Have you caught that new show, “Moment of Truth”? I’ve watched a total of 3 minutes of it simply because I sat down to watch the evening news on Fox a few minutes too early. Even those brief moments were more than I could stomach: I turned the TV off and checked email while waiting for the news to start.

I find nothing entertaining about watching someone squirm as they’re asked embarrassing questions while a polygraph measures their truthfulness. Oh, I understand the premise well enough: they wouldn’t be going through such humiliation if they weren’t interested in making money. But, as far as I’m concerned, the only differences between that show and, say, Jerry Springer is that fists don’t fly and someone besides Jerry makes a little cash out of the whole mess.

Of the people I know who avidly watch the show, most say they feel a thrill, a sense of vindication when one of the contestants gets discovered in a lie. They talk about the woman who was asked by her ex-boyfriend whether she’d leave her husband for him, and she said that she would. But that’s not what led her to being buzzed off the show. No, her moment came when she was asked “Do you think you’re a good person?” and she answered “Yes.” Her brain, like anyone else’s would, knew it was lying.

Besides wrecking marriages, the show has also renewed discussion about the nature of lying itself: whether it’s always a bad thing, particularly when the truth itself can do so much damage sometimes. One author has capitalized on the moment to launch a new book studying lies women tell, and her belief that women make better liars than men.

Anyone surprised by that assertion?

I thought not.

Lying and fulfilling the social expectations of “femininity” seem to go hand in hand. As early as childhood, little girls learn to present a front that doesn’t necessarily reflect their true feelings: Hush, sweetie. Play with your dolls while the grownups talk, Princess. Meanwhile, as the saying goes, boys will be boys so no one really expects them to sit still while nearby adults ignore them.

By the time we are preteens we know three “truisms” about womanhood: guys like girls with big boobs, blonds have more fun, and girls with glasses never get asked to dance first. We start stuffing our training bras, begging for highlights and squinting through class if our parents won’t get us contacts.

But, really, think about those things: bras make boobs look perkier than they naturally are; highlights falsify hair color; and contacts disguise vision problems. They’re all lies, too. (Don’t even get me started on the subject of makeup and curling irons.)

We learn, too, that those lies work. People fall for them or at least pretend they aren’t being deceived. As we grow up, we also learn that lies help us avoid conflict by making others feel better about themselves and, as a result, about us, too.

We also grow angry people who don’t lie to us to make us feel better: bosses who fire us for not performing up to par on our jobs, spouses who leave because we stopped trying to capture their interest, friends who break off relationships because they’ve outgrown us. Agnes Reppelier once said, “There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

Maybe it’s because I am a woman that I see lying as intrinsic, to some extent, to nurturing: to protecting and sheltering others until they’re ready to hear the real truth; to cosseting the feelings of those with whom we’re not intimate and, yes, even sometimes the egos of those we know better than anyone else. Maybe that’s why women lie as readily as we allegedly do, but who’s to say that’s a bad thing?

Personally, I’m a little tired of our recent obsession with the “truth”. With reality shows. With talk shows. With sordid confessions on YouTube and tell-all memoirs.

I miss the days when you couldn’t Google someone you’d just met and find out everything about them in 30 minutes or less. I miss the slow progression of getting to know someone, and how the growing closeness between two people could be measured by the unveiling of truths they’d grown willing to share.

So tell me, folks, do these pants make me look fat? It’s okay, you can be honest with me. I promise I won’t get mad.

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