All of you shouldn’t hit on the hot chick

(Mr. Thoughtful is on a short leave of absence, and wrote this for me to publish after he left. This post is entirely his creation)

I came across an interesting bit from the movie about the great mathematician and game theorist John Nash. He gives a carefully thought-out solution to the problem of what to do when you and your friends go into a bar and see one beautiful woman and several less attractive women:

…the famous example used in the original Beautiful Mind movie about Nash’s life:
“Given that you are in a bar, would you prefer to pursue the most attractive person in the bar, or would your efforts focus on someone less attractive?”

This seemingly superficial question gets at the following dilemma: if a group of young men are sitting in a bar and a group of women walk in, where one of them is particularly attractive — is it an optimal strategy for all of the young men to pursue the most beautiful woman? As Nash’s character reasons in the movie:

“If we all go after the blond we block each other. Not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends. They will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. What if no one goes for the blond and we don’t insult the other girls? That’s the only way we win.”

Hat tip: John List at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/vote-now-on-the-prisoners-dilemma-contest/

And don’t pretend that 1) you’re such a superstud that the beautiful woman would choose you over the other guys hitting on her, or 2) you wouldn’t go for the less-than-beautiful woman but would hold out for a beautiful woman (bc you date only beautiful women).

An example of number one above is found in Neill Strauss’s “The Game”, when he is in a bar hitting on a hot chick and a minor TV celebrity comes in and tries to get her attention. Neill reportedly had first-class game, but the celebrity had, well, celebrity. In Southern California that counts for a lot. Neill reported that he won out after a fierce pickup duel.

Be careful when naming your child

I came across an interesting article discussing a study that concludes kids with unpopular names are more likely to be deliquent:

What’s in a name? Possibly a life of crime.

An unpopular name - like Alec, Ernest, Ivan, or Malcolm - is more likely to spell trouble than favourites Michael, Matthew or Christopher, according to research presented Saturday at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of B.C.

“There is a positive correlation between unpopular first names and juvenile delinquency,” said Daniel Lee, an economics professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania…

Lee has a word of advice: “It’s all right to give unique names to your children, but make sure you become a good parent.”

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=ff841028-6389-44e9-8609-93ddbef6e4a5

I didn’t read the full text of the study, and it may conflict with research done by the economist Steven Levitt in his excellent book, “Freakonomics” (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

I have long thought that naming kids certain off-beat names may give them a subtle handicap in life.  Some kids manage just fine even with odd names.  Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s kids will get along just fine being named Scout or Ryder (or whatever their names are).  But most kids don’t have the built-in advantage of celebrity and wealth.  Why take the chance if your kids won’t have such built-in advantages? 

And on a more mundane note, do you want your kids to go through the aggravation (admittedly slight) of having to spell, and respell their names to ever restaurant hostess and every other person who takes down their names?  You might think this is a trivial thing, but it adds up over the years.

What Happens After You Get Married?

This post should more accurately be entitled “what can happen after you get married”, because many marriages stay happy for years.  This is merely what could  happen, and too frequently does.  It’s pitched to guys who have never been married or had close friends who are married.  It’s pitched to guys bc I have more experience with that angle.  It would be an interesting idea for some of our female blogger readers to write something on this subject that is pitched to what women might find after marriage.

Some wives stay looking great for many years.  This isn’t the norm.  Be prepared for your wife to pay less attention to her appearance than she did before the marriage.  This happens to an even greater extent after she has a baby.  This is understandable on several levels.   One, raising a small child requires a lot of time.  It’s difficult for most of us to carve out time and energy to work out even without small children. 

Also, there is just less incentive to keep looking great.  There’s an old episode of the Murphy Brown show in which Candice Bergen finds which White House official started having an affair by looking at who started gym memberships.  People, guys and girls, want to look their best when they are on the market or in a new relationship.  After the marriage, working out is done less often.  A Nordic Track is an expensive clothes rack.

Next, for those guys who were attracted to your girlfriend’s long, gorgeous hair, be warned that it may be one of the first things to go.  Girls know that long hair attracts guys.  But after they’re married they don’t really need the hair anymore.  So off it comes, if not right after the marriage, then usually soon after a baby comes.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.  If you try to talk her out of cutting it (if she even tells you of her plans before going to the salon), she’ll reply defensively, “Well, it’s MY hair.”

