How to empower women (who want to be): encourage machismo

Today I was listening to some '70s rock (which lasted into 1981 or '82, before new wave took over), and it struck me how strong the female stars are -- Joan Jett, Pat Benatar, Blondie, even tiny Rachel Sweet. According to feminist dogma, it should have been the opposite: given how openly masculine and gender-insensitive that period of rock music was, women should have felt intimidated, perhaps even disgusted, and stayed away.

Contrast that period with the alternative rock period of the early-mid '90s -- the famous women are all of the neurotic trainwreck type. Sure, some of them yelled a lot, but then emotionally fragile people are prone to doing that. It hardly makes them strong. And just as before, this pattern among the women mirrored that found among the male stars, most of whom were afraid of their own balls (aside from Red Hot Chili Peppers, who formed their identity back in 1983). Dude, they're like, latent instruments of oppression, man...

It's easy to see that if the trend in pop culture favors the masculine, this will propel masculine men and women both into the spotlight, while if it favors moping, wusses of both sexes will crowd out their stronger alternatives. But we miss this simple truth when it comes to the jobs that we're supposed to worry about -- business, law, medicine, politics, academia, etc.

The roles, mores, and so on, that are expected in those institutions select for certain types of people. If we're supposed to re-fashion those roles so that they are more typically feminine, then guess what -- self-defeating, passive-aggressive people of both sexes will rise. Among men who were in the workforce before women's liberation, one of the main benefits of the old system was not only that they themselves could get shit done more easily, but that the women who did pass the test were close to them too -- unlike the catty, bitchy career women of today. Now everyone has to waste a lot of time and effort dancing around all sorts of "touchy" topics.

To make it simpler, how would you make girls physically stronger than they are now? It's not a trick question -- by putting a greater emphasis on strength in gym class! Make weightlifting regular, or at least have the kids do push-ups or toss medicine balls every day. The boys and the girls would grow bigger muscles. However, strip away the focus on strength -- say, by turning gym class into an aerobics class -- and suddenly the boys and girls alike will become weaklings. (Most people who you see exerting themselves lifting weights look to be in decent shape, while the people who you see riding bikes or jogging around town tend to look like hell.)

Of course, many girls -- probably most of them -- would just sit it out and maintain their pleasantly soft figure instead of bulking up. And women who couldn't hang with the men back in the pre-women's lib days would have happily taken a more feminine job instead. We don't really have to worry about that. But what about women who could become Olympic athletes or competent businesswomen? If the zeitgeist constrains the roles to be less masculine, then they will never be pushed to succeed and will remain underdeveloped. (Same goes for the men too, of course.)

Before women's lib, we had greater diversity in roles -- from very feminine to very masculine -- allowing a wider range of specialization and greater choice for individuals. But by biasing the roles systematically toward the feminine side, current institutions choke off half of the source of social and cultural dynamism, as people of both sexes who would thrive on the masculine side must join what they see as the namby-pamby side.

One encouraging sign comes, for once, from the obstreperousness of little boys. At least we know that the tolerance of emasculated social roles is beaten into them, rather than easily impressed upon a blank slate. Higher costs make it less stable over time. Most of the time when you hear some brat throwing a fit in public, you want to go over and put him in his place. But I make one exception, when I'll actually shoot him a nod of respect -- "ah maaaaaan, i don't wanna. that stuff's for girrrrls!"

Does technology fail because of switching costs and user laziness?

[Much more detail on this topic can be found at Stan Liebowitz's webpage, especially in the books The Economics of QWERTY and Winners, Losers, & Microsoft.]

Google's web browser Chrome hasn't done well in its first year. Obviously we'd need to wait for another year or so just to see if things stay that way, but we're already hearing the predictable whining from its supporters about why it isn't off to such a hot start. Impartial spectators in the article ask obvious questions like, "Does the world need another web browser?" and "Does anyone but geeks care about how fast it goes compared to current alternatives?" Those are the obvious reasons that no one is adopting Safari, Opera, or Chrome -- nothing gained for 99% of internet users.

But losers are never content with simple answers, so of course we have to hear all over again about how users are so lazy that they get "locked in" to the browser they start off with, and that they don't migrate to an allegedly superior one because of the high "switching costs." Both are wrong.

Whiners always have a selective memory, so it may surprise them to notice that there have been three separate cases of a browser's surge in market share in only 10 to 15 years. First Netscape Navigator soared to dominance, and not just because it was first -- there is no reason for there to have been a winner-take-all browser. Early browsers could well have been evenly distributed. But Navigator was better than the others, so it won. Then Microsoft's Internet Explorer came along, and it was better than Netscape -- so it rose to dominance, dethroning Navigator. A while later Firefox showed up, and it's been steadily eroding Internet Explorer's market share ever since. Quite plainly, there is no such thing as lock-in or inertia for usage of web browsers.

Whiners also say that most people lazily stick with the default browser their computer came with. That would surprise Netscape Navigator users, since that was not the default. Nor has Firefox been the default, and it's been sapping the growth of the browser that is the default -- for almost all computer owners, no less. Safari has been the default for Macs since 2003, and yet despite Macs having roughly 10% share of their market, the Safari browser that comes with it has only 2-3% of its market. In other words, most Mac owners junk Safari and install something else. At least for things that are important to people, there is no such thing as blindly following what's given.

And as for switching costs, there are none but those that the newcomers inflict upon themselves, at least for web browsers. The analogy that switching costs is supposed to make is to learning a new language. Imagine that one language were more expressive than another -- you might not switch because it's simply hard to re-learn a whole new set of rules relating to word order, vocabulary, word-formation, sound sequences, and so on.

But that is almost never true for a mature technology because the producers have an incentive to make new technologies compatible with old ones -- in particular, they have an incentive to make the knowledge about how to use the old one carry over. When CD player producers wanted consumers to switch from playing cassettes to CDs, did they throw a whole new set of buttons at them? No, because no new functions were needed -- stop, play, etc. Did they plaster a whole new set of symbols to identify each function -- say, a happy face on the play button, a sad face on the stop button, faces looking left and right for the rewind and fast-forward buttons? No, they carried over the same symbols as before. Some of these pairings between symbol and function are so standard that you can easily pick out the record button on any device that records.

These no-brainer design choices made using a CD player automatic if you already knew how to use a cassette player. All you had to learn was how to open and close the disc drive or tray, but they made that as similar as possible to ejecting a cassette.

(Similarly, I can play a video game that has jump and attack functions and know exactly which buttons do which, without reading the manual, and even if they have different symbols on them, because those function-position pairings were standardized 20 years ago.)

The same is true for web browsers. Firefox carried over the left and right arrows for back-page and forward-page, a circle-with-an-arrow for refresh, a red octagon for stop, and a house for homepage. The URL bar, probably the most important feature, looks the same. Really, when you try out any web browser for the first time, are you that confused about how it works? It couldn't be simpler to switch. There are surely lots of differences across browsers that no one cares about, like how to alphabetize your list of 40,000 tentacle porn bookmarks, but 99% of the activity that 99% of users are doing requires only a handful of features that have become standardized.

There are a few exceptions that might make it harder to switch, but those were self-inflicted. For example, why does Safari fuse a stop button with a bookmark button -- and use the symbol of a plus sign? That's not intuitive at all. Stop buttons should always be red X's, red octagons, red traffic lights, whatever. Not a plus sign.

Also, the two browsers with the lowest share, Opera and Chrome, put their tabs in funny places. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all have the URL bar above the tab headings. Opera and Chrome have a URL bar embedded underneath each tab heading. Why would this matter? I don't know, but it truly jumped out at me as weird when I saw what Chrome and Opera looked like. I'm sure the Asperger-y designers have a solid logical case for why this is, mathematically speaking, the optimal design. But real people have voted that it isn't. And they don't need to explain why -- it just feels weird.

