This week’s miscellany of the odd, intriguing and amusing items I came across on the Web.

First from The Guardian (“Gentlewomen prefer Bonds”). It seems it has now been “scientifically proven that being a bit of a bastard is simply a natural evolutionary strategy.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that while gentleman prefer blondes, women prefer bastards. But just in case anyone was fretting that the old adage was just a hoofed-together cliché, the brains at New Mexico State University have surveyed 200 college students and clinically proven that men with serious personality flaws always get the girl.

In the same vein, “All Men Are Liars” from the Sydney Morning Herald offers The four rules of masculinity:

No Sissy Stuff: Masculinity is based on the relentless repudiation of the feminine.
 
Be a Big Wheel: Masculinity is measured by the size of your pay cheque, and marked by wealth, power and status.
 
Be a Sturdy Oak: What makes a man a man is that he is reliable in a crisis. And what makes him reliable in a crisis is that he resembles an inanimate object. A rock, a pillar, a tree.
 
Give ‘em Hell: Exude an aura of daring and aggression. Take risks; live life on the edge.

Maybe this is an example of that kind of masculinity at work? Reuters reported that an Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes (“Guy kidnaps ex-girlfriend to get ironing done”).

The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her.

I suspect many people would say this is more typical of much macho ‘thinking’ (“Escaped thief asks police to open handcuffs”).

A man caught breaking into a German supermarket late at night escaped despite being handcuffed to railings — only to be arrested after he ran to a nearby police station to get the cuffs removed.

Then, The Boston Globe reports that gender stereotypes like these may be all in the mind (“Surprising insights from the social sciences”).

Researchers conducted experiments on students at Harvard University, Temple University, and the University of Michigan to see if prompting people to consider their own identity changed their thinking about time and risk. [. . .] When gender was primed, men and women tended to conform to whatever stereotypes they held about their own gender.