There are a lot of critics of Game out there. Most of them really are blinded by ideology, to an extent that brings to mind Galileo and the church. But I like to approach the world with a scientific mindset, and the scientific method requires always being critical of any idea, not matter how well established.

[As an aside: One of the reasons I gave Game a whirl is because as near as I can tell it's quite possibly the best peer reviewed concept in the modern body of knowledge. Unlike most modern scientific tests which are typically run by one team, and then maybe reproduced by a small handful of other researchers, Game has been tested by thousands of "field researchers" in perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual "experiments." That's an awful lot of supporting data.]

Sadly, I seldom see Game criticized on anything like legitimate issues, even though there is one that’s always been bothering me: the “Cougar” phenomenon. Game tells us that women prefer status and give low priority to looks. A natural consequence is that women should prefer older men, generally, as a proxy for status. It’s admittedly an imperfect proxy, but usually a rather decent one. Also, Game tells us that men generally prefer younger, hotter women.

Yet supposedly there’s a huge Cougar/Cub phenomenon going on all around us. What gives?

Roissy explains it typically as a bunch of used up older women settling for the young men who will have them. Sometimes, the reasoning goes, these are just very beta guys who can’t get girls their own age or younger. Sometimes they’re very alpha guys just getting started and “learning the ropes.” Makes sense, as far as it goes.

Before I learned about Game, I’d always thought women were adjusting to a higher preference for looks as they can afford to. In the modern world, the typical beta-provider status that women would have sought after before is less important than ever. Women don’t need a provider; they can typically pull in decent salaries on their own. So the superficial qualities take a higher preference. I was right, but I misunderstood the female version of superficial qualities to mean “looks” rather than what we call “Game”. In hindsight, this seems like it might play a tiny part (looking good is a small part of Game), but not a very big one.

So what’s going on?

What if it’s simpler than any of us thought? What if the whole Cougar phenomenon is just bullshit? It looks like that may be the case. A researcher in Wales did a study of online dating forums to try and find out just how widespread the phenomenon is.

After examining the age preferences expressed in 22,400 singles ads on popular dating websites in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, he found no sizable cohort of women seeking younger men. To the contrary, the share of lionesses wanted men their own age or older. Nor did he find evidence for the proliferation of cubs: the overwhelming majority of men displayed their eons-old preference for younger women.

Women prefer older men and men prefer younger women. Who knew?