If web browsers competed at least partly based on price, then relatively poorly designed ones like Opera, Chrome, and Safari could capture a larger market share by charging less. After all, many people, like me, are content with a mediocre mp3 player -- since they rarely use it, they'll just take what's cheap. But since all browsers are free, there is even more intense competition based on quality -- visual design, intuitive use, desired features, etc. So the newcomer had better blow the incumbent out of the water, or don't even bother.

It isn't lazy or unwashed consumers who keep a new technology from being adopted -- it's arrogant producers who declare what consumers must use to qualify as human. How did that work out for the command-line interface?

College kids these days throw such boring parties

You may know that young people have been committing violent crime at lower and lower rates since the early 1990s, and that the same is true for property crimes. Illegal drug use is down since the late '90s, and hardly any young people smoke anymore. And of course promiscuity and pregnancy rates for teenagers and young adults are way down over the same time. Plus, with fewer and fewer young people getting their driver's license, you see less rowdy behavior on the roads. Indeed, the only holdout is binge drinking among college students -- for young people who aren't at college, the rates have been plummeting ever since the drinking age was raised.

Still, those are just numbers. To really believe them for yourself, you'd have to do some fieldwork and see the changes with your own eyes. Going to clubs that are 18+ gives you a decent idea -- for instance, I see fewer people dancing together than I did at my middle school dances -- but they could just be presenting a responsible image when they're in public among strangers. Something like a private house party would be more revealing. As it happens, an undergrad chick friend invited me to a housewarming / costume party last Friday, and I was shocked by how tame it was.

First, the house was located a safe 15 minutes off-campus, and only undergrads lived there -- no landlord, parents, etc. Plus it wasn't any old weekend: it was the Friday before Halloween, and most people were dressed up, which should have heightened the potential for bad behavior. And these people are in the IQ range of about 105 to 115 -- above-average, but not the brainiac type. They weren't nerds, losers, or goody two-shoes at all. Based on their counterparts who I knew as a teenager, I would've expected rampant pot-smoking, sex or make-outs in the closet, and drunken quarrels escalating into a fight.

True to the recent statistics, though, there was some drinking, but no one was falling-over drunk. Zero cigarette smoke. Also, no drugs of any kind -- only a couple of people hinting that they might want to get high. That's it? Just a joking side-comment about maybe doing it? Though I've never done drugs myself, they were common enough when I was a teenager that I recall hanging out with my best friend while he scored some weed on a lazy Friday afternoon, or my suitemates in college pouring into one of their rooms and filling it with pot smoke, again for no special occasion.

No violence or even an escalation toward a fight -- pretty remarkable given how much alcohol lowers your inhibitions. I thought I was going to see a catfight when some slut who'd cheated on one of the homeowner's friends walked in. The girls started talking a lot of shit about her, but all behind her back, never confronting her. That would be typical if it were the locker room, but at a private party where she's the unwelcome outcast and the shit-talkers are buzzed on booze? Quite a bit of restraint.

But the biggest shock was that there wasn't anyone running off to an unoccupied bed to start fucking -- not even to make out! (The complete lack of darkly lit rooms didn't help.) Maybe they were just averse to hooking up with strangers, though, right? Well, there were more than a few couples there, and they weren't getting physical at all either. I mean, not even grind-dancing, kissing, or holding hands. For god's sake, a bunch of 6th-graders playing Seven Minutes in Heaven in 1988 were venturing farther sexually than this group!

One of the earliest memories I have of seeing something somewhat sexual is being at my high school babysitter's house when I was probably 7 or 8. I was glued to the TV playing Legend of Zelda with her brother, when we got distracted by something. Turning over, I saw my babysitter standing with her back to me and her boyfriend holding her, facing us. He pulled up her skirt to show us her ass and said, "See this is how you do it -- you get the left one, then the right one. The left one, the right one," while squeezing each cheek in turn. Her head was turned to one side, and I remember her looking embarrassed, almost like she was ready to cry. Years away from puberty, I could still tell that whatever I was seeing was a big deal. *

And yet I doubt any of the Millennial party-goers I hung out with ever saw anything close to that growing up. Internet porn, American Pie, or Superbad don't count -- it's completely different when it's happening right before your eyes. And with the age of losing your virginity steadily rising, I doubt they even heard about it -- let alone experience it themselves -- while developing.

So don't let all those Facebook albums full of beer pong pictures fool you -- aside from some mild drinking, young people have never been so well behaved and so shielded from the slimy and awkward parts of real life.

* The disappearance of irresponsible young people means that little kids growing up in the 1990s or later didn't have reckless, cute older babysitters to give them their first glimpse of adult world. I recall another high school babysitter bringing over three of her friends, getting buzzed on beer, and acting goofy. (I didn't know what alcohol was at the time, but later I realized that their behavior was due to drinking.) My favorite experience of all, though, was when a college girl babysitter had to -- or maybe just felt like -- returning to campus, and dragged us along with her... at night. Boy was it worth it: she took us to a student dorm, or maybe a sorority house, full of barely legal Buckeyes.

omigooood, who's thiiiiissss???!?!?!

Oh them? They're the kids I'm babysitting.

omigod, they're soooo cuuute!!!

Honey, I hear that all the time -- you'd better come up with a more original pick-up line than that. On a serious note, I think that night triggered my puberty development years earlier than it would have on its own. Once your body senses that female pheromones are above some threshold, it figures that your peers are now going through puberty, so you should be too. But I started liking girls several years before the average boy, and enjoyed my first long French kiss when I was 12 -- maybe all it took was a single night's tour through a college dorm, with nubile babe pheromones flooding my nostrils the whole time. Hey, if you dropped a 9 year-old boy into a gang-infested urban slum, he'd probably grow tougher a lot earlier than if you hadn't. Why shouldn't that work for other aspects of adolescent development?

Are longer lifespans making adults more childish?

Over the weekend, the NYT gave us a flashback op-ed from 1990 on making Halloween less childish. Before the civilizing trend of the early-mid 1990s through today, it was still possible to talk about Halloween as having been handed over to a bunch of goofy kiddies. Now, helicopter parents have destroyed the holiday for their kids, and it's mostly old people who go nuts. (Here's a post I wrote last year about how the skag stole Halloween.)

If Halloween isn't supposed to be about little children asking for candy, what should it be about, according to the op-ed writer? Why, staying at home and reflecting on the past and your forbears. Sounds fun -- I'm sure that would have been an easy transition to make. If you want one of those holidays, fine; but pick a day that's free of existing fun holidays, or try to convert an existing serious holiday.

Of course, we have succeeded in taking back Halloween from young people, but at what price? It's not as though adult ownership automatically makes the thing serious, as most adults have little interest in souring the fun associated with things they themselves enjoy. So the result is to maintain the "childishness" of the holiday, but to make adults rather than children look childish. Which sight is more pathetic? -- kids dressed up or adults dressed up? (There's no debate that we'd like to see adolescents dressed up.)

We see this trend in all sorts of other things that used to belong to children and some teenagers. Video games are an obvious example. The typical video game player (I will never use the lame term "gamer") used to be a male under the age of majority. Now the average age is early-mid 30s. And video games are no less childish now than during the Nintendo era -- they may have more "mature content," like getting into the persona of a mass murderer, but that hardly makes the player more grown-up. As with Halloween costumes, we've only succeeded in making adults rather than children look childish.

And the same goes for comedy movies, a trend that Steve Sailer recently commented on here. There may be a Hispanic demographic angle to this shift, but a larger one is again the ownership of this activity by people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s rather than teenagers or college students. Goofball or gross-out comedies marketed toward young people are pretty funny, and that's how they used to be in the 1980s and, if more weakly, in the 1990s. (The 15 - 24 age group, as a fraction of the population, peaked in the early 1980s.) Now they're geared more toward the same group that plays video games and spends lots of time putting together their Halloween costume -- at least in their late 20s, and mostly in their 30s or even 40s.

