In response to “The Evils of Womankind,” I received the following comment:
Derek wrote…
Men cheat more often than woman. Now, consider substance abuse. Men are much more likely to be substance abusers than women. Collectively, these are two of the leading reasons given for divorce. Substance abuse is cited in roughly a third of divorces. Infidelity accounts for a similar figure, although some suggest that it is much higher.
…with no sources or data or citations given whatsoever.
It turns out that I’m not the only one who has received this fairly common criticism.
Every statistic shows that men cheat more than women.
In anonymous studies, women report being cheated on more than men and when asked if they’ve ever cheated, more men say they’ve cheated that women do. People try to refute this by saying that women are just lying, but all of the research that we have on lying indicates that men are also more likely to lie than women are.
When asked if they’ve ever slept with someone who’s in a relationship, women report higher instances of being the ‘other woman’ than men report being the ‘other man’.
And then we have studies that show that when it comes to ‘mate poaching’ (someone intentionally pursuing a relationship with a person who’s already in a relationship) women have far more success than men do.
This is made even more wild by the fact that women have far, far more opportunities to cheat than men do, and men are still cheating more.
I don’t often bother to cite these statistics because it’s not debated at a serious factual level. I’ve never even seen any statistics—other than a few highly biased individual anecdotes—that would lead me to question my belief. It’s so universally understood that men cheat more than women, they lie more than women, and they are more prone than woman to substance abuse.
The data is so overwhelming that it’s basically this (yes, I see the irony of the bad data):
It’s really not that hard to find a wide range of sources for the statistics that support the claims that I’ve made. I’ve referenced some in the past and I have others sitting in my blog’s draft folder waiting for that one day when I’ll write an article (or two) about them. Unless one isn’t trying very hard, it shouldn’t be difficult to find many different sources that show that men cheat more often than women. Nobody should be demanding evidence for what is plainly plain.
It isn’t sufficient for a critic to refute just one study for bad design or being otherwise incorrect. No, instead one has to claim that the entire enterprise is false: all the studies and evidence are wrong. But, if that is truly the case (and some believe it is), then citing individual studies is really quite pointless. So, while I might accept the premise that Science itself is utterly corrupted and unreliable no matter how unanimous it appears to be, what I can’t do is embrace the category error by taking seriously the refutation of individual studies when the issue is systematic to Science itself.