Women prefer wimps! That was the big news in a newspaper last week: according to scientists, females are predominantly attracted to ‘weedier’ types, who look ‘kind and trustworthy’. The revelation was hotly followed by the report, that ‘women can’t help hungering for a hunk’. (The second story was also backed up by biologists’ findings.) No doubt the discrepancy between the two studies can be explained by another idea, regularly published in newspapers, that women are attracted to ‘hunks’ or ‘rogues’ during our fertile periods of the month and trustworthy ‘wimps’ during the non-fertile phases.

But one could just as easily argue that the discrepancy says more about ‘scientists’ than about women. These in-depth studies are usually based on a survey of nine undergrads in a university’s psychology department. They are handy for underpinning broad media stereotypes, which is both convenient and confusing.

The irony is that the greatest truth about men and women arises from the discrepancy itself. Had the two stories (‘Women love wimps!’ and ‘Women love hunks!’) appeared side by side, on the same day, in the very same edition of the paper, with neither story referring to the other, I would have nodded at their wise reflection of human desires. Of course it doesn’t make sense and is contradictory.

It used to be said,that to keep a man happy, a woman must be a cook in the kitchen, a lady in the drawing room and a slut in the bedroom. (This was always bad news for those who tend to be a lady in the bedroom and a slut in the kitchen.) But it was never pointed out that men have a far tougher job.

For a woman to be truly happy with a man, he would need to be a hunk in the bedroom, a cook in the kitchen, a vision of machismo in public, a wimp in arguments and easily capable of fixing everything from broken dishwashers to awkward work dilemmas.

And if he did manage to be all those things, he would end up marrying a woman who can’t bear the way he eats spaghetti. The obvious point is that, while females worldwide struggle to be Superwoman (to satisfy the needs of their bosses and children, as well as partners), what they want for themselves is Superman. Isn’t that ideal?