According to Ms. Pat Brown, criminal profiler and CEO of The Sexual Homicide Exchange, there is no excuse for letting Jennifer Wilbanks — the 32-year-old runaway bride from Duluth, Georgia — off the hook. Wilbanks, who obviously wants and needs a lot of attention, committed a crime — including a fraudulent 9-1-1 call to claim she had been kidnapped — and should be charged as a criminal, claims Brown. Wilbanks put her family through hell and wasted precious police resources. Furthermore, she had many chances over five days to let her family and the police off the hook. One account is that she had bought a bus ticket five days before fleeing Georgia to Las Vegas and then Albuquerque, NM, where she was found.

Instead of acting like an adult and just calling off the wedding, Jennifer behaved like a little girl. Worse, the media are treating Wilbanks like a little girl who got cold feet and should get nothing more than a “there-there-my-little-sweet” pat on the head.

To make matters more ridiculous, the police chief in Albuquerque, feeling sorry for the poor, little, distressed runaway bride, gave Jennifer a teddy bear. Moreover, this story consumed all TV networks, and Geraldo, for days on end — even after Jennifer was found. Special treatment for a criminal. A female criminal.

Had this been a guy, said Pat Brown, he would be going to jail, without a doubt. The double standard looms, my friends.

POSTSCRIPT
Apparently, according the New York Post, Jennifer Wilbanks has jilted at least one fiance before this current incident and has been prosecuted for shoplifting. I wonder now if the police chief of Albuquerque will ask Jennifer to return that teddy bear he so stupidly gave her?

POST-POSTSCRIPT
Runaway bride is indicted (FoxNews). Faces up to six years in jail. Another crack in the double-standard armor.

My remaining question is: Why is this the story that just won’t die?????????????????????

Almost every time I do a radio interview, the host asks me if I think men and women are DNA-wired to behave as they do, with men stereotypically looking to spread their seeds and women seeking providers. I always disagree and claim that our respective behaviors are socialized. That is the premise of my book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley, Science Journal columnist, wrote an article entitled “Evolution Psychology May Not Help Explain Our Behavior After All.” Her article, shown below, is based on a new book, called Adapting Minds, by Northern Illinois University professor of philosophy, David J. Buller. Professor Buller concludes that “the claims of evolution psychology (evo psych) are ‘wrong in almost every detail’ because the data underlying them are deeply flawed.” Gee, big surprise. I’ve been saying this for almost two years.

People must stop using the crutches of DNA, astrology, and the like to make excuses for their behaviors. Just as men and women have been socialized, they can become unsocialized. They are responsible for their own behaviors. Enjoy Begley’s article. Get my book. — MHR
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Evolutionary Psych May Not Help Explain Our Behavior After All
April 29, 2005; Page B1

Like almost everyone else, David J. Buller says he was “completely captivated” by evolutionary psychology, and no wonder. This field claims to explain human behaviors that seem so widespread we must be wired for them: women preferring high-status men, and men falling for nubile babes; stepfathers abusing stepchildren. Even the more troubling claims, such as one saying rape gave our male ancestors a reproductive edge, have caught on, as laypeople and scientists alike say, yeah, that makes sense.

In a nutshell, evo psych argues that Pleistocene humans who engaged in certain behaviors left more descendants than did contemporaries who did not engage in those behaviors. As a result, we, their descendants, are wired for the behaviors.

But as Prof. Buller, a professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University, dug deeper, he concluded that the claims of evo psych are “wrong in almost every detail” because the data underlying them are deeply flawed. His book “Adapting Minds,” from MIT Press, is the most persuasive critique of evo psych I have encountered.

Take the stepfather claim. The evolutionary reasoning is this: A Stone Age man who focused his care and support on his biological children, rather than kids his mate had from an earlier liaison, would do better by evolution’s scorecard (how many descendants he left) than a man who cared for his stepchildren. With this mindset, a stepfather is far more likely to abuse his stepchildren. One textbook asserts that kids living with a parent and a stepparent are some 40 times as likely to be abused as those living with biological parents.