As with video games and costumes, these types of comedies need to be watered down because the target audience isn't that juvenile. Usually this is done by heaping humorless "irony" onto the product to make it look like it's made for adults, in the same way that making a candy bar with almonds and goji berries assuages the 30-something's sense of guilt for pigging out on sugar. Predictably, these grown-up junk bars -- laughably marketed as health foods -- are not nearly as pleasing to the tongue as a simple Caramelo or Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Why has this transfer of ownership from children to adults completely failed to lower the level of childishness? (Of course, that's not such a big problem if it's only kids who are engaging in the activity -- there needs to be some level of childishness in the world, but just confined to what kids do.) The answer is that if adults are merely trying to steal something fun from children, they have no incentive to transform the activity into something that looks grown-up, responsible, and so on. If adults' motivation were to show children how to engage in the activity responsibly -- say, having a single glass of wine at dinner -- then we would see them behaving like adults. But when the big person is merely stealing the little person's toy -- after all, "that stuff isn't for kids" -- then we'll see adults indulging more in childish activities.

For all the benefits associated with longer lifespans in modern countries, there is this downside -- that as adults live longer and healthier lives, they'll want to keep those lives as fun-filled as possible. Why bow out gracefully at age 35 or 40 if you can still live it up childishly well into your 60s like the Baby Boomers are? This naturally makes old people more bitterly envious of young people than before -- "why should they have all the fun"? -- whereas before the two age groups would not have been seeking the same goals in the first place. When desires are different, envy is impossible.

Now, for example, the fact that a 20 year-old girl can look beautiful so effortlessly only serves to anger the 30-something who sees herself as still in the game, whose counterpart many generations ago would have already settled into family life.

Yet just because older people are healthier than before doesn't mean that their state relative to young people has changed -- 20 year-olds will always look better than 30 year-olds, and video games marketed to little boys and teenagers will always be more fun than those marketed to the middle-aged. Older people can look better today than the old people of centuries before, but they have to work harder at it. In the same way, they can have more fun on Halloween than the old people of yesteryear, but they still have to work pretty hard at it. In expending this effort to stay young, they immediately notice that there's a huge group of people who don't have to toil at all to enjoy youthful fun -- the young.

And when the powerful become envious of the powerless, we know what's going to happen to the source of fun among the lower-status group: it's going to get stolen. The corrosive envy that the wicked stepmother had of Snow White has been a constant throughout human existence, but it is much more intense now that longer lifespans encourage old people to still compete on the same terms as young people, without realizing how pathetic they look in general.

Sure, there is the one-in-a-million specimen who can still look great into their 30s, or who can have as much carefree fun as kids do on Halloween, but the remaining 999,999 out of the million become the ugly old guy in the club, the video game addict whose hobby is more about collecting and going through the motions of completing a game, or the movie "buff" who passes over the DVD of Fast Times at Ridgemont High in favor of Superbad.

No more "you're welcome"?

Maybe this trend started earlier, but I encounter it enough now that I think it's real: service workers have stopped saying "you're welcome" or just "welcome" when you tell them "thank you." They just say "thanks" or "thank you" back, perhaps with a different inflection like, "No, thank you!"

It's too feminine, and not in a good way -- in that annoying passive-aggressive way, while also mirroring what the other person said. I'm sure that businesses have run a variety of tests and determined that most customers feel better when the clerk says "thank you" back instead of "you're welcome." But you'd think there would be a subset of these industries that would cater to the apparently tiny niche I belong to, just like some low or mid-priced restaurants don't have waitresses who lay it on extra thick with the hiiii omigod you guys look so awesome, i mean, you're like totally the bestest new friends i've made tonighttt!!!

Anyone know of places where it's still common to hear "you're welcome"?

Diversity destroying devilish diversions

By now we've become numb to news reports about how the cult of diversity has led to yet another restriction on workplace interactions between men and women or some new unwieldy phrase we're supposed to use for cripples ("persons with disabilities") or for vagrants and bums ("historically teetotalingly challenged communities").

But what incentive do the masters of cultural regulation have to limit their powers to only the most common-sense cases, assuming even those existed? Obviously those beyond criticism pay no price to meddle in every aspect of everyone's lives, so of course we'll see a lot more of that than before.

Here's an NYT article on the pathetic move by schools to basically outlaw Halloween for kids, all in the name of "positive costumes" and tolerance for other cultures. Because, you know, most kids these days would be dressing up in blackface if it weren't for the principal telling them not to. Indeed, why don't we just require all little boys and girls to dress up like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks?

And how's this for a two-faced policy? -- "French maids are explicitly discouraged." Jeez, your daughter tries to honor the oppressed gender of a foreign culture's working class, and that's the thanks she gets for it?

Clearly the push by paranoid parents for fewer toy weapons and bloody imagery began as part of the "save the kids" campaign that only began once kids became incredibly safe. That is, during the mid-1990s, right as rates of violent crime and child abuse were plummeting. My generation's parents saw the sickening news of Adam Walsh's murder, and yet they still let us dress up like serial killers for Halloween. The super-neurotic parents of the past 15 years, though, have managed to pressure the public and private spheres to deprive their kids of the joys of mock violence.

Even more, this has become a status-signaling contest among parents (here's one):

"I'm not sure what is driving this memo [about approved costumes]," Mr. Bishoff said. "But perhaps it is reaction to years past. Sometimes kids will have those 'Scream' masks, but usually not too blood and gutsy. I mean, can't parents have discretion? The fact is, if parents are too stupid to not send kids to school with hockey masks as Jason, they are probably too stupid to read this memo."

Yeah, don't those stupid parents know that letting your kid dress up as Jason is the first step toward him becoming a machete-wielding maniac? Better yet, you'll have to follow him around for a few hours to make sure that he doesn't play with boys who have stupid parents that let them wear Freddy Krueger gloves. Bad influences. Well it's either that or just not let your kid go out at all -- which is what you'll probably decide on, since micro-monitoring is cheaper to do at home.

Time was, you bragged to other parents about how rich your child's life was -- "Look at how well little Jayden can play the piano, and he's pretty popular with the girls, too!" Now parents compete to see whose kid is the biggest loser:

"I won't allow him to play sports since they only glorify violence and competition, and I won't pay for driving school since I can drive him around just fine myself. I mean, not hanging out with friends is good for him anyways -- gives him more time to volunteer at the Martin Luther King Center for Persons with Disabilities. He'll never get into Columbia without enough community service, you know."

If a bunch of nutcase parents want to harm their own children's social lives, that's their prerogative. But by creating a cultural regulation system, we empower these fruitcakes to spoil the fun of other people's children. Without the diversity stick -- which no one can object to being beaten with -- they'd have very little to force their paranoid practices on everyone else. But just cloak it in some double-talk about positive role models, and there you go.

Banning Halloween -- another unintended consequence of the diversity regulators.

Why straight men rationally dislike gay men

[Inspired by a conversation I just overheard in the campus dining hall between a flaming gay and his homely but slutty chick friend, who was sharing quite loudly the details of her waking up next to a guy whose name she didn't know but had gotten banged by earlier. Only a freshman in college, she is well on her way to becoming this middle-aged whore that Roissy observed at the end of her trainwreck.]

A common response to the question, "Why do straight guys have such disgust for gays?" is that they shouldn't -- after all, less competition! But because only around 3% of men are homosexual, that's not exactly weeding out a lot of potential competition. Factor in how desirable these guys would be if straight, and you're left with even fewer -- maybe 1% or less of all males weeded out.

