Black Sheep - The Hidden Benefits Of Being Bad
By Richard Stephens
(John Murray)
By being obedient and never saying boo to a goose, by following rules and regulations and keeping always within the letter of the law, I have never got anywhere in life.
Non-smoking, teetotal and monogamous, I am a complete flop. For, as Roald Dahl’s Matilda sings, in the greatest stage musical in history: “Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.”
This is also the thesis of Richard Stephens, a psychologist from Keele University, in Black Sheep.
There are, he argues, distinct hidden benefits in being bad. Chewing gum, for example, relieves stress. Doodling in the margins of exercise books during meetings or in class lets the mind flow free and aids concentration – not something that furious teachers seem ever to have countenanced.
Swearing, likewise, ought to earn applause rather than reprimands. Curse words, says Stephens, are not necessarily a sign of a limited vocabulary and stunted intelligence - to eff and jeff with spirit shows that you are one of the gang and “adds an edge to proceedings”.
The upper classes swear like mad, says the author – only the aspirational lower-middle classes moderate their language.
I’ll remember that the next time I ask my mother-in-law to pass the blinking carrots, for golly heck’s sake, and to stop hogging the blinking potatoes. Except blinking and golly heck won’t be the precise terms to be used, obviously.
Next to swearing comes drinking. Stephens is all for the “social enhancement” effect of booze. It heightens feelings of well-being, and archaeologists have discovered that our remote ancestors cultivated cereal crops for beer long before they invented the baking of bread.
But here’s an interesting observation. Given the opportunity to drink water or alcohol, laboratory rats chose gin and vodka only if their environment was cramped and unpleasant. If content and their cage clean, warm and full of things to do, they didn’t need a Happy Hour.
Hence, drug and alcohol use (and abuse) is related to personal circumstances – being cooped up in nasty offices with repellent colleagues, or stuck at home with screaming kids – rather than to any particular addictive power inherent in the substances.
Alas, too many are more than a little bit naughty in the grip of the grog, and family or work responsibilities are disrupted.
Stephens also mentions the propensity of a few drinks to create the “beer goggles” effect, ie how romance can bloom after a white wine spritzer and a lager and lime.
Having lots of sex and sleeping around is frowned upon in our Puritan society, but sex is not only an antidote to stress, it keeps us young-looking.
During sex we pull funny faces, “resulting in reduced lines and wrinkles, fuller, uplifted cheeks, a firmer jaw line and stronger, wide-open eyelids”. Who needs plastic surgery?
Sex also produces a natural analgesia by releasing neurotransmitters such as serotonin into the bloodstream.
A study of hamsters and rats has shown that the males are eager to mate with new and different partners, if available. If it’s the same old lady hamster or rat, they go off the boil.
It’s dangerous to apply this lesson to the human animal, however. A study in Italy showed that men who were having affairs had twice the risk of a heart attack or other major adverse cardiac event than the chaps who stayed at home eating spaghetti. The official medical term is a “sudden coital death”.
It is far safer to be Scottish. Research has found that the electrical brain excitement of Glasgow football fans watching video clips of their team scoring goals exceeds by far any results from the arousal of men watching porn (Just don’t ask where the scientists clip their wires).
Stephens points out that sex addiction and jealousy “can be detrimental, impairing the ability of men and women to make decisions”. On the other hand, in terms of evolution it is actually against nature to remain in long-term relationships because you end up coping with declining health and becoming a carer or nursemaid.
I may be wrong, but I believe that throughout history the only ones who stay together for eternity are Catholics and penguins.
Risk-takers are the entrepreneurs and innovators, the dare-devils and buccaneers who get things done.
Driving fast, incidentally, is another way of being in a “state of high involvement”.
“Dangerous driving can kill,” says Stephens, “speed in itself does not.”
Daily Mail