But that’s not what the data say, Prof. Buller finds. First, reports that a child living in a family with a stepfather was abused rarely say who the abuser was. Some children are abused by their biological mother, so blaming all stepchild abuse on the stepfather distorts reality. Also, a child’s bruises or broken bones are more likely to be called abuse when a stepfather is in the home, and more likely to be called accidental when a biological father is, so data showing a higher incidence of abuse in homes with a stepfather are again biased. “There is no substantial difference between the rates of severe violence committed by genetic parents and by stepparents,” Prof. Buller concludes.

On a lighter note, evolutionary psychology claims that men prefer fertile, nubile young women because men wired for this preference came out ahead in the contest for survival of the fittest. The key study here asked 10,047 people in 33 countries what age mate they would prefer. The men’s answer: a 25-year-old.

But the men were, on average, in their late 20s. One of the most robust findings about human behavior is that people prefer a mate who matches them in education, class and religious background, ethnicity — and age. The rule that “likes attract” is enough to explain why young men prefer young women. Besides, if you scrutinize the data, you find that 50-ish men prefer 40-something women, not 25-year-olds, undermining a core claim of evo psych.

The argument that Stone Age women preferred good providers, and that today’s women are therefore wired to see a big bankroll as the ultimate aphrodisiac, is also shaky. Among some hunter-gatherers today, young mothers receive more food from their mothers than from their husbands. That makes even the theoretical basis for the claim — that women who sought good providers had an evolutionary edge — problematic.

The empirical basis is no better. On average, 25-year-old women say they prefer 28-year-old men, even though 50-year-old men have much more of the high status and resources that evo psych says they are wired to lust after. Again, likes attract more than “good providers” do.

In defense of the “good provider” theory, evolutionary psychologists cite studies of female college students asked to choose their ideal mate. Shown photos of young men — one in the uniform of a fast-food worker, one looking like a middle manager, the third like a CEO — they indeed choose one of the latter two. But just as people prefer to marry someone near them in age, they prefer to marry someone like them socioeconomically. The fact that female college students, usually middle- or upper-class, prefer medium- or high-status men could simply reflect their preference for a man who looks as though he comes from the same socioeconomic background, Prof. Buller points out. Also, earning capacity is a sign of other traits, such as education level and socioeconomic background. So although it seems that the women are being asked how important their mate’s income is, they are likely using income as a sign of the other things they care about.

Evolutionary psychology has a more fundamental problem than the shakiness of its data and the fact that the data can be interpreted in more than one way. Why, if child abuse by stepfathers is such a great evolutionary strategy, do many more stepdads love and care for their stepchildren than abuse them? And why, if rape is “such an advantageous reproductive strategy, [is it that] there are so many more men who do not rape than who do,” asks primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, Atlanta.

After “Adapting Minds,” it is impossible to ever again think that human behavior is the Stone Age artifact that evolutionary psychology claims.

You can e-mail me at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Read the outrageous article below from today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s about these new shirts girls are wearing to bash boys. The maker of the shirts, Todd Harris Goldman, even has a book called Boys Are Stupid: Throw Rocks at Them.

Can you imagine such a negative-titled book targeting girls like that? Can you imagine boys wearing shirts that trash girls and advocate physical abuse against them? Our double-standard society NEVER would tolerate that?

The question is, Why does our society tolerate the trashing of males? If men and women don’t put an end to this, by protesting against David & Goliath Apparel, boycotting shirtmaker and author Todd Harris Goldman, and boycotting the stores selling this trash, we will never have harmony between the sexes. Any girl who wears these shirts should be ashamed of herself, and her parents should be ashamed of themselves.