Of course there are all sorts of visceral reactions that straights have toward gays, the most obvious being the thought -- or heaven forbid, the mental image -- of two guys doing it. And as enlightened human beings, we're supposed to put aside such "yuck test" results and provide clearer reasons.

So here's a perfectly rational motivation that straight men have to make homosexuals knock off their gayness: their interactions with (straight) women represent a form of pollution. Gay men are always there to convince a woman that she doesn't need to lose any weight, that any guy would be lucky to get with her, that she still has plenty of time before she has to settle down, and that she shouldn't feel guilty about being a slut --

I mean, god gave you that nasty thing down there for a reason girlfriend, you should own it! Psh, don't let anybody else tell you how to live your life!

The result is a woman with an inflated ego, less shame, and more venereal diseases. Some poor schlub will end up dating or (perish the thought) marrying this skag, and it won't be the gay himself who bears the costs of dating a polluted woman but the boyfriend or husband. Think of how much better the relationship would be if she were more humble, not so shameless, and free of syphilis. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the gay enabler will date or marry any such polluted woman. When pollution costs them nothing, they will churn it out like a tidal wave, with the costs being borne by straight men.

It is no surprise, then, that straights have an impulse to get the gays to keep quiet -- to do what they want behind closed doors, but to not ruin the dating and mating pool that we straights have to drink from.

Just to show that this is not irrational prejudice against gays per se, let's ask if there's a sub-group of straight men who also play the ego-inflating, shame-scrubbing role. Indeed there is -- we call them "white knights," "captain save-a-ho," and so on. These are loser straight guys whose only hail-mary hope of getting laid is to find a fairly homely and slutty woman and tell her that she's too beautiful for those other men out there, that she shouldn't be ashamed of being repeatedly used and tossed aside, etc.

Both he and the gay bff have selfish reasons for propping her up -- the former to hopefully sleep with her, the latter to have another close friend -- and just like the gay friend, his servile worship is tantamount to pollution. After all, once her mind's been ruined, he'll either have gotten some or not, and some other guy will have to pay the cost of dating an artificially delusional woman. And just as we saw before, most straight guys get disgusted when they see this kind of behavior:

Dude, you're pathetic -- grow some balls and stop kissing her ass.

Still, if gay men are only 3% of the male population, why make such a big fuss? Simple: each gay guy can and does spoil the brains of multiple females. Where they are in highish concentration, it might be around 10% of all females who they manage to pollute. That percentage would be frighteningly high -- as though there were one on each block.

The Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase is famous for showing that, among other things, government regulation isn't necessary to solve problems like pollution of drinking water. The people who drink the water can negotiate with the polluters, and if the costs of these transactions are low, they'll settle their differences on their own. For example, the people might simply pay the polluters not to pollute if their harm was greater than the polluters' benefit. (Alternatively, the polluters might pay the people to put up with the filth if the pollution benefited the polluters more than it harmed the people.)

Before the openly gay era, the costs of straights negotiating with gays to keep their offensive behavior out of the public sphere were pretty low -- basically just a social stigma against homosexuality. When the stigmatized group members contemplate "coming out" in general, they see how difficult it will be, so they don't bother haggling at all. All the stigmatizers would have to do is shoot them a look like, "hey, remember what your place is," and that would have been the sum of the transaction costs.

In the post-disco era, though, the stigmatized group feels emboldened to bargain and fight back, so that the costs of negotiating between straights and gays has skyrocketed. Any straight guy who now says -- just as he would to a fellow straight "white knight" -- "C'mon, knock it off, you're ruining the women we have to date," will find himself on the wrong end of a hate speech lawsuit.

I mean, like, omigod, so -- what -- I can't make my best friend feel better about her open sexuality just because I'm gay? You don't know who you're messing with, mister -- I mean, we didn't struggle at Stonewall for nothing, and bitch we aren't going back!

Obviously the government isn't going to step in to deal with this market failure either. So really the only option that straight men have is to move somewhere else where the dating pool is not only free of homosexual pollution but has been purified by the tacit collective agreement among men to keep women's self-destructive tendencies from growing out of control.

Extra sugar, but non-fat, please

On my way back home from campus, I stopped by a 7-11 to pick up two hard-boiled eggs to make some egg salad (with bacon bleu cheese dip and horseradish mustard... mmm baby). The 60-something clerk looked at them and remarked, "Oh that's really healthy" with a flat affect. I don't like getting health advice from people with one foot in the grave by age 60, so I told her, "I know -- they're full of B-vitamins."

One of her friends then dropped in to ask what she was up to, and she said, "Oh nothing, just eating candy." I didn't even notice it, but sure enough, she was passing the time by shoveling sugar down her piehole. But hey, at least there was no fat in all that sugar! It's no wonder that her face had been destroyed by wrinkles or that she was lugging around 70 pounds of extra fat.

It's one thing when the vegan faggots at Whole Foods give you weird looks when they see that all you're buying is butter, cheese, beef, and pate -- as misguided as their reliance on grains is, at least they aren't popping heaps of jelly beans in their mouths all day. The average person, though, is perfectly happy to chastise you for eating bacon and eggs: "Don't you know what's in that junk? Here, have some ice cream instead."

It's like those people in Starbucks who order a venti 6-pump hazelnut java chip frappuccino with extra, extra, extra caramel sauce -- oh, and can you make that non-fat? No lie, I truly heard a girl order something with "extra, extra, extra" caramel sauce, but non-fat, please. Buncha dipshits. That's how crazy everyone has become by listening to the government and the nutrition experts: if they get even a bit of whipped cream on their frappuccino, they're certain to drop dead of a heart attack on the way out, but the 50 pounds of sugar is just fine because "it gives me energy."

Swedish diet and good skin

Swedes eat a lot more animal products than other nations, especially before the anti-fat hysteria that began in the late 1970s, but even after that they haven't fallen as much as the US and UK have for tofu, green-only salads with non-fat dressing, and piles of pasta.

One obvious health benefit is their stature -- they're overshadowed only by the Dutch (who also gorge on animal products), and stand one to two inches taller than Anglo people in the US and UK. Another is penis size: Swedish men have the second-biggest members, just below the pate and cheese-eating men of France.

What about the benefits for women? Sweden certainly has done well in the Miss Universe competition, especially considering its tiny population to draw contestants from. They've done far better than England, and on a per capita basis they've done better than the US. Stereotypes abound about how beautiful Swedish women are, while just the opposite stereotype holds about their English and German contemporaries.

More specifically, Swedish women seem to have really nice skin compared to similar ethnic groups. Pay attention to the skin on the brunette's legs in this ABBA video (hit the HQ button):



Now, the blond is 25 in that video, so her skin tone isn't surprising. But the brunette is 30 years old and still enjoys some pretty taut flesh -- bouncy enough that she can successfully sport a micro-miniskirt after passing the big 3-0. I don't think this is a "good genes" effect, since her face -- despite having nice skin -- isn't so hot. Contrast this with someone like Halle Berry: she had nice skin at 30, but she had nice everything at 30 due to her good genes.

You see lots of females like the brunette from ABBA, but only when they're teenagers: they have skin to die for, and all over, even though they may have plain or ugly faces. So, what we see here is more like a slowing of the aging process, not the robustness of good genes to all manner of environmental insults. If you want to extend young adulthood into your late 20s and 30s, ditch the grains, starches, and sugars, and pile on the eggs, fish, and cheese.

For those interested in the mechanism, I may put up a more in-depth post sometime, but briefly, the key is to avoid sugars and get lots of vitamin A. When a sugar smacks into a protein, a freakish fused glob results, so that the protein can't do its job anymore. These reactions are more likely to happen if there are simply more sugar molecules bouncing around your bloodstream. In particular, the proteins that give you good skin -- collagen and elastin -- can get screwed up by sugars fusing with them. By lowering the level of digestible carbs, you lower your blood sugar, and so lower the damage done by these reactions.

