Spooky action at a distance." If feeling brave, turn to Google. -- Ed.