Society deserves the behavior it tolerates and advocates.
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Girl Power as Boy Bashing: Evaluating the Latest Twist In the War of the Sexes
by Jeffrey Zaslow, Wall Street Journal — Personal Journal
April 21, 2005; Page D1

Seventeen-year-old Bryan Blase sees girls at school wearing T-shirts that announce: “Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them!”

Bryan, who lives in suburban Detroit, isn’t offended. The shirts remind him that boys are often disrespectful to girls. “We are stupid,” he says. “Girls should throw rocks at us.”

The age-old gender war is being sold to our children in new, and some argue, insidious ways — and kids are spending millions of dollars to buy it. Marketers today are pitching the battle of the sexes to younger and younger consumers, using misogynistic rap lyrics, insult-laden clothing lines, confrontation-packed reality TV shows, and advertising that defines girl-power as boy-bashing.

Psychologists and gender-relations researchers warn that this ratcheting up of boy/girl conflicts could damage kids’ self-esteem and their ability to relate to the opposite sex. But a lot of today’s media-savvy kids say they appreciate the humor behind this gender war-mongering — and they doubt they’ll be scarred by this new form of commerce. As for parents, we need to make mature judgment calls without being humorless.
An antiboy shirt from David & Goliath, whose founder has also written a book (right).

Apparel firm David & Goliath saw its popular “boys are stupid” line dropped last year from about 10 store chains after protests by parenting and tolerance groups. Still, the company says its products remain in 2,500 outlets, and it expects sales to rise to $100 million this year from $90 million in 2004. (About half of its sales are these controversial products.)

David & Goliath founder Todd Goldman, 36, just released a “boys are stupid” book. It begins: “Girls are bundles of joy and gifts from heaven. Boys pick their nose in front of 7-Eleven.” It ends: “Just remember. For every stupid, smelly, cootie-ridden boy, there is a rock.”

Mr. Goldman fell into the boy-bashing business after starting his T-shirt concern in 1999. He created a “boys are smelly” shirt, then a “boys have cooties” shirt, and sales jumped. “For twenty bucks, a girl can walk around town, saying things she wouldn’t normally say, without opening her mouth.”

He argues that his products are just darkly comic, and critics need to lighten up. But detractors point out that our society wouldn’t condone products that encouraged violence against a specific race. Nor is anyone selling “throw rocks at girls” shirts. “This is not humor. This is sarcasm as a weapon,” says Ted Braude, a psychologist in Royal Oak, Mich., who works with boys.

Gender-bashing products are popular today in part because our society reduces childhood to zero-sum accounting, says Joe Kelly, president of the advocacy group Dads and Daughters. “People think that in order for girls to get a hand up, we have to push boys down. For boys to get a hand up, we have to push girls down.” Title IX legislation, requiring schools to end discrimination based on sex, has heightened animosities, he says.

But store owners say sales are driven not by politics, but by kids’ sense of what’s cool. Beautiful Girl, a boutique in Woodmere, N.Y., sells piles of boy-bashing apparel. “Kids realize it’s tongue-in-cheek,” says Jon Shapiro, the store’s co-owner. “The moms are very indulgent. If kids want it, moms buy it.” Mr. Shapiro considers the controversy overblown. “There hasn’t been a rash of boys being stoned.”

Teachers and parents can ease boy/girl conflicts by avoiding the adult impulse to group kids by gender, says Barrie Thorne, author of the book “Gender Play” and a sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley. Spelling bees and kick-ball games shouldn’t be boys versus girls, she says. And she advises parents to encourage boy/girl platonic friendships; too often parents tease kids by suggesting they’re in a romance.

“New Moon,” an ad-free alternative magazine for girls, purposely avoids revving up gender squabbles, focusing instead on girls’ aspirations and inner beauty. That makes it a rarity on newsstands. My 15-year-old daughter notices that most teen magazines for girls depict boys as jerks. “It’s always, ‘He did this to me. He did that to me.’ Rarely do I read a story where a boy does something nice,” she says.