Vitamin A's primary role has nothing to do with vision, despite all the hoopla you heard as a kid about carrots being good for your eyes. It does do that, but mostly vitamin A maintains the proper functioning of your epithelial cells -- the ones on the "surface" (including the lining of your digestive and respiratory tracts). That includes skin. In fact, the most potent anti-acne drug -- accutane -- is a vitamin A derivative. You can only get real vitamin A (retinol) from animal products, whereas the stuff you get from vegetables (the caretinoids like beta-carotene in carrots) is a precursor that your body very inefficiently converts into vitamin A.

For the real deal, you have to eat liver -- that's far and away the most concentrated source. Take cod liver oil if you are unfortunate enough not to like the taste of pate or braunschweiger. It's fat-soluble, so animals also store some in their fat, such as eggs, the fat left on muscle meat, and dairy products. But it's not a ton, so you really have to make sure you work some form of liver into your diet.

Losers crying monopoly: Booksellers edition

One of the economic themes I try to emphasize is the bogosity of most of our notions about monopolists who fleece consumers. Historically, that has rarely happened, unless the government propped them up. When the business enjoys a high level of control because it won fair and square, there is basically no such thing as a harmful monopoly in reality (theory allows it, of course).

What we think of as harmful monopolies were actually slashing prices for consumers, boosting the level of output, improving the quality of their product, and thereby driving all of their inferior competitors out of business. It is these losers in the struggle who have raised the biggest stink about an industry becoming more and more concentrated in a few companies' hands. Of course, human nature must harbor a fear of a few people controlling so much stuff, or else the failed business interests could never have whipped up popular support for cracking down on railroads, oil industries, Hollywood, software makers, and whoever will be bruised by the government's antitrust bludgeon next year.

Here is the latest installment of this pathetic story: small-scale bookstores want the government to train its antitrust guns on Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target for slashing their prices on popular books, claiming that this will tend to erode the mom & pop bookstores and give these big guys even greater market share. If you read the WSJ article cited, you'll see that the lower prices are not coming from the retailers paying less to the publishing houses -- instead they're taking greater losses themselves in order to get a leg up on their competitors.

You remember what book-buying was like before Amazon -- hardly any variety, high prices (corrected for inflation), recommendations that reflected whatever weirdos who worked there, and snobby employees who thought that working at a "good bookstore" was going to be their springboard to being crowned Poet Laureate.

I still think bookstores will continue to exist because they allow people to browse through as much of a book as they want before deciding whether or not to buy it. Books really are goods that need to be sampled before someone decides to buy it. That's something that you can't do with any online bookseller. Since bookstores apparently can't compete very well on prices, they'll have to offer a higher-quality browsing experience to stay competitive against online retailers. You've surely noticed how much nicer bookstores have gotten recently, no doubt because of the online threat.

I'm not worried that most people might eventually do their sampling at brick-and-mortar stores and then buy the books they like online. That will wipe out brick-and-mortar stores, but then if they disappeared, so would the online booksellers -- after all, people would have no way to sample books anymore. Only if online retailers can provide a good enough browsing experience will they be able to replace brick-and-mortar stores permanently. As things stand now, though, you can't flip through most books on Amazon. On the plus side, for books that you can browse, you can also search them, which goes far beyond what you can do with a hard copy. Does the book discuss something you're interested in? Just search and find out.

Is the decline of the genius due to cheaper information transmission?

This year's winners of the Economics "Nobel" followed up on pioneering work done by a previous Nobelist, Ronald Coase, of whose Big Ideas had to do with why firms exist instead of every individual making market transactions with all others. A firm is a planned collective where some people give orders and most people carry them out. Making sure that this all works out OK is costly. If you just entered into a free-market contract with everyone else you had to interact with, you wouldn't need to spend so much monitoring them -- their part of the deal would be clearly spelled out in the contract, unlike the vague "job description" of someone who works in a firm.

But Coase saw that even using the market carried its own costs, called transactions costs. For example, if the tasks you needed someone to do weren't so predictable, you would have to keep re-writing the terms of the contract in the free market. That could waste lots of your time and eat up money if you had to pay fees to lawyers who re-wrote the contract. In this case, it could be less costly to hire that person as a worker for your firm and pay them not for micro-specific tasks but to simply show up and do what their manager says. This allows greater flexibility in having that worker do what you need them to do.

So, the basic idea is that if it costs too much to use the free market, firms will develop and have lots of tasks done "in-house." If it didn't cost anything to use the free market, firms would start shrinking by outsourcing various tasks to independent contractors who they wouldn't have to micro-manage. Here is a straightforward and lively podcast about the nature of the firm from EconTalk.

I think we see something similar in scientific and artistic accomplishment. In some eras, there are geniuses -- individuals who excel at all manner of intellectual tasks -- and in others there are legions of specialists working together. At first you might think the analogy is to free trade: when there are substantial barriers to trade, you won't specialize so much in what you produce because you can't exploit your comparative advantage and because the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. During Descartes' day, this argument would go, there were something like high trade barriers between him and other intellectuals, so Descartes and his contemporaries would lean more in the generalist direction. Now that those barriers are diminished, intellectuals can specialize much more narrowly, and so we don't have geniuses but research teams.

The main barriers to "trading" your output with someone else -- I'll take geometry and you take algebra -- were communication costs. I don't mean just the language barrier, since you can decide on a lingua franca like Latin or English. But being able to bounce your ideas off of other people, give feedback to them, and so on, surely proceeded much more slowly when communication was sent by primitive vs. advanced post systems, let alone when it is sent by telegraph, telephone, or email.

Do these seem like the typical trade barriers? Not really. When we talk about more free vs. less free trade, we're talking more about tariffs, embargoes, and whatnot. If the main reason that Newton couldn't instantly communicate with Leibniz was that there was an aroused populace and a bunch of lawmakers who required him to give up one of his fingers each time he received an article from Leibniz, then the trade analogy would be apt.

Instead, the barrier seems more like a transaction cost, just as you would have to make by meeting with a contractor, communicating back and forth about what the terms of the contract will be, and so on. "OK, I'll take this part of the project, and you work on that other part. We'll keep in touch and update our responsibilities as the project unfolds." How an intellectual work will develop is incredibly unpredictable, so these two free-market transactors are going to have to interact very frequently and keep changing their picture of what each one is going to do until the next interaction.

If the problem looks more like one of transaction costs than of trade barriers, then we should look to Coase's idea about why firms exist. In the 17th C., the constant back-and-forth would have proven too costly, not just financially (before postage, telephones, and email were widespread and cheap) but also in terms of time waiting to hear back, which you could spend doing your own thing. So, rather than contract an intellectual task out to someone else, you'd move it "in-house" and work on it yourself. You'd be a one-person intellectual firm. (As far as I can tell, Coase's idea about the firm just applies to bundling tasks together in an operation, not necessarily a bunch of individual people.)

But if the transaction costs were trivial, as they became during the Industrial Revolution and as they have plummeted even further during the Internet Age, you'd feel the relief of crossing off that task from the long list of shit you already have to do, and let someone else take care of it, provided you take care of something they need done. Geniuses no longer make sense because specialization is made possible by cheap communication.

Lastly, there's one idea we can cross off the list of possible explanations -- that geniuses only flourish while there's "low-hanging fruit," so that one person could pick fruit from a number of different trees. Once that's gone, intellectuals have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees, and that requires spending most of your life climbing a single tree rather than dilly-dallying around the entire orchard. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit. If it were so low-hanging, why did it take the appearance of someone with a 3000 IQ like Newton to pick it? So-called basic calculus could not have been discovered by schoolchildren in math class. If it were so low-hanging, why didn't it repeatedly smack all previous mathematicians in the face as they were wandering around the orchard? Quite obviously, geometry, algebra, calculus, etc., are stratospherically high-hanging fruit.

