Fast and Loose

Of course, Tigney has an answer for that. Players always do.

"I'll sit down and read it to her myself," he says. "She'll still be my chick."

An Old Game

Singer and comedian Fanny Brice would have recognized Tigney's game.

"Two or three girls has he that he likes as well as me, but I love him," she sang in 1928's "My Man." Over the next few decades, dozens of other women made hits out of bad boy allure: "He's a Rebel," "Leader of the Pack," "Maybe I Know [That He's Been Cheating]," "Nothing but Heartache" and of course Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Oh No, Not My Baby."

"We make so many excuses for these guys," says Dorothy Marcic, who chronicles this pattern in her book "Respect: Women and Popular Music."

Not always, of course. In 1966, Nancy Sinatra sang "These Boots Are Made for Walking"; in 1981 Pat Benatar warned "Treat Me Right"; and Cher, in 1992, warned her guy that he would cry over her in "Save Up All Your Tears." But by the late 1990s, Marcic says, stars such as Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears had put themselves right back in the players' hands by making themselves into sex objects.

"We're just so pitiful sometimes," Marcic says.

Kruger, the Michigan psychologist, prefers an evolutionary explanation. Females of long ago believed that if they mated with cads, their offspring, particularly their male offspring, would inherit the cads' confidence and strength and in turn pass them on to the next generation.

He calls this the "sexy son" hypothesis and sees remnants of it on campus today.

He and two colleagues asked 260 female students to read parts of several novels by the romantic poet Sir Walter Scott and pay attention to Scott's promiscuous "cad" and monogamous "dad" figures. Which type would they prefer to have a relationship with, he asked.

The students said that once they were ready to settle down and have children, they'd choose dads. If they had daughters, they'd prefer the daughters dated and married dads. But they would rather party with a cad.

Alexandrian Ashley Hines, recently graduated from West Potomac High School, understands that. In ninth grade, she sought out her then-best friend's brother. Until she wised up to his player ways, "he made me feel safe," she recalls. Other guys didn't mess with her -- a plus when you're a freshman in a big school.

Now she has a boyfriend who, she recently told several friends, "was a player -- before I got with him."

She left him behind on a recent school trip to New York but took his cell phone. That was a mistake. She received calls and text messages from other girls all weekend and, when she called her boyfriend to ask who the girls were, he always gave her the same answer: "I don't know."