Madeline Gobbo, 14, of Hood River, Ore., sees that advertisers woo girls through boy-bashing. She’s amused by ads for Skechers sneakers, which show kicking or whip-wielding females and cowering males. “Girls used to try to be equal to boys,” says Madeline. “Now they’re trying to be better. The media is picking up on that.”

Movie and TV executives admit that they see dollar signs in boy/girl conflict. Reality show “Girls V. Boys” airs on The N, Viacom’s “network for tweens and teens,” available in 43 million homes. The show pits girls against boys, as they fire water guns or joust each other off boats. In the “Ride ‘Em Cowboy” challenge, teammates dressed in cow costumes had to move around on all fours and avoid being lassoed by a team of the opposite sex.

“We wanted to set them up in situations where they’d be competing during the day and flirting at night,” explains Sarah Tomassi Lindman, a vice president of The N. She says that “tension” has created strong drama and growing ratings.

Kids I spoke to seem to know that at the root of boy/girl antagonism, there’s a whole lot of attraction.

In Wayne, Pa., Rachel Hobbs, 15, has a friend who wears a shirt that reads: “Boys are smelly. Throw rocks at them!” Rachel told her friend: “You’re dating this guy. You’re holding his hand. You’re wearing that shirt. Why aren’t you throwing rocks at him?”
Her friend replied: “Because I like him.”•

E-mail: Jeffrey.Zaslow@wsj.com.

Jim Agnew, world-class literary researcher whose clients include Vincent Bugliosi, Bill Zehme, Bill Kurtis, and Jonathan VanMeter, has selected Marc Rudov’s The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth, to appear among his “book picks” of April 18, 2005.

The late Pulitzer Prize-award-winning columnist Mike Royko referred to Agnew as “the finest researcher of crime in America.”

Get your copy today!

Isn’t it amazing that yet more evidence comes along to buttress the premise of my book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth, that men and women are virtually the same. No, it’s not amazing. I’ve been telling you this for over one year.

Sue Shellenberger, work & family columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has just written a new book about the “female midlife crisis,” called The Breaking Point. Before Sue’s book, people never even put female and midlife crisis in the same sentence. No longer the case. Because women now have the freedom, power, and economic means traditionally associated with men, they are behaving like men (duh, they are behaving like humans). Gee, what a concept.

In fact, Shellenberger’s book cites a 3,000-person study from the National Opinion Research Center in 2002 suggesting that the overall rate of extramarital cheating for women is rising rapidly and is approaching that of men, with nearly one in six married women saying they have had affairs. No, say it ain’t so!

Read the article below about Shellenberger’s groundbreaking book… and, remember, you heard it first from me.
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The Female Midlife Crisis

More Women Than Men NowReport Upheaval by Age 50; The ATV Tipping Point

By SUE SHELLENBARGER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Personal Journal) — April 7, 2005; Page D1

The “midlife crisis” has long been thought of as something that afflicts men and often involves expensive toys and second wives. But the Wall Street Journal’s Work & Family columnist, Sue Shellenbarger, says that as gender roles change, women are increasingly experiencing their own version of these upheavals. What follows is adapted from her new book, “The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today’s Women.”
* * *

Like most people, I had never taken the notion of midlife crisis seriously. I thought of it as a fleeting, laughable period of adolescent regression that leads middle-aged men to buy red sports cars and take trophy wives. Typing with my arm in a sling after a thrill-seeking ATV adventure ended in a crash, I attempted to make light of the subject in my “Work & Family” column in The Wall Street Journal. Lampooning myself for having one of the stupidest accidents of my life, I wrote, “The midlife crisis is a cliche — until you have one.”

I quickly learned I wasn’t alone.

The column drew one of the biggest reader responses I had received in 12 years as a columnist. While some readers of both sexes were startled by the notion that a female could even have a midlife crisis (”I had no idea that women got this, too,” wrote a Texas man), a far larger number of women readers experienced a shock of self-recognition.