The true function of the low-hanging fruit story is to massage our egos when we realize that we're in an intellectually stagnant or even backward time -- it can't be that we're stupid or lacking imagination... it's just that... well, all that baby stuff like differential geometry's pretty much been taken care of, leaving little left for us would-be geniuses to solve. That story sounds fine and pretty during a period of slow growth, but we keep seeing those periods interrupted by revolutions. After Euclid wrote The Elements, what was there left to do in geometry? Indeed, his book was the main textbook for centuries until people took geometry in different directions -- and that wasn't low-hanging non-Euclidean fruit either.

Also, this account isn't as rosy as it may sound -- like, great, we don't have to rely on geniuses anymore! The trouble is that when a bunch of ideas are bouncing around in a single person's brain, compared to the loss-y process of bouncing your ideas off of someone else, you can see the larger pattern more easily. It's true that even Newton will need to chat with others, but there does seem to be a critical threshold of how much work you're doing by yourself. Above that threshold, the big work is done by geniuses -- and it's a lot more important than when it's done by hives of specialists. Our contemporary research team arrangement hasn't yielded anything like Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Einstein, or von Neumann.

Still, the sciences aren't doing so bad -- the loss of geniuses is even worse in the arts. There, the tasks that make up an intellectual project are even more poorly defined and unpredictable. For one thing, there's not really a problem you're trying to crack but rather an impression or viewpoint you're trying to convey to an audience. And the end-result is much more of a gestalt thing. Darwin's Origin of the Species would've been a more difficult read if a committee of biologists investigated and wrote up separate chapters of it, but you'd still walk away with the same knowledge. But imagine a committee of composers each responsible for separate movements of a piece of music. How it all hangs together is far more important in art, making the cost of teamwork prohibitive.

Now in our age of cheap communication, artists form "circles" or "movements" where the tasks are contracted out to lots of members and followers, not unlike research teams in science. Again, it's not as though Shakespeare and Bach never talked to anyone else, but most of their work was done in-house rather than spread out across a clique of specialists. Here there are also very real costs of contracting, aside from just communication -- an artistic circle, movement, or whatever, requires that its adherents waste a bunch of time and brainpower drawing up a manifesto. How different is that from a contract between a plumber and someone with a clogged toilet? If you're Michelangelo, you don't have to set down a more-or-less binding agreement about where the project is headed -- you make those continual re-adjustments yourself as you go along.

In case you think I'm making this whole thing up, look at the two recent cases of mathematicians who solved long-standing Big Problems. Andrew Wiles basically locked himself in a room for several years in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and Grigori Perelman lives nearly isolated from the outside world but still managed to prove the Poincare Conjecture. I'm not nearly as au courant on the arts, but I'll bet that the exceptions amidst the stinking stew of contemporary literature, music, and visual art are those who insulate themselves from the world of circles, movements, and manifestos. That certainly seems true for film-makers -- most of Stanley Kubrick's or David Lynch's movies are better than the doctrinaire hive junk, for example. Art buffs, feel free to leave comments on this question.

Putting girls in their place

God knows we love young girls' throbbing energy level and cockiness -- it makes them more fun to be around -- but that testosterone peak sometimes leads them to act out of line. We can always rely on females to police other females' behavior, but that only goes so far. After all, the target of the policing realizes that most of her persecutors are acting selfishly -- omiGOD, i mean, like, don't be JEALOUS just cuz you're old and ugly. She won't conclude that she's done something wrong, only something threatening to the status of competitor females in the mating arena.

That's where feedback from boys comes in. She won't care if a low-ranking boy calls her out for misbehaving, for the same reason as before -- i mean, are you kidding me? you're just JEALOUS that i'm hot and you're a loser. Such guys aren't likely to call her out in the first place because they're pussies, but even if they did, the most likely cause is resentment. And her male relatives have selfish motives too -- to get the best value out of what they see as their property.

This makes it all the more important for desirable males to whip girls into shape whenever they get out of control. First, they are less likely to call acceptable acts "misbehavior" because they aren't competing with the girl, aren't bitter or resentful -- they have enough choices that one girl isn't a drop in the bucket -- and have no genetic stake in how she behaves. Ideally this would be her boyfriend or husband, but even they may not step up enough because they'll incur a higher cost in the form of a potential strain on the relationship's harmony.

I used to do my part for the greater good of humanity by keeping young, cocky girls in line when they were my tutorees. To them, most of the time I was like their friend's cool, cute older brother. If they lost my respect, they'd feel sick showing their face where I work, and that put a real brake on their impulse to act like wild animals. Again, rambunctiousness is healthy to a certain extent, especially when you're young, so I only put my foot down when they stepped too close to the boundary.

Now that I no longer have that outlet, I have to rely on my interactions with them at dance clubs. Most of the time, they're somewhat out of control, but they aren't carrying on like maniacs. Once more, the only parties who would be deeply disturbed are male relatives, bitter loser males, and all manner of competitor females -- especially the older ones, who don't like being reminded of how slack their skin has become and how close their libido and energy level in general is to flatlining. But every once in awhile, they do act like retards and need to be corrected -- for their own benefit and for the well-being of everyone around them.

At '80s night this week, there was the usual circle of groupies staring up while I was getting into the groove, and as usual a few climbed up on the mini-stage to get closer. But instead of delivering a lame pick-up line or just going right for it and grinding their pelvis against my body, one girl gave me a light kick to the calf -- and when my back was turned. Given how crowded the place is, and given how much people are bouncing around, I thought it was an honest mistake. But then she gave me another light kick like the first one, and shot me a come-hither look when I turned around to see what the fuck she was doing.

I paced slowly over to her, set my hand down on her shoulder, and said, "Don't... Do that... Anymore..." I didn't have a scowl on my face, nor a coddling or reassuring expression. Just that look like, you're being annoying and need to knock it off. She stopped horsing around at that point, and when she was about to leave the area 10 minutes later, she tugged at my jeans from the floor and reached up to shake my hand and say i'm sorryyyyy with an honest worried look in her eyes. I took her hand but merely half-smiled and waved her off as though she were overreacting and being weird, which must have fucked with her mind a little more.

The next time she feels like being too aggressive with a boy she likes, she'll remember how ashamed she came out of it the last time. Girls get away with too much shit, and someone needs to rein them in when they push the limits of appropriate behavior. Accosting a boy that you're ga-ga over is one thing, but kicking -- even lightly -- is another. Now, playfully bumping into me -- oooops, i mean, i guess i'm just clumsy -- would have been OK. And I certainly don't mind when a group of them rushes up and gooses me -- believe me, that'll put lead in your pencil. But unless someone is there to give her negative feedback, how will she learn where the borders are?

Now in fairness, she may go to a girls-only high school and so might have had little feedback from boys during her adolescence so far about what's normal in pursuing them. Elementary school girls punch, kick, or push down the boys they have a crush on, but we expect that to stop as boys' feedback to her trial-and-error approach teaches her that that's not acceptable. She definitely wasn't drunk or hyped up on caffeine, so she really did have the wrong view of how to act.

The only alternative to going to a girls-only school is that boys her age are too desperate and afraid to call her out on her bullshit. You don't have that much bargaining power at that age, while the girl who sits in front of you in math class can wrap any guy around her finger, and that makes confronting them pretty intimidating. Even the most popular guy in school still pays a higher social cost, or takes a larger risk, compared to when he's more mature and secure socially. And she was pretty cute, which makes it even harder for guys to suck it up and crack down when necessary.

