Who Do You Trust More, Men Or Women? - New Studies Reveal Startling Results

'Of course men cannot be trusted.  Just look who's in the White House...If Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, then how can we trust him with our country...Richard Nixon lied through his teeth about Watergate...Ronald Reagan deceived us about Iran-Contra...Martin Luther King cheated on his wife Coretta every chance he got...Kennedy bedded Marilyn Monroe and Russian spies...'

  

While it is unfair to pick on world leaders - Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon, famously said that power was the greatest aphrodisiac, so it is quite natural for powerful men to have the pick of the litter - do all men share this penchant for lying, deception, and cheating?

In a new, controversial study published by the Utrecht (Louisiana) University Press (March 2025), Professor Emeritus Lionel P Smathers confirmed this universal, popular conclusion: 

In a double-blind study of over 2000 subjects across a wide range of socio-economic, racial, and cultural categories, the inescapable conclusion is that men, for reasons of birth, genetics, and cultural influence, can be trusted far less than women.  While this was the unanimous conclusion when it came to sexual vagary, it included the crimes of Bernie Madoff, Skilling, Kurniawan, and other infamous frauds. 

There is something in the male makeup, exhibited on the pre-historic African veldt, on Wall Street, and in Washington and Silicon Valley which have given men a predatory, amoral drive for survival while women have been content to sit by the home fires tending to the family. 

'See, what did I tell you', said Vicki Chalmers to her close friend, Bernadette. 'I knew it all the time.  Men are rutting pigs'. 

Her friend demurred, wife to a faithful, loving husband and wonderful father.  'Well, surely not all men, Vicki', she said knowingly. 

'Just you watch out', Vicki replied angrily. 'What goes around, comes around', confirming the suspicions that Wilbur Hanson was not the choirboy Bernadette thought.  Vicki had seen him at the Town & Country bar of the Mayflower hotel on a hot midsummer afternoon, hidden away in the shadows with someone definitely not Bernadette.  'She will have her comeuppance', thought Vicki, angry at her supercilious friend. 

Yes, Vicki  had also been deceived by a wandering husband - in Anchorage with Miss Fairbanks, 'business trips' to Port-au-Prince, weeks of 'staying late at the office'.  She hated to conflate all men based on her own unfortunate experience, but when face-to-face with a smiling, assured, deceived woman like Bernadette Hanson, she had to speak up. 

Not every academic agreed with Prof. Smathers.  In fact his article, reprinted in the New York Review of Literature was the subject of an academic tit-for-tat that went on for weeks.  In a particularly dismissive retort, Prof. Arnold Vibberts of Medford (Oregon) University had the following to say in the familiar sardonic, catty, and unctuous style characteristic of the Review:

With all due respect to my esteemed colleague from Louisiana, research from other quarters, far more disciplined, rigorous, and methodologically sound has shown just the opposite.  It is not just men who are the deceivers, the sexual truants, and untrustworthy public servants, but women who trump their misdemeanors at every turn. 

What my learned colleague conveniently overlooks is pregnancy and the fact that only women know who the father is. Women have used this proprietary information to feather their nests.  Playing on men's natural evolutionary mistrust of women (see Freud, On the Determinants of Male Jealousy, 1904), women have dismissed male patriarchy and chosen their own path to sexual freedom.  

Laura, the main character in Strindberg's seminal play, The Father drives her husband mad with doubts about his paternity, has him committed to an insane asylum, and takes over full responsibility for the considerable family finances and the sole care of their daughter.  Fiction? Hardly.  Research by Figgins et. al in 2022 in which 1500 women were queried about their 'gender potency' results were unequivocal.  Most women were aware of their innate biological and reproductive power and would use it if and when necessary. 

French Deconstructionist Lacan ventured into the argument a number of years before in an influential article on historicism and the ineluctable influences of social imperatives. 'It is not that women are inherently duplicitous', he wrote, 'only complicit, made so by their perennially inferior, subjugated status.  Using whatever power they have over men they are co-equals in sexual terms if not legal or social ones'. 

