Now that corona has disrupted social life and increased the number of people who are isolated and lonely, the Net is full of sob stories about social media users who were contacted by scammers and, falling for the latter’s pretended interest in them, lost money as a result. To learn more about the problem, I opened Duck Duck and typed in the search words, woman loses, savings to phantom lover. As you would expect, in no time at all I got an avalanche of headlines to explore.

Here are a few examples.

“Woman loses $2,000 to romance scam” (about a New York woman who sent a supposed admirer in Benin $2,076 before she realized she was being milked).  See https://www.wkbw.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/woman-loses-2-000-romance-scam).

“Woman loses $150,000 in online dating scam.” “A woman in Indiana learned that the hard way this month, after losing over $150,000 to an online scammer whom she’d thought was a local man falling in love with her. See https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/woman-loses-150000-in-online-dating-scam-072414.html.

Woman loses £320,000 in ‘romance fraud’ scam. Now she says she fees “violated.” See https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-54613937.

“Online dating relationship ends badly, $1.3M later.” “Ellen was retired, living a comfortable life in a nice home in British Columbia. In the driveway was a luxury car, and her house was paid for.

And then she joined an online dating site, hoping to find some companionship.

Instead of romance, Ellen says she lost her life savings, and more — over $1.3 million — seemingly taken by an online scam where villains prey on people looking for their perfect partner.” At https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2013/11/30/online_dating_relationship_ends_badly_13m_later.html.

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“Online romance scammers,” the report goes on, “work individually and in teams, often creating fake profiles using real people’s photographs in order to form close (if internet-based) relationships with unsuspecting victims, whom they eventually ask for money — because they’re overseas in the military, because they’re sick, because they’re trying to buy plane tickets home, etc. Given victims’ presumed complicity in these scams (because, technically, their money is given voluntarily), and the resulting stigma, it’s likely that online relationship scams are much more prevalent than even FTC reports suggest.”

Back to the headlines. Note that, in them, all the victims are women, all the perpetrators, men. I am not saying that male victims of “love scams” do not exist. As you will discover if you try, though, stories about such people are much harder, sometimes almost impossible, to find. That remained true even when I deleted the original search term, woman, and replaced it by man; indeed many of the same stories kept popping up in both searches.

What is going on here? Surely the problem is not that all women are simple and/or foolish. To remind yourself of that, just think of what Potiphar’s wife did to Joseph, Delilah, to Samson, and Judith to Holofernes. Indeed we have the whole of history to suggest that men are as likely to fall for women’s wiles as the other way around, if not more so.

The real explanation must be as follows. Men on the average are considerably stronger than women. Certainly that is true in terms of physical strength; perhaps, in spite of all feminist attempts to prove the contrary, also in terms of aggression and dominance. As a result, when a woman is victimized by a man she is likely to attract sympathy and even love; she may, indeed find herself more attractive to men than previously.

For men, the situation is exactly the opposite. By presenting themselves as victims, hence as weak, foolish or both, they make themselves less attractive to women. Afraid of being despised, ridiculed or both, they are likely to shut up about what happened. Shutting up, they are much less likely to reach the headlines. As one seventeenth-century English judge put it, it was not his job to help idiots who could not prevent their wives form taking their money from them.

And so the story goes marching on. Wicked men attack poor, weak, witless women; poor, weak, witless women are attacked by wicked men. The outcome? The most intense hatred between men and women there has ever been. One that is bound to end in disaster both for men and for women.

I can see the Taliban laughing.