I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon.  If a woman gets her long hair cut off, her female friends will all applaud her for it.  In fact, I think the exact phrase her friends will use is: “It’s sooo cute.  And I’ll be it’s so easy to take care of.” (note: I’ll be Britney Spears’s recently shaved head is fairly easy to take care of; no worries about conditioners, stylists, frizz, hairspray, etc. ; just a Gillette razor and some shaving cream).

Women exert a lot of peer pressure on other women in regard to hair styles.  They will applaud the women who cut off their long hair and try to convince women with long hair to cut theirs off.  This mainly happens to women over a certain age.  It doesn’t appear to happen to women whose job is dependent on their looks, such as actresses or models.   One possible reason for this is that the women who cut their hair realize they don’t really need to be attractive anymore.

This are just a few of the areas which may well not be the same after marriage (or at least after the first few years honeymoon period).  In light of our recent comment from a guy who married a Russian woman, I’m curious as to whether these things are common with foreign wives.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the most vexing change guys find with their wives after marriage.

 

Women in bikinis make guys want immediate gratification

From the Department of the Obvious.  But it’s nice to have rigorous academic confirmation of what I had always thought.

“Bikini-clad women make men impatient”

“A recent study shows that men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie sought immediate gratification—even when they were making decisions about money, soda, and candy.”

Hat tip: http://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2008/06/bikini-clad-w-1.html

Pickup techniques, for long-term or short-term relationships

I posted last week some material about Roissy, the psuedonym of a pickup artist who blogs.  He made an interesting response to a critic who lambasted him for discussing the pickup skills that allow guys to meet women, charm them, go to bed with them, then abandon them for their next conquest:

 … the skills that make a player are the same skills that help a regular man find, capture, and keep his dream girl. it’s a lifestyle and a mental state change.

I’ve had this same thought.  A guy can use these skills for either purpose: having short-term relationships with lots of women or having a long-term relationship.   But even if the guy wants a long-term relationship, I suspect he improves his chances of finding one if he uses the skills of the pickup artist.  These skills seem to capture a woman’s interest better than the plain-vanilla alternatives women hear all the time (hi, I’m so and so, what’s your name, do you come here often, etc.).

You can read all about these techniques in Neill Strauss’s book, “The Game” about his time with the legendary pickup artist who calls himself Mystery (the techniques are more fully set out in a book Mystery himself wrote).

I saw an interesting illustration of this at work a few months ago, on the Dr. Phil show of all places.  He interviewed two guys who used something very much like the Mystery Method of pickup, in which the guy and his wingman go up to a woman in a bar and try to capture her interest (without seeming like they want to capture it).  They tried it on several women from the audience.  These women responded to these techniques, even though they had just been told they were being guinea pigs for the pickup artists techniques. 

The women said afterwards that they were intrigued by what the guys were saying and would be much more interested in those guys than the other guys who hit on them.

But back to the main point of this post - if you’re a guy looking for a long-term relationship, you first have to meet women.  It makes sense to use the best method available to meet them.  I’m convinced some of the pickup artists have the best methods.  These methods have, after all, been field-tested.  The best of these pickup artists keep those techniques that work and discard those that don’t. 

http://roissy.wordpress.com/

Online dating provides a huge ego boost to attractive women

I’ve written before that online dating is heavily tilted toward attractive women.  That’s because 1) except for EHarmony, there are more men than women who are members of dating services, and 2) men everywhere are after attractive women.  A moderately attractive woman who posts her pic on Match.com or Yahoo Personals will get thousands of emails or other expressions of interest in a year. 

Here we have confirmation of this phenomenon from another source.  The following interesting discussion appears in The Guardian:

… it’s a super ego-booster. Every evening I’m on it, I have at least 30 men wanting to chat with me and meet me,” says a French senior civil servant, a single woman in her early 30s. Before contacting her, the 30 men have clicked on the “flash” icon to let her know that they find her especially attractive. Before condescending to reply, she double-checks their profile: age, picture, education, income and marital status.

She chooses them like a discerning consumer, and only replies to married men. “For the moment, I am looking for fun, not love. I do a first pre-selection, and send a standard reply to the unlucky ones out of courtesy. As for the selected few, according to their wit and their language skills … I draw a shortlist of perhaps three and agree to meet them…

It’s a simple issue of supply and demand: pre-select candidates, test sales pitch, draw a shortlist, have a face-to-face interview, hire on the spot, dismiss without notice …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2132546,00.html

Attractive women get so much attention online that they become more and more demanding in what guys they are willing to date.  They create the infamous 463 bullet point list of characteristics they insist upon.  And the moment the guy de jour fails to meet one of those 463 points, the woman is back to her computer to bring up another crop of men who might meet her rigid specifications.