Dozens told heartfelt tales of pain, upheaval, rebirth and transformation in middle age, and said they had no idea other women were experiencing the same thing. My comic tale had touched a hidden nerve. Clearly, millions of midlife women had reached a crisis stage — a time when old values and goals no longer made sense to them.

I began gathering more stories. Through newspaper ads, networking and e-mail, I identified 50 women who had undergone midlife turmoil, each of whom generously agreed to share her life experience. In 30 years as a journalist, I haven’t experienced interviews as moving as these.

A startlingly high number of women have experienced what they consider a midlife crisis, broadly defined as a stressful or turbulent psychological transition that occurs most often in the late 40s and early 50s.

FURTHER READING: Read an additional excerpt on how to tell if you are headed for a midlife crisis, from “The Breaking Point.”

By age 50, even more women than men are reporting a turbulent midlife transition — 36.1% of women, compared with 34% of men — according to research by Elaine Wethington, a Cornell University associate professor, based on a subset of the giant 6,432-person MacArthur Foundation “Midlife in the United States” study of Americans’ well-being at midlife.

Applying the findings to the 42-million-member generation of U.S. women who are nearing or in middle age, defined as about 38 to 55 years old, more than 15 million women will have, or are already having, what they regard as a midlife crisis — about equal to the entire populations of Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota combined.

This pattern of female midlife crisis is emerging now because, to put it simply, women are different today. For the first time in history, women not only face more of the kind of stresses that tend to bring on midlife crises, but they also have the financial muscle, the skills and the confidence to act out their frustrations and resolve them. In a sense, women are having midlife crises now because they can.

The income of middle-aged women has posted powerful gains in comparison with men’s, by many measures. Women’s inflation-adjusted full-time earnings have risen 16.8% in the past 15 years, government statistics show, giving them the financial strength needed to act on midlife rebelliousness. Men’s comparable earnings have declined 1.7% for the same period. Nearly one-third of wives now outearn their husbands, and the proportion of women earning more than $100,000 tripled in the past decade. All this gives women a sense of freedom at midlife. “My successful, satisfying career allowed me to be very independent, with a cocky attitude” that sparked to a full-blown midlife crisis, says a California saleswoman in my study.

Women also have the skills and resources to make career changes or start their dream businesses at midlife if they wish. The proportion of professional jobs held by women, from engineering, law, medicine and architecture to teaching, writing and computer science, has grown to 54.7% from 51.1% in 1990, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Women hold nearly half, or 45.9%, of all executive, managerial and administrative jobs, from CEO slots to food-service management, up from 40.1% in 1990. Women today are better-educated than men, too, earning 58% of all college degrees granted, including 59% of the master’s degrees, says the National Center for Education Statistics.

Gender Differences

Real differences are emerging in how women and men experience midlife crisis. A variety of studies suggest that women not only undergo bigger changes than men in middle age, but they also by some measures have a more positive attitude about their prospects in life.

Women experience a more dramatic rebound in personal fulfillment at midlife, on the heels of a deeper dip than men in their child-rearing years. A study of MacArthur Foundation data by Dr. Wethington, Ronald Kessler of the Harvard Medical School, and Joy Pixley of the University of California at Irvine found that only 24% of women ages 35 through 49 said they had “fulfilled a special dream” in the past five years, such as acquiring money or property, accomplishing something noteworthy, finding a partner, or getting married. For adult women, this was the lowest ebb of fulfillment in their entire adult lives. By contrast, 40% of the men in the same age group reported dream fulfillment.

But the pattern quickly reverses over the age of 50. The study shows 36% of women ages 50 through 64 report reaching some fulfilling goal in the preceding five years, suggesting midlife can be a time of powerful renewal for women. In contrast, men’s dream fulfillment goes downhill from their mid-30s on, sinking to 28% from ages 50 to 64, and 27% after that.

