I’ve criticized Baumeister and Tierney’s Willpower for it’s lack of substance. It’s also pretty sexist.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley is introduced as a paragon of self-control with these lines:

If self-control is partly a hereditary trait – which seems likely – then Stanley began life with the genetic odds against him. He was born in Wales to an unmarried eighteen-year-old woman who went on to have four other illegitimate children by at least two other men.

Because a woman with several children and no husband living in a time when women had almost no rights and no real control over their sexual or reproductive lives was a slutty slut slut who had no self control. Poor Stanley wouldn’t have been sent to the poorhouse if she could’ve just kept her legs closed!