History Headscratchers / Maury

*** I've wondered that a few times myself. It kind of makes it seem like the show is purposely out to simply exploit teenage girls or give the message [[FamilyUnfriendlyAesop only teen girls can get out of control. Boys are saints.]]

*** I think (at the risk of FlameBait) that it's done as something of an equalizer. The majority of shows are about paternity tests (by default turning men into rude, obnoxious deadbeats,) especially since most of these guys sleep with a woman then call her a slut/ho/etc. I think it's a way of showing that yes, women can be just as bad as men, they just tend to be caught earlier. Especially since, while boy's '''aren't''' saints, it's not uncommon for the young girls on this show to admit dating men over twice their age, whoring themselves out for money, clothes, and even for drugs, and many of them admit to having sex with any man that'll agree in order to have a baby. Usually, by the time a boy would be that out of control, he's likely done something that would get him arrested.

** Honestly, lie detectors are a crapshoot. Click the Lie Detector trope, there's a linked Cracked article that's a great read.

*** That's true, although it may sound weird to ask about "more than 2 women" if he has just said no to "more than 1 woman". A possible alternative is that they may start with a large number (more than 10 women), then repeat going downward, and take note of when (and if!) it starts to registers that he's lying.

** Did you sleep with more than 1 woman? Than 2 women? Then 3 women? Repeat until the detector says he's telling the truth.

** It has been suggested, possibly somewhere on this very wiki, that the lie detector administrator/s throw out numbers of women that the men have possibly cheated with X number of times in order to determine if they have cheated and if so, with how many partners. As to how they determine how many numbers of partners to guess, you got me. Perhaps they ask the women accusing their boyfriends/husbands of cheating how many other women they think their men are sleeping with?

* Sometimes on the cheating spouses episodes Maury says "more than X women, more than X times." How does a polygraph determine how many times someone cheated?

** Parents who grew up starving will sometimes force their children to over-eat, giving them enormous portions of food and expecting them to clean the plate (cleaning the plate being a traditional expectation of children). Those kids get punished when they don't eat everything, or belittled when they serve themselves too little. So if the child's got a bit of "baby fat", they've succeeded... even when the "baby fat" is in fact morbid obesity. Of course, it's not only parents who grew up with little to eat who do that; parents who got plenty to eat during childhood will heap adult-sized servings onto a plate and expect their small children to finish it all.

* The sheer amount of Failing Sex Ed confuses and scares me. A woman can bring anywhere from 8 to 20 men on the show, each time she's positive he's the father. The time frame for paternity is always about one month or less (basically the time since her last period.) Either this woman has slept with at over a dozen men in less than 30 days, or they're really clueless about where babies come from.

*** Still, it becomes mind boggling when you start to think about it. If you go back nine months before the baby was born, give or take a month, ''how many men were these ladies fucking in that time frame?!'' I may have had my...[[ReallyGetsAround moments]], but most of these women screw more men in a month than I do in a whole damn year! How do you even raise a child in that kind of environment?
* The sheer amount of Failing Sex Ed confuses and scares me. A woman can bring anywhere from 8 to 20 men on the show, each time she's positive he's the father. The time frame for paternity is always about one month or less (basically the time since her last period.) Either this woman has slept with at least a dozen men in less than 30 days, or they're really clueless about where babies come from.