In a post titled "Germans prefer looks over wallet size," Patrick Morgan has some very bad news for sundry rump evolutionary psychologists, pickup artists, and all-round cranky misogynists (emphasis his)

Results of an explorative empirical study on human mating in Germany: handsome men, not high-status men, succeed in courtship.

Recent research on human mating depicts men as searching for physical attractiveness (PA) and women as searching for status.

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Surprisingly, the answers given by male and female subjects regarding sociosexual behaviour and mating preferences are predominantly congruent. Sex differences among preferences for good looking and high-status partners were small or even insignificant. Lower educated subjects had considerably higher status preferences than higher educated individuals. In both sexes, PA was much more preferred in a potential partner than status. For both sexes, physical appearance was decisive for the subject’s dating attractiveness.

Source: Discover Blogs NCBI ROFL

Actually it's surprising if and only if you fall for the first bogus Rule of Desire. If you do then you're going to be a lot more comfortable believing that women are more attracted to money or power than to, you know, physical desirability.

If you're over all that then you're probably going to be even more comfortable with (yet, still, further) confirmation that both men and women are human beings.

Adam Ostrow of Mashable! says

The company recently launched an iPhone application for its AMP energy drink called “before you score,” with “score” meaning (to put it in the most subtle of terms) having a successful night with a woman.

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Now, guy-centric marketing is nothing new for AMP, who often promotes itself through male dominated extreme sports (formerly, it was known as Mountain Dew AMP). The ads are also somewhat reminiscent of AXE, who insinuates in much of their advertising that its products will help you with members of the opposite sex.

But that’s simply a (far-fetched, but whatever) product claim. Here, AMP has actually built features into its application that make it seem one can systematically “score” by exploiting women’s naivety. Beyond that, they actively encourage users to promote such conquests through social media.

Read the quote in context here.

I can’t imagine why but for some reason I’m reminded of an old friend’s step-brother who was from the part of Louisiana where if there were vampires they’d all have buck teeth.

Anyway, according to my friend, when they were young men back in the 1970s his step brother got a job as a carpenter. That’s fine, they were from a long line of construction workers and the step-father was a concrete contractor. What was a little odd was that the step-brother bought a shiny black-leather and chrome carpenter’s belt. What we even odder is that, my friend swore, he wore, over his swim trunks, to the swimming pool! Allegedly because he thought women would think it was hot.

No, this guy wasn’t named “Bubbah.” That was his older brother’s name. This step-brother was named C.J., which was short for Clyde Julius. (My friend always called him V.I., which he said was short for Village Idiot.)

I dunno. I’m guessing today C.J. would hang out by the swimming pool ostentatiously trying to pickup women with his AMP app on an iPhone. With, I’m guessing, not much better luck. But he’d probably drink a lot of AMP soda so I guess that would be a good match and thus a marketing win for PepsiCo.

Lynn Gassiz-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has the definitive takedown of the “women want bad boys” conceit.

If we women really crave, above all else, guys who are nothing but trouble for us, shouldn’t John Hinckley have totally nailed Jodie Foster? Aren’t scary violent guys with guns exactly the kind of jerks that, according to the Nice Guy™ narrative, we should be falling over ourselves to sleep with? Or could it, just possible, be that the reason lonely murderers weren’t getting laid to begin with was that they already had that violent streak in them, and when women met them, they encountered things that made the hair on the back of their neck stand on end.

She said it here.

And while a seeming counterfactual would be the numerous fan mail, including marriage offers, tendered to Ted Bundy after he confessed to being a serial killer, the fact that his admirers numbered at best in the low hundreds in a nation of hundreds of millions says only that for every Whacko Jacko there’s a Whacko Jill.

Lynn continues (emphasis mine)

In fact, though we’ve all had the experience of rejecting guys who were genuinely nice enough, but not for us (the guy, say, who totally disagrees with you about whether he wants kids, or who’s the most amiable fundie you could ever meet, but you’re Unitarian, or who otherwise just isn’t on the same page as you regarding something on which you really need to be on the same page), we’ve also all rejected guys who made the hair on the back of our neck stand on end. The guy who carries a knife, and one of his first questions is whether you’re connected with any guy bigger than him, who could beat him up. The drunk who volunteers, right off the bat, that he’s going to beat up any guy who pays you any attention. The guy who tells you a long story about how God sent messages to him in traffic lights to go and find his ex-girl friend, and then says, by the way, you look a lot like her, and you look rather romantic, right now, against that post. Oh, we may sometimes fall for the smooth talking guy with great pecs who will cheat on us in the end (just as men fall for the female equivalent), but we also have a basic sense of self-preservation that, when we listen to our gut, leads us to avoid the most scary dangerous men who want to go to bed with us.

That line about bigger boyfriends who could beat him up is classic by the way. And classic projection too. I’m not sure you could completely parse the notion in a thousand pages but some of the high points include:

• Internalizing the worthiness trap that says men must be “higher status” to “earn” or deserve “higher status” women. (When, in fact, women, being human beings just like everyone else, tend not to imagine themselves as prizes granted.)
• Tacitly acknowledging their acceptance of a particularly primitive patriarchal system wherein female partners are effectively spoils of war instead of, well, partners.

• Weirdest of all, an abiding insecure certainty that their place in the system is uncertain and, especially, that they’re unlikely to succeed in it. (This is similar to the assumption I think drives a lot of men’s preference for virginity or inexperience which is that they won’t compare favorably to any of the woman’s previous partners.)

But the big thing that’s implied is that the NiceGuy™ strategy is really a secondary strategy in an “alpha male” paradigm… that if the NiceGuy™ was only bigger, only able to beat up other men, and maybe better with a knife (a knife?!?!) then instead of all the smarmy “Pickup Artist” tactics he could just grab you by the hair and drag you out and nobody better try and stop him.

There’s also the… interesting assumption that all women want big, rich, violent partners. There’s also the assumption that all women’s attraction is transactional — that if you don’t “lock her in” some how she’ll kite off with anyone bigger, richer and/or more violent than her current partner.

There’s also the equally interesting tangle of assumptions that — assuming women are autonomous anyway — their attractiveness quotient is linked to their attraction to big, rich, and violent men such that the more beautiful the woman the bigger, richer, and more violent her partner is likely to be. Or, assuming women aren’t autonomous, that the more physically attractive they are they’ll automatically fall prey to end up in relationships with those selfsame bigger, richer, or more violent men.

What’s most disturbing, of course, is that none of this seems to be particularly true about women. Yes, some women sent Ted Bundy love letters just like some men are Ted Bundys or John Hinkley Juniors. But just as it would be… rash to assume all men are or want to be closet Ted Bundys or John Hinkley Juniors, so it would be rash to assume all women have or would like to send them love letters.