More than one in four New Yorkers has herpes

I was amazed to read that more than one in four people in New York City have herpes:

NEW YORK (AP) - A city Health Department study finds that more than a fourth of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes. The study, released Monday, says about 26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D916M4QO0&show_article=1

NYC Health Dept: http://www.nyc.gov/health

Cougars

The following interesting discussion of the cougar phenomenon is found at Roissy’s blog.  For those of you who haven’t heard of this, it’s older women going after young guys. 

… can think of quite a few girls I frequently see haunting the DC nightlife scene who’ve gone from kitten to cougar in just a few years.  Many women of DC’s socialite crowd have crossed the cougar rubicon, yet stubbornly refuse to give up their lifestyle.  When all you’ve ever known is the inside of a club, 37 varieties of martinis, and dancing on raised platforms as horny guys give you your attention fix, it’s understandable you’d find it hard to accept your demotion to has-been hottie.

…  with career-delayed marriages and perpetual dating where she is waiting around forever to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist, the clubs are beginning to fill with women who have missed the boat yet won’t admit it to themselves.

Fascinating point about women wanting to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist.  I’ve noticed the same thing myself, and it merits its own blog post.  With the huge supply of guys made available to women through online dating (and its bad-for-guys male/female ratio), most women seem to have developed huge lists of must-haves.

Read the whole thing.  It has lots more interesting commentary, complete with pictures.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/from-kitten-to-cougar/

I don’t see anything objectionable with these older women chasing young guys.  But they shouldn’t delude themselves that they’re going to be like Demi Moore landing a 10-15 year younger Ashton Kuchter.  The good-looking 25 year old guy will gladly have sex with the 40 year old woman he meets at the club, but for a long-term relationship there are few 40 year old women he will prefer over the young hotties.

And here’s another interesting point from Roissy’s discussion (one that may interest Mr. Practical): “She looks Russian, which means that she will hit the wall sooner and harder than most women her age.”  Is this true? 

What’s wrong with a lesbian kiss?

It’s a sad day when two lesbians are ordered to stop kissing.  This happened recently at a Seattle Mariners game:

Sirbrina Guerrero and her date were approached in the third inning by an usher who told them their kissing was inappropriate, Guerrero said.

The usher, Guerrero said, told them he had received a complaint from a woman nearby …

Note that it was a woman who complained.  I’m guessing that way more women than men would be offended at this.  Why is that?  A female friend of mine once told me that my not being uncomfortable around gay guys meant I was secure in my masculinity or some sort of pop psychology theory.   She claimed likewise to see nothing wrong with homosexuality.  A few weeks later we were having a picnic in a park and I looked over and saw two girls making out about 50 yards away.  I pointed this out to my friend and she reacted with disgust.  I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have reacted with disgust if it had been two guys.

Here’s a picture of one of the girls.  I’d like to see her kissing another girl:

Full story here: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9142SUG1&show_article=1&image=large

Should Airlines Charge More To Fly Fat People?

Airlines are getting hit hard by huge increases in fuel costs.  They have tried to make some additional money by charging more for heavier suitcases, and limited checked bags to one bag.  Now a surcharge for fat people is being discussed:

With soaring fuel prices, airlines have been trying to cut costs where ever they can. On Thursday, Continental Airlines announced around 3,000 layoffs.

But as CBS 2’s Dana Kozlov reports, there’s another way airlines can make up the money by easing their load on gas. 

… it’s an idea floating around in cyberspace and aviation expert Aaron Gellman said he understands one airline pitched the plan for a Far East route. So instead of just baggage on the scale, passengers would stand on it, too, and would be charged based on their weight.

http://cbs2chicago.com/consumer/airline.weight.fee.2.741830.html

Interesting idea.  I read that Southwest charged a fat guy for two seats because he took up two seats.  I don’t see any major objection to airlines charging more to really heavy people.  It takes more fuel to fly them places.  I’m not sure it is fair to charge the same price to fly a 50 pound six year old as a 300 pound passenger. 

What are your thoughts?