In response to my posting that Robert Graves poem earlier today, & my

remarks about nice women marrying terrible men, several readers have pointed

out the underlying phenomenon here: Nice guys are, to the more adventurous

kind of woman, b-o-r-i-n-g… a fact prominent in literature — notably,

for some reason, French literature (Manon Lescaut, Madame Bov). Sample

e-mail:

“Derb—The reason many women marry wretches is because bad boys are

undeniably exciting. Nice, stable, intelligent, thoughtful, steady men who

take out the garbage and come home on time are dull, and simply do not give

off the same pheremones that women respond to.

“This phenomenon has been going on forever, but particularly look at the

fascination with James Dean, various revolutionaries, and even Elvis. [Derb

here: I don’t hink Elvis fits the argument. He was basically a very nice

guy — exquisite Southern manners.] I had a secretary once whose backstory

was that she had been engaged to a fine fellow, and the week before the

wedding, a motorcycle-riding thug visited the people across the street from

her parents. Of course, she ran off with him, ended up pregnant and a

single mom, then married a good guy who was an engineer for our large

aerospace company. After about 6 or 7 years, first her mother (aged

50-something) ran away to the West coast to be with some stooge, so that the

stepfather cried on my secretary’s shoulder. Then, SHE decided that the

stable life with an engineer was a bit dull, and divorced her husband and

moved to Seattle to be near her mother and, presumably all the exciting guys

out there. [Derb here: You mean, exciting guys like… Bill Gates?]

“Most women, I think, resist the impulse, other than to avoid sex very often

with their dull men, but a 2 sigma tail to the right of the mean seem to

live out their fascinations in some way or other. And the Lacis of the

world live to regret it.”