The Golden Retriever Boyfriend

A local friend sent me an account of what he overheard at a nearby coffee shop. Two women in their twenties were dissecting a party. Some of the men there had committed the offense of behaving like men, expressing interest in several of their female friends, and the women could not find enough dismissive things to say about them. Then they arrived at the boyfriend of an absent friend, and the register changed completely. “Have you met him? He’s such a puppy dog. He’s literally a golden retriever.” The voice went up into a coo. He’s so cute. He’s so adorable. My friend’s fear, which I now hear constantly, is that social programming has become so thorough it has demoralized female libido the way it has been demoralizing male libido for a generation, and that the next cohort of women will reach adulthood with the drive stripped out of them entirely.

My first instinct was to reach for the research, and the research says something more unsettling than either confirmation or denial. The best measurement anyone has taken is a 2019 study in Scientific Reports that showed 4,483 heterosexual women in thirty-four countries pairs of male faces, one masculinised and one feminised, and recorded which they preferred. Buried in it is a plot of every nation’s result. American women chose the masculine face about sixty-four percent of the time, placing the United States near the very top of the sample. Case closed, I thought. Then I checked when the data were gathered. The paper never says. The only hard date is its submission, July of 2018. The women in that sample averaged twenty-five years of age, and nobody over forty was included. Which means the twenty-six-year-old in my friend’s coffee shop was, at most, a high-school senior when the baseline was taken, and she has never been measured. Nobody has re-run that study since. Not once, anywhere, in the six years that have reorganised everything else about how young Americans relate to each other.

That is the correct status of my friend’s hypothesis. It is not refuted. It is untested, which is a different and worse thing, because it means the loudest voices on both sides are arguing from a photograph taken before the event they are arguing about. And there is reason to think the photograph was never as clear as I first took it to be. All twenty faces in that study were white, and the same twenty were shown to women in all thirty-four countries, a decision the authors never discuss. For Americans judging American-looking faces, the measure is clean enough. For Japanese or Singaporean women judging morphed Europeans, it is doing something harder to name. So, the comfortable reading — that American women are near the top and Japanese women near the bottom — rests on firmer ground at our end than at theirs.