Women, because of this history and natural proclivity, can be trusted far less than men. This genetic, reproductive investment has given them 'a nuclear weapon in the armory'. 

'Men have not needed to be duplicitous or unfaithful', Prof. Vibberts went on.  Ask Suleiman the Great of Ottoman Turkey, a man whose harem numbered in the hundreds and whose many wives were cloaked, veiled, and immured in granite redoubts.  The Saudis have been on to something for generations.'

Not only academics are in this cat fight on the back pages of the New York Review. Leakage into the popular press when the subject is of such topical interest is guaranteed; and when Women Today opened the discussion to its female readers, the outcry was deafening. The reference to the legitimacy of the repressive Saudi regime in its incarceration of women alone was grounds for the beheading of the so-called academics who champion men's predatory, abusive rights. 

Vicki Chalmers, far too old for Women Today but a closet reader of girly-girl articles in it about how to get a man, read the angry retort in the magazine which opened the discussion up to its readers; and from there the debate became a cause celebre. 

Insults, vicious ad hominem attacks, vile and scurrilous contentions poured forth from both sides.  If anyone ever doubted there was a war between the sexes, this nasty exchange dispelled all doubts. Men from the deepest holler in Appalachia to Wall Street traders both reviled women for their trickery and roughshod feminism and reiterated their natural right to roam. 

Women were equally outraged, and from all quarters were heard the familiar accusations of patriarchy, misogyny, and male supremacy.  'We may not be saints', one reader wrote, 'but we are not sinners'. 

Professor Vibberts who argued  that female 'reproductive supremacy' gave women a potent weapon in their contest with men, and deployed often, was unrepentant. 'The facts speak for themselves', he said in an interview with the BBC. 

'Feminists argue that women need protection from men', Vibberts went on.  'Nothing could be further from the truth, and by ignoring their innate, inviolable reproductive power, they demean all women'. 

This irony has not been lost on social conservatives.  How can you champion women on the one hand, claiming that they are superior to men in all regards, and then demand bastions of protection for them on the other?  'Nonsense'. said Vibberts. 

Vibberts was summarily dismissed from Medford despite his tenure, for 'behavior unbefitting of the University'.  He knew it was coming, for few if any of his colleagues were speaking out against the cant and pseudo-intellectual monopoly of the Left; but he easily won his case on free speech grounds, stating that a cloture of the debate on gender differences was tantamount to gulag repression. 

'How's your marriage, Professor?', one gotcha reporter had the temerity to ask. 

'Of my five current wives', he replied, 'one of them may be telling the truth.'

The Invented Woman - The Recreation Of A Glorious Past That Never Existed

Vicki Chalmers knew that her memory was failing from 'Now, where did I put my keys?' to 'Who’s coming to dinner?' but she put those minor inconsistencies aside and said, 'But I can remember the important things'. 

Vicki had always preferred selective, creative memory.  There was no more idyllic time, she said, than those years in Greenwich Village smoking endless unfiltered cigarettes, drinking tequila, and loving the one she was with. 

There was Emil the conceptual artist. 'We made love underneath his The Human Odyssey, looking up at Homer standing astride the whitecapped waves of the Mediterranean', none of which was even vaguely true, but when told in such dreamy-eyed romantic verse to an eager group of ladies at tea, the truth did not matter. 

 

It all could have happened.  She did live in New York at the time, although on Staten Island as an au pair, released one night a week when she took the ferry to Manhattan and wandered up from the Battery to SoHo and the East Village.  As she walked past the dive bars, smoke-filled cafes, and coffee shops, she imagined herself there, cigarette dangling from her lip, eyes squinting against the smoke, a volume of Proust's Chez Swann opened in front of her, the pages dogeared from use, stained with tears and drops of expresso, next to an artist or a poet, longhaired, distant, and mythic. 