This is one unfortunate consequence of a greater degree of age segregation in society. All groups split up somewhat by age, but ours especially does so. Parents -- let alone adults with no children -- are pretty clueless about what young people are up to, and this naturally leads to paranoia and moral panics. Video game violence, goth music, an epidemic of oral sex, etc.

But the other side of this coin is that young people are more clueless than before about what real life is like. If the only males you interact with are also young, you're very unlikely to ever get smacked down when you mouth off. More experienced guys, by contrast, don't believe that you have something they've never seen before, or that it's too risky to tell a pretty girl that she's acting retarded. Again, she wouldn't care at all what most older guys thought, for good reasons that we've already covered. But there is that subset of "my friend's cool older brother," or rebellious actors or lead singers, and so on, who they're deathly afraid of pissing off.

In all societies, people will fragment enough by age that these encounters will be rare, but like earthquakes, even a rare event will leave an indelible impression if its shock is great enough. By shielding them from the harsh events of the real world, we give them an artificially high sense of invincibility, and as a result, they'll behave more recklessly. Now, this doesn't translate into higher rates of crime or promiscuity -- the things we tend to worry about first -- because the costs there are mostly in the form of state punishment or same-age social shaming. Still, having to live more in adult-world would temper their conviction that they're the shit and that they can act as obnoxiously as they please.

Small farmers, not big corporations, gouge consumers

Recently I pointed out how backwards were the complaints about the large corporate buyers of farmers' raw milk being "too big" and supposedly wielding their buying power to fleece people who like dairy products. In fact, it's the dairy farmers themselves -- not those who buy up the raw milk and distribute it elsewhere -- who are trying to take the consumer for a ride.

The basic way that a monopoly harms consumers is by restricting output in order to send prices skyrocketing. Imagine when De Beers controlled almost all of the world's diamonds -- if prices were to fall unexpectedly, they'd simply choke off the supply. With fewer diamonds available, consumers will fight more intensely over them and so drive up the price. By creating an artificial shortage, De Beers makes consumers pay higher prices just so it doesn't bring in less money.

Unlike De Beers stuffing diamonds in their sock drawer, though, dairy farmers would have to pay huge costs to maintain cows that they'd taken out of milk production. So they just get rid of them altogether (from this WSJ article)

[L]ow prices have forced farmers to sell dairy cows through an industry program called Cooperatives Working Together. Member farms contribute money to the program, which purchases cows and slaughters them. So far this year, the number of working dairy cows in the U.S. has fallen by 170,000 to 9.2 million, says industry expert Jerry Dryer.

There you have it. Right in the pages of the newspaper with the widest U.S. circulation, we have an open-and-shut case of a group colluding to restrict its output in order to push prices back up to where they'd like them to be. For god's sake, they don't even break the law behind closed doors -- they've established the anti-competitive Cooperatives Working Together in plain view!

Of course, since they're farmers, they're not "gouging consumers" or "breaking the law" but merely struggling to preserve their endangered habitat. You can imagine the reaction if McDonalds and Starbucks saw their prices dropping due to the coffee war competition and agreed to destroy fully 2% of their coffee output so that they could charge higher prices for the remainder. Ditto if Wal-Mart and Target colluded. Actually, the elites would give Target a pass because they bring edgy designer junk to those who could otherwise only afford tacky crap. *

With most layers of government strapped for cash, the best policy response here is to shutter the DoJ's Antitrust division and have these glorified hall monitor pansies go do something useful.

* BTW, looks like the word "edgy" isn't so edgy anymore. One last slang-tastic paroxysm from the euphoric culture before it tumbled over like a drunk into a sewer.

News is the new sugar

Human beings spent most of their time thriving on a diet that had very little sugar, aside from the occasional in-season fruit -- and these were more like berries, not mangos or bananas -- or the odd glob of honey. Even when refined sugar became available, it was too expensive for most people to buy. But today sugar is incredibly cheap (tariffs on foreign sugar notwithstanding), and as a result the average person consumes a lot more of it than they used to.

Does it make sense to say, then, that "the cost of sugar consumption has gone down?" Only if we're talking about the monetary cost. There are myriad non-monetary costs to our health because we're consuming so much more of it now, and our bodies were not designed to cope with that much of it. (In general, our body wants there to be about 1 teaspoon of sugar in our blood, not 1 cup or however much gets in there when we eat a bagel with jelly, banana, yoghurt, granola, and fruit juice.)

And of course there are the opportunity costs -- that is, what do we give up by eating sweets instead of the non-sugary foods like eggs, steak, and liver? Again, plenty: sweets provide basically no nutrition, while the less saccharine foods give us vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids -- and above all, the feeling of a full stomach!

So, when we count up all of the costs -- and not just the monetary ones -- our consumption of sugar actually costs us a lot more than it used to, given how much we now consume and how outta-whack that is with our ancestral diet. (Natural selection is always at work, of course, so if we leave sugarholics to fend for themselves, a rare mutant might arise that doesn't get so screwed up by the stuff. Perhaps 100,000 years from now, that mutant's descendents may inherit the Earth, and human beings of the future will thrive on granola bars like cows on pasture.)

If the average person instinctively took account of all costs, especially if they had to work out a disillusioning calculus of what else they could be doing with their time, money and effort, then sugar might not be such a problem. So what if its monetary costs fell? -- we wouldn't be suckered into downing the stuff by the pound, since we'd see the far greater hidden costs. But most people aren't tough-headed accountants, and so sugar is a problem.

There are lots of similar examples where the monetary cost to gain access to something has fallen dramatically, perhaps to almost nothing, our consumption of it shoots up accordingly, though to such an evolutionarily new level that we're harmed. And because we don't attend to the full range of costs (especially what we could be doing instead), we have a tendency to keep harming ourselves, fooled into thinking we're on top of the world because this great stuff is so cheap.

The obvious examples are other chemical substances like cocaine or tobacco or alcohol, but I'm not really worried about these. Hardly anyone does hard drugs, drunkenness is way down, and there are no replacement smokers. The same is true for the other major worry of cultural conservatives -- porn. Young males will spend lots of their time masturbating or thinking about or looking at representations of naked girls. With lower monetary costs and higher quality, downloaded porn can make the young male demographic worse off. But again, people whose lives are made noticeably worse off by a porn habit aren't that numerous.

What's far more troubling is our addiction to news, broadly construed to include what newspapers traditionally covered (and so what blogs and internet forums now cover too), as well as the news or gossip in your social circle. Back on the African savanna, after all, shit didn't happen. On the rare occasion that it did, it was big news -- "Look out, there's a lion!" or "Hey, I found an abandoned honey comb!"

Even most of what was newsworthy you never heard about because it was too costly to find out, let alone to relay to paying consumers (remember, no advertisers back then). Thus, there weren't many sources to tell you the news. The upper limit on your daily dosage of news reflected the frequency of local social intrigue -- "Dude, did you hear that Thundarr's cheating on his wife?!"

Now, that has changed quite a lot. For one thing, a lot more shit happens today. But more importantly, the monetary cost to consumers of news is minuscule: you just go to the New York Times website, a blog, Facebook, email, or your text message inbox. That's a lot cheaper than corresponding by post or schlepping out to a news-stand to buy a hard copy of a newspaper. Given how thirsty we are for news -- that extra bit of information about which direction the lion was headed could have saved your life -- and how incredibly cheap it is now, we spend most of our waking hours consuming news of one sort or another. (And then spend most of our sleeping hours dreaming about deleting all of our unread emails, or telling people who barely know us to stop leaving retarded comments on our Facebook wall.)

Of course, this isn't a quantum leap, since there have been other cheap forms of quick printing and mail couriers. Still, even with those technologies it would have been prohibitively expensive to ask someone to update you with all manner of news every five minutes. But that's no problem at all now -- just keep your cell phone on and a bunch of tabs open in your internet browser for each source, and you can get your news fix all day, every day, without having to pay a red cent.

