Chris Williamson sat his roundtable down and delivered the finding like a man producing evidence in a trial he has been prosecuting since adolescence: formidability predicts partners, attractiveness does not. Women rate one thing on the questionnaire and select for another in the dark. And I want to be clear before I go further — I think he's right. I think the study is right. What the men at that table found is real; it is only not the thing they think they found.
They think they've located a fact about women. What they've actually caught is a lag — the delay between the answer a person gives and the choice a person makes. When the study asks a woman what she values, some cortical committee convenes, deliberates, and issues a statement. When she chooses, no committee is consulted; the choice has already happened by the time the committee hears about it and drafts its explanation. That is not two poetic selves.
That is two timescales. The one that reports runs slow and after the fact. The one that acts runs first, and the questionnaire only ever interviews the survivor who arrived late to the scene.
Consider what the study actually does. It sets a woman's stated ranking beside her chosen partner and finds they don't match — and calls the mismatch a discovery about women. But the design that produces the mismatch will produce it in anyone. Ask a man to rank what he wants; then track his gaze, his messages, whom he pursues. The gap reappears, identical, unbudged.
The instrument is not measuring preference. It is measuring the interval between the account and the act — and that interval is the standard architecture of a mind that decides before it knows why. So the roundtable built a mirror, calibrated it carefully, and then aimed it exclusively at the opposite sex, because aiming it at the near side returns a face you cannot argue with. The finding is not 'women are dishonest.' The finding is that the reporting self is a narrator, not a driver, and it has never once been consulted about the road.
So here is where I carry it past the table. Formidability wins not because women crave fighters but because formidability is legible faster than the account can form. It resolves before deliberation begins. That is the mechanism: the fast channel decides, the slow channel narrates, and whatever the fast channel can read first becomes the driver. Notice the consequence the roundtable never reached — preference cannot be corrected by argument, because argument arrives only on the slow channel, and the slow channel does not steer.
You can persuade the narrator. You cannot recall the choice it was told about after the fact.
The men at the table — I'm not unsympathetic. Their complaint is that the wrong men win. But the study grants them no jury to appeal to. There is only the fast channel, and the narrator who believes he authored what it already decided. What they called research was a lament fitted with a p-value.
What answered, on time and indifferent, was the part of us that never files a report.