But for a few slips of fate she might have been a student at Columbia, or halfway through a doctorate on Deconstruction at NYU and living the postmodern moment at the Cafe Nero, or...the possibilities were endless, but the closest she got to her dream was  'the forgotten borough', an afterthought of the Dutch who settled Manhattan and the legions of entrepreneurs who later made the City what it was. 

Fate was fate, she believed, and there was nothing you could do about the cards you were dealt except to make the best of them; and soon in her young life 'extension' became the operative principle. With enough imagination and empathy it was enough to be in the occasion of cool, commit to memory the confected reality, and rely on it as a foundation for future recall.

Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described memorist, said that the past and only the past defined human existence.  The present, Nabokov went on to observe is nothing more than a millisecond of existence before becoming the past. The Higgs boson once produced has a lifetime of less than one sextillionth of a second; and this is slow compared to the passage of the present to the past. The  future is only a speculative time of possibilities and impossible dreams. 

The more one remembers the past, said Nabokov, lives it through constant recollection, and curates it as a personal, existential treasure, the more one’s life has substance and meaning.  Nabokov developed techniques to fix events in his memory and devised ways to recall them from his mental archives and replay them like a movie.  The more he could remember, he said, the more complete he was as a human being.

However one chooses to define the present, it quickly becomes the past, archived in our memory, and without attention can disappear.  If we cannot remember the beach at Deauville -  the umbrellas, the silhouette of the cliffs of Dover on the English side of the Channel, the seagulls, the chill, and the dresses of young girls – then it never happened.  Even if the events of that day had subliminal effects – our preference for colored dresses or our dislike of the chill – if we cannot remember them, they have lost their meaning, integrity, and substance.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an autobiography which was written not as a historical record of the author’s life, but as a pastiche of those memories which define him.  There was no reason to order them chronologically, to link them to future events citing cause and effect, only to celebrate them for what they were – integral and indispensable parts of him.

Vicki was a creative memorist.  She saw no distinction between her imaginings, their confection into valid memory, and the actual events of her life.  Why should one be forever harnessed to a mule endlessly plowing the same furrow? No, the human spirit was made of much finer stuff than just plodding through a solitary, brutish, short, and nasty Hobbesian existence.  

Of course she did not set out to construct this alternate reality, but fell into it naturally.  As a little girl, the world around her seemed too flat and grey until she invested it with brightness and color of her own. Birds were not just birds but messengers of God.  Clouds were the meadows of angels. 

Vicki came into her own later in life when she reined in her fanciful ambitions, finished college, and moved to Washington where she found an internship at an environmentalist non-profit agency.  Although she had no particular commitment to reversing climate change or to saving the snail darter or spotted owl, the idea of saving the earth had congeniality. 

It wasn't long before she conflated her own fancy with the affairs of environmental action.  She became  a preservationist, a poet of the forest, a Rousseau and a Walt Whitman. She wove these stories and accumulating 'memories' so convincingly that her actual deskwork, endless editing of policy papers and screeds disappeared, in fact for all intents and purposes never existed.

The progressive tent is a big one with room enough to accommodate all manner of activists - climate change activists were joined by civil rights workers, transgender advocates, socialists and communists, and former farm workers.  In the heady atmosphere of social reform, all issues were conflated or subsumed within a universal anti-capitalist ethos. 

Slowly but surely, she created memories of abortion camaraderie on the National Mall, marches down the avenues of Washington with Black Lives Matter, standing tall and defiantly against the storm troopers of ICE. 

None of it was true, but it could have been, so close was she to the action in its preparatory phases in her office on U Street; and years later she spoke with confidence about those good, purposeful, righteous times. 

She didn't stop there, and as an older woman revived 'memories' of marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Woodstock, and Montgomery sit-ins. 

The remarkable thing of it was she never once considered herself an imposter, a fraud, a balmy dreamer.  Her invented memories were so real, so intimate, and so peopled with friends, lovers, and colleagues that she became a totally invented person. 

