Fox News Says Women Are Pre-Disposed to Like Jane Austen

In honor of the Pride and Prejudice bicentennial, Fox News is renewing its commitment to knuckle-dragging explorations of truthiness. In a recent post, reporter Suzanne Venker pulled Jane Austen, science, and love into the under-evolved primordial swamp where Fox News makes its home.

Here’s a basic summary: “Ladies love Jane Austen because they’re just a confetti of hormones. Amirite, ladies? Also, something about Lena Dunham!”

And of course, no news story is complete without a 4-step strategy to find Mr. Right.

One of the problems in the article (and there are about as many as there are words) is that it doesn’t recognize the difference between fact and fiction. But, again… Fox News. Venker claims that oxytocin, a neurochemical which “gets released whenever a woman has intimate contact with a man,” makes women all fuzzy-headed and that’s why they’ll mistakenly sleep with men and then watch romantic comedies while they wait for him to call (and he won’t, because men are just boils full of testosterone). When anyone cites a film, especially She’s Just Not That Into You, as a way to back up even a psuedo-scientific argument, they should be forced to moderate Wikipedia pages for the rest of their lives. Oh, and somehow this has something to do with Jane Austen.

If you feel like revisiting your breakfast, you can read the article here.

***
–Benjamin Samuel is the co-editor of Electric Literature. Because he’s a guy, he’s just like those other guys in that documentary called Entourage. You can find him on Twitter here.