Rebecca Kamm: Men: How to avoid gold diggers

How to avoid a gold-digging woman. Photo / Thinkstock

Ha, ha. You thought this would be a real guide, didn't you, but then you saw my annoying face and you knew, you JUST KNEW, it would be something different altogether. Sorry about that / not really.

Reason being, I get an alarming number of comments on this blog from readers who believe women care almost singularly about a man's money, both when it comes to choosing a partner and how that relationship then pans out. Herewith, a little sample (grammar has been tidied up by me):

- Marriage is now known by many men as a way women score a quick buck.

- Women want everything. They want equality and yet still expect everything to be paid for.

- I've met more greedy women than men.

- The predatory females seeking a quick economically productive kill in the matrimonial property division stakes will just have to keep getting smarter.

- These women wanted a fur coat, new car and trip to Europe, so it is all women's fault for forcing their poor spouses to take on more risk to get a quiet life. (This one was about the GFC. I don't know what "the quiet life" is - maybe it's when you light some candles and bathe in the pennies?)

- Most of the women of this generation want their men to be more successful, rich, well-travelled and overall want a luxurious lifestyle. Especially more successful than their best friend's partner/boyfriend/husband.

To state the obvious: what a load of fantastical, bitter crap. I don't dispute the fact some women marry for money, and that it's a cynical, awful thing, but I do know first-hand that this is rare. In my immediate circles it's a totally foreign concept, and if I had a dollar for every girlfriend who is currently helping to financially support their boyfriend while he pursues his "dream", I wouldn't need any more dollars*.

*Exaggeration. But I could definitely buy some pizza from SPQR.

Fact: There are equal amounts of morally questionable, financially motivated men out there, whether they're chasing wealthy women or hunting cash via other means, like, I don't know, dodgy business deals or outrageous salaries.

(The latter two being less common avenues for women, except that lady in the news who just had a "lavish" wedding at her employers' expense. Good one, lady. Congrats.)

I would hope that for most sane, thinking people who know real life women, the above goes without saying. Others - thanks to one bad experience with an exploitative woman, or simple ripple-effect paranoia - continue to assert that the homogenous money-hungry lump known as "women" are frenzied cash hunters by nature.

Still, let it not be said I don't cater to all types, as I proceed to offer up a solution to this fear: Antibiotics.

New research fresh out of Japan has found that when men have minocycline - a tetracycline antibiotic - in their system, they can more easily disregard their attraction to a woman while deciding whether or not she's trustworthy.

According to The Daily Caller: The researchers gave men an amount of money that they could either split evenly with a partner for no risk, or attempt to triple at their female partner's discretion. The female partners were instructed to lose all the money should they be given the chance.

When the partner was an unattractive woman, the men in both the placebo and minocycline group trusted the partner half the time. However, when the partner was a beautiful woman, the men in the placebo group trusted her almost 70 per cent of the time - while the minocycline group trusted her only 50 per cent of the time.

The study - called Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces 'honey trap' risk in human economic exchange - is worth surveying, if just for the entertainment factor.

Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness, resulting in betrayal by the female, it says, marching on with some very relevant-to-real-life information about ... what happens in the movies:

In movies, a female spy often wins the trust of her male target using her physical attractiveness. The male target usually suspects that she is a spy, but because of her attractiveness, he becomes amorously entangled with the female spy despite concerns regarding her trustworthiness.

So, there you go. Find a sympathetic GP who shares your views, then you can be safe/alone forever.

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