She always kept one step ahead of the truth - her stories of her halcyon years were so rooted in chronology, fact, and record that few questioned her; and her passionate retelling of them complete with love, hate, deception, dishonesty, and courage deflected any suspicion. 

Her marvelous confection was so convincing that she herself had no idea what was real and what wasn't. In a land already filled with striving, desirous, upward-reaching, credulous people whose grasp on reality or real possibility was fragile at best, Vicki fit right in.  No one really cared about the truth, veracity, or fact.  It could have been was enough for them. 

Artists like Browning, Durrell, and Kurosawa let alone trial lawyers knew that truth was evasive. Eye witness accounts of the same scene differ greatly.  Stories told around Aunt Leona's Easter dinner table about Uncle Harry and his third wife never jibed. The Ring and the Book was all about mnemonic artifact. 

So for Vicki Chalmers the niggling doubts about memory loss were insignificant.  If one memory faded, she could replace it with another, and till the end of her life she was so adept at confabulating her past that she was revered - a freedom fighter, a reformist, a progressive.  Yet, not only was she none of those things, she cared little about them.  They had been convenient, accessible realities, no more no less. 

A marvelous human invention was Vicki Chalmers, a marvel, talented creator of reality, an eye-painter, a dreamer brought to life, a unique creation.  Those who suspected that much of what she told was reverie, never called her out for dishonesty.  They, like everyone else, loved the stories, the passion, the engagement, and the vitality.  Who needed the truth?

The Faithful Husband - Leftovers In The Survival Of The Fittest

New Brighton is a small Connecticut city once known for its industry.  Its factories produced arms and materiel for the Union Army in the Civil War, the United States Army in WWI and WWI, and hardware for the domestic market. Its factories eventually shut their doors in the face of foreign competition, but small tool-and-dye shops remained. 

New Brighton in the modern era was like many in New England, recovering from the end of their industrial heyday, losing population to the wealthier suburban towns serving New York, Hartford, and Boston, but managing.  For those who remained - a healthy cadre of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants - like was good.  Crime was rising due to Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants; the Polish neighborhoods, always anchors of civility, were now far smaller than they were fifty years ago, but there was the Frederick Law Olmstead park, an important regional hospital, and a small university. 

The older residents remember the town in its halcyon years - a bustling downtown, festooned with lights and window displays at Christmas, Holy Week processions, and a post-war optimism shared by many in the country.  Things changed, of course.  Religion was no longer the common thread of the community, children are driven to school rather than walk, the finer stores have moved to the suburbs, and marriages are more open, women more free to come and go as they please, and men involved with other women.  It isn't exactly the free-for-all found in big cities, but the old life of fidelity and Kinder Kirche Kuchen is no longer. 

From an evolutionary point of view, this is a good thing.  Darwin would have been cautionary at best had he seen the sedate homeliness of the Fifties, men settling for one woman, women happy as homemakers and mothers, and children brought up in an atmosphere of propriety, faithfulness, and patriotism. 

The real world was held in abeyance during those years of happy marriages and a welcoming but censorious society.  The Sixties changed all that.  Love the one you're with replaced the old tired nostrums of sexual ordinariness.  Sex was offered, accepted, negotiated in a free marketplace, the fetters, tethers, and halters were off.  Mr. Right went packing.  Men were free to roam. 

Something happened, however, in later years.  Somehow sex was again being put back in carefully-wrapped boxes, opened carefully to save the ribbons. Women were once again nicely trimmed, honorable, and as untouchable as the Virgin Mary...unless they let their knickers down, set the rules of engagement, warned against untoward advances, and in the interest of personal integrity replaced ravishment with dutiful respect.

 

Arnold Perkins was a man who accepted this new ethos.  He washed the dishes, kept hair meticulously out of the sink, encouraged and congratulated his wife at every turn, never questioned her intentions or movements, and saw only the emergence of the New Woman - independent, confident, ready and able to take the place of men everywhere. 

