Rosemary McLeod: Hard to believe breeding fuels desires

Miley Cyrus was newly cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority for poking her tongue out all the way down her pretty little chin in an ad for a TV programme. Photo / AP

In my next life I want to be paid for doing "studies" into human behaviour. As with a new revelation from a Canadian "study" they're always wacky, as if a Martian is trying to work out what makes us tick.

From any angle we're a strange species, destructive, aggressive and fouling up a beautiful planet. Are we logical? Not when violent criminals attract girlfriends from inside Kiwi jails when commonsense says women should give them a wide berth.

More harmlessly there's the apparent illogic of the cougar thing where older women hook up with guys young enough to be their sons. According to the Canadians it's not lust or the simple desire for a sleek human handbag that drives these couplings, but a breeding instinct. This in a world where sex has become so far removed from procreation it's laughable to link them in the same sentence.

The sheer old-fashioned quaintness of it makes you want to pinch the researchers' cheeks and call them darlings.

Set aside the decorative appeal of a younger man who grooms himself so beautifully he should be gay lounging about on your tiger skin rug, and even on your own cougar skin. Shrug off the comfort of knowing you need never have a conversation about anything deeper than depilatories, and even disregard the possibility that he desires you more than women half your age and better looking, and what's left? Surely not ageing ova yearning to saddle a cougar with childrearing.

More likely it's a toss-up in the cougar mind between having an exotic dog for company or a younger man, and the man wins out because he won't chew the upholstery or cock a leg on the azaleas.

The arrangement where much older men pick young girls for partners is supposed, the Canadians say, to be driven by a similar desire for ageing sperm to find fertile eggs. As if a pretty girl can't find a pretty boy her own age for fertilisation purposes. As if a man with a pretty young girl wants to saddle her with infants rather than parade her about as a new sop to his vanity. As if babies is what everyone is after.

In reality the only people wanting babies seem to be the people who can't produce them the usual way, the subject of many magazine articles about things going on in test tubes, or surrogate Third World mothers.

Yes, these may be happy stories in the end, and we're pleased for them, but isn't it odd that fertility doctors have become the heroes of what used to be an ordinary shag?

What interests me in all this is why perfectly attractive, intelligent women over 40 can't find men closer to them in age in the first place.

My study would be into why high-achieving women have such dire love lives, and my hypothesis is that it's got nothing to do with their eggs. It's more likely to be that men like to enthral a docile woman with their wonderfulness, and can't stand the competition of an equal, which leaves us with the human race we've got, none too bright and often awful, and may explain why we don't get any smarter. But these are hypotheses, not "studies", I grant you that. They are passing impertinences.

How sex fascinates us, despite its elementary biology. What dances we perform in its honour - like little Miley Cyrus, newly cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority for poking her tongue out all the way down her pretty little chin in an ad for a TV programme. Complainant B. Pederson described the pose as "disgusting and low class". But that's what we love little Miley for, B. Pederson, and why we watch her so indulgently. And no "study" anywhere could say she goes to so much trouble with fertilisation in mind. I'd say quite the reverse.

• Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.