The triggers of midlife crisis reflect sex differences, too. Women’s midlife crises are more likely than men’s to begin with family events or problems, Dr. Wethington says, from a divorce or a parent’s death to an extramarital affair, to the realization you haven’t met your own standards or goals as a parent.
Whereas male midlife crisis is more likely to be driven by work or career issues, women’s turmoil is more likely to be driven by introspection. Women are more likely to attribute their midlife crises to some new insight into themselves through religion, therapy or reflection. Women are more likely to cite personal health problems as the cause of their midlife crises. This can include worries about slowing down or about losing one’s attractiveness, based on the MacArthur Foundation research.

Perhaps most significant for the culture, women are innately more likely than men to talk with others about their inner turmoil, to openly seek solutions, and to look for remedies in community and society. That suggests their midlife transitions will send increasingly visible ripple effects through society.

Ripple Effects

Midlife women are turning old sex roles upside down. They are dating and having affairs with younger mates — a luxury that used to be regarded as the exclusive province of men. And increasingly, they are enjoying vital, active sex lives over the age of 45.

A rising number of women are having extramarital affairs. In 1991, research showed married men cheated a lot more often, with about one in five admitting to having affairs, compared with one in 10 women. But a 3,000-person study from the National Opinion Research Center in 2002 suggests that the overall rate of extramarital cheating for women is rising rapidly and is approaching that of men, with nearly one in six married women saying they have had affairs.

The middle-aged group appears to be leading that trend. In a look at 1994 data from the National Opinion Research Center, Michael Wiederman found a spike in the rate of cheating reported by women ages 30 to 50, and lower rates among women born before the baby boom. Mr. Wiederman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia College in South Carolina, believes that extramarital sex is simply easier and more acceptable to today’s middle-aged women than it was in the past. “There’s been a change in attitudes and mores. There are more women out there in the working world, and they have greater independence, which you need to have an affair.”

The midlife search for meaning drives women into other pursuits. Many change careers to pursue work that is more altruistic or fulfilling. Others return to college to pursue a new interest. Part-time college enrollment among women 35 and over grew 10.5% in the past decade, nearly twice the overall rate of growth in part-time students, the National Center for Education Statistics says. Full-time enrollments among older women rose 31.3%, well above the 18.7% overall trendline.

Organized religion is drawing significant support from midlife women’s quest for meaning. While the proportion of middle-aged men who attend church often has declined nearly 10 percentage points during the past decade to 38%, women ages 38 through 55 have held steady in church attendance.

Midlife women also are changing the face of sports and travel. Participation in such adventurous pursuits as wilderness camping, wall-climbing, kayaking and snow-shoeing has risen significantly since 1997 among women ages 38 through 55, according to a study by Leisure Trends Group, Boulder, Colo.

Looking Back

To capture a few complete stories of midlife crisis, viewed through the clarifying lens of hindsight, I sought out several older women in their late 50s, 60s and 70s who had experienced midlife crises a decade or more ago. I asked them how their midlife decisions had shaped their experience in old age, and what they would do differently if they could.

Without exception, the women who made big midlife changes said that if given the chance to do it all again, they would embrace new undertakings even more wholeheartedly. Every one of the women who entered fully into midlife crisis, taking risks and exploring new opportunities, was enthusiastically glad that she had. Their only regrets were in failing to start sooner or to take more chances.

At the least, each of these women reaped memories that sustained her for years. Carol Marians an Oregon artist and scientist, left her career as a math professor at age 43 to return to college as a Ph.D. candidate, then pursued a lifelong dream of re-creating the copper-red glazes of China’s Sung dynasty. Her work with ceramics led her to make pioneering discoveries on the structure of certain mineral forms. That work is a bulwark of her sense of personal identity.

Now 64, Dr. Marians still revels in those memories. “Whenever I feel sad, I look back at that,” she says.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com