Needless to say, his wife quickly tired of his toadying complaisance. She was a woman, after all, programmed for bad boys, genetically primed for male confidence, pursuit, and sexual desire.  Before her inclusion within the new paradigm of female supremacy turning the tables on formerly predatory, abusive men and giving them a taste of their own medicine, she was a girly girl who fell for the football captain, the dreamboat, the man of a thousand women. 

Subject to the insistence of her political sisters she came to realize the error of her ways - this macho thing was what had incarcerated women for millennia.  Forget the hunters of the plains, the warriors, the shamans and bed the farmers who will finally and at long last treat you right. 

Now that she had roped the calf, she wanted only the bull.  She wanted to feel the glory of being taken, being used, being ravished.   She was initially ashamed of these feelings, a traitor to the cause, but nature overruled nurture, and before you know it she was in bed with a billionaire she met at the Town & Country bar at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, an after conference hours affair she had always dreamed of. 

In fact she could have written the script herself - handsome, well-dressed man treated like royalty as he came into the bar, kissed by a hundred women as he walked to his place, ordering a dry Stoli martini straight up, three olives. 

This was the very man she was told to avoid - the predatory male indifferent to women except as vessels of pleasure, the epitome of self-interest and arrogant self-assurance - and yet she could not resist, succumbed without a whimper, and wanted to come back for more. 

'Another time' he said, and of course she never saw him again. 

Meanwhile Arnold waited patiently for his wife's return from her business trip.  Dinner was in the oven, the table was set, the bathrooms had been given an extra swish, and her favorite music was playing.  When her heard her familiar step on the walk, he smiled, delighted that she was back. 

'I'm tired...sorry, see you in the morning' she said to a disappointed but understanding Arnold as she went up the stairs. 

'Of course, dear. These trips take a lot out of you', and with that he replaced the china and silver, carefully put away the roast, the parsley potatoes, and the legumes almondine, turned off the music, and sat in his recliner. 

'Man up!' was the cry he should have listened to.  He had become his wife's doormat, her convenient househusband, her steady-as-she-goes plowman, her faithful, dependable mate and had gotten nothing but a peck on the cheek in return. 

He ignored the signs - sexual demurral, increasingly frequent trips to New York, a new dismissive indifference - and assumed the best, that his wife was coming into her own, a proud, defiantly positive woman. 

Meanwhile his wife cavorted in her newfound return to the old days, danced until midnight, squired by devilishly attractive men and was left in series on the curb.  She had been used, but she loved it. 

These men all had wives, lovers, and children by all of them.  They were Darwinian darlings, at the top of the phylogenetic chain, the progenitors of the best and the brightest, the fittest; while the Arnolds of the world died out, overmatched, ignorant, and useless. Blips on the evolutionary radar. 

Feminist accusations of predatory, toxic masculinity, misogyny and swamp-and-cracker machismo were brushed off like pesky flies by these men who went on their merry way finding hundreds of women failed by the cant of femaleness and wanting only the hard, rough reality of sexual pleasure. 

The marriage ended, no surprises there.  Arnold quickly remarried to a simple, sexually complaisant, deferent woman from New Brighton with whom he shared common interests.  

He never blamed his first wife.  She had every right to choose her own path, her own destiny; and it was he who could not provide the support and consistency that she needed. 

Only once did he have his doubts about his life choices.  His Yale reunion was dominated by the wealthy, successful, sexually adventurous men of his class.  They talked only of conquests - a Wall Street merger, the billion dollar startup, offshore investments, homes in St. Bart's and third wives.  His lot - sharing misery stories in the shabby non-profit corner - was a sorry one; and he wondered if he had taken a different turn, he might be one of the big men at the bar. 

Unfortunately evolution is not a matter of choice, and he had gotten the short end of the stick. 

As to his wife? No one had heard much about her after she left Arnold and New Brighton.  His friends hoped that she was a sexual retread in Spokane, which was possible the way she started off; but no one cared that much except for the apocryphal lesson of her marriage to Arnold.  Man up! Throw the bitch out! but of course those angry howls had no resonance in a society still beholden to women.