So we're binging on news, but is it as bad as sugar? After all, knowledge is power, right? Yes, but you hit diminishing returns very quickly. Most of the shit you're reading about won't help you in an absolute sense -- knowing which cave the bear went into -- or even in a relative sense -- knowing where a good water source was discovered. You'd squeeze most of the power from the knowledge you'd gain by simply reading the morning news, as opposed to re-visiting the newspaper's website for a total of four hours per day. And you'd know all the really important social gossip from your daily face-to-face interactions plus some time talking on the phone, as opposed to spending an additional two hours cumulatively per day checking your text messages, email, and Facebook. For most people, a daily news report and an hour on the phone each day is about all that's needed, and many could get by with a weekly news report and an hour on the phone per week.

Compared to previous patterns of news consumption, we're not benefiting a whole lot more in terms of learning stuff that will help us out. The only additional benefit we're getting is the purely hedonic one, like the rush we feel when we eat a chocolate brownie. The monetary cost of taking in the news is obviously way down, but the other costs are enormous. Remember that these technologies only speed up the transmission of information. We still have to search through the endless lists of headlines, Facebook profiles, email subject headers, and so on, to find a bit of news to consume. Then we have to actually digest it -- and reading takes just as long as it used to. When we respond, it takes just as long to think of our own news, how to phrase it, and to set it down in discrete form.

If we were only as plugged into the world of the news as we were before, clearly our total cost would be lower. But because the monetary cost is tiny, we're consuming a lot more news and reading and sending a lot more messages to people in our social circle, and the price we pay to participate in those processes is scarcely affected by the internet, cell phones, etc. Only the transmission costs have gone down -- composing and processing are still as costly as ever. As a result, most of what we're doing with these technologies is a waste.

Many people already see this -- aside from the vice of writing in blog comment sections, I've always worked to abstain from all this pointless bullshit. But others will claim that we really are better off with all this extra news -- again, knowledge is power, they'll say. It's really the opportunity costs of staying plugged in that no one thinks about, since it isn't very satisfying to dwell on all the even more pleasurable things you could be doing with your brief time, other than "making the rounds" yet again through your motley group of news providers and corresponding with people about nothing important.

The self-appointed cool people are eager to remind you that they don't watch TV (and probably don't even own one), but being hooked into the news stream is far worse. At least with TV, there is a predictability to what there will be today. Indeed, if you just remember back to the days when you missed school from sickness, most TV programming is unwatchable. The remotely good stuff didn't come on until 3pm and only lasted until 11pm or midnight. That still sounds like a big fraction of your waking hours, but most didn't watch eight or nine straight hours of TV, compared to far more people now who get little done for work or for play because they're hooked in for that long.

In fact, you have to keep searching your news sources all day because you never know when something will pop up. It starts right after you wake up, continues through much of your work day if you have a computer at work and don't have a boss constantly over your shoulder, persists through much of your so-called free time, and only ends right before you go to bed. At least with TV, you know that it's not even worth turning on before 3pm -- so let's do something fun until then. And most of the good stuff is done by 10 or 11pm, leaving plenty of time afterward (for night owls anyway) to catch up on work or have some more fun. Can you imagine most people blacking out such a long stretch of time as a "no internet, no cell phone" period, day after day?

Three consecutive hours of TV is much better than three hours of news-checking spread out across the day. With TV, you can concentrate your feel-good, mind-atrophying stuff into a three-hour chunk and get on with life outside of that timeframe -- it's like getting a solid night's sleep. Checking your news sources and corresponding are more frequent, if briefer, interruptions, like suffering from narcolepsy. We all need to sleep, but don't count on getting much done if you keep fading in and out of consciousness all day.

Our desire for following what's new in the world in understandable given the world that natural selection adapted us to, no less so than our desire for sweet stuff. But now that the cost of accessing it is negligible, we consume a lot more than we were designed to. The additional benefits either are not there or are at best small, while the other costs of our consumption have skyrocketed. We pay a huge price to process all that sugar we can now buy so cheaply, and we waste too much time staying abreast of nearly free, abundant news. Fortunately for our egos, the deus ex machina of self-deception will swoop in and reassure us that we really are gaining more power over our lives by staying plugged in for so long, and that we aren't doing those other so-called fun things because they aren't actually as pleasurable as refreshing the NYT's homepage for the fifteenth time in three hours.

But just as you'll naturally lose your sweet tooth after going on a low-carb diet, you'll find it pretty easy to unplug yourself from the news after awhile. I read the WSJ through my library's journal subscription, so I can only read what's in today's newspaper, not whatever else they've added to the newspaper's website in the past minute. I only turn on my cell phone a few times during the day. And for the most part I only look through my email when I get up and before I go to bed. No doubt I find this easier than others will because I have a lower opinion of what everyone else has to say, so that my typical response to a news item is "Who cares?" rather than "Omigod, I like totally have to share this on Facebook!!!"

That's the best practical advice I can give to the more caring souls reading this: each time you come across a headline or whatever, just ask "So what?" And whenever someone sends you an email, just say out loud "Oh shut up." It doesn't matter whether it's one of the few interesting news stories or an urgent message -- you have kick your habit of caring about what's going on cold turkey. After you've hardened yourself, then you can gradually re-introduce the limited amount of news and correspondence that you need. In the meantime, you're just going to have to be more cold-hearted.

The geek does the cheerleader's homework -- who, if either, is the parasite?

Increasingly often teachers will force students to work in groups, which usually results in the smartest person in the group pulling all of the weight while the others more or less freeload. It's pretty easy to describe the others as parasites and the smart person as parasitized, although we might not judge the parasites so harshly since they didn't intend for the class to split up into groups -- they were compelled by the teacher -- so it may be more like a case of stronger people who cannibalize the weakest person when all are forced by shipwreck into a foodless situation.

However, lots of other study groups form voluntarily, with both the smart and the less-smart finding it agreeable. The smart one is obviously providing his smarts -- probably he'll end up doing the other person's homework -- so clearly the less-smart person gets something nice out of the deal. And the smart guy must be getting something good too from the less-smart partner, or else he wouldn't have signed on in the first place. When we see these voluntary exchanges, we should suspect that each person is getting more than they're giving up, unlike the earlier case of mandated partnerships.

If we reflect on what we've seen ourselves or have seen time and again in fiction, we find two recurring patterns of the smart person who agrees to do someone else's homework. One is where the less-smart person is a high-status guy, maybe a good-looking rebel or a popular athlete, who can afford the nerd some protection, teach him how to behave around girls, or have some of his higher status rub off on the nerd when news gets out that they're hanging out with each other, even just to study. The smart guy, of course, won't see his status rise to the heights of the guy whose homework he's doing -- but some improvement is better than none, and again if the smart one agrees to it, the boost to his status must be worth doing the other guy's homework.

The other case is similar: there's some good-looking girl, possibly popular too, who he'd be delighted to be around -- and not just as though he were standing behind her in the cafeteria line, but alone in one of their rooms, close to her, with a frequent verbal back-and-forth, sustained eye contact, and so on. He'll soon realize that he won't get to make out with her, but this lower level of relationship may be worth enough to him, or perhaps he'll be able to attract some female attention after the word gets around that they're hanging out. He may have been invisible to girls before, whereas now at least a couple of 4s or 5s will take notice and he'll have a positive, rather than zero, chance of getting laid. These benefits make it worth giving up his time to do her homework.

And clearly the popular guy or cute girl find the cost of hanging out with the geek worth it, since they'll benefit from passing rather than failing the course, or else they wouldn't have bothered to form the study group to begin with.

Thus, both of them gain from this "social trade," and so it's not quite right to describe one as the parasite and the other as the parasitized. But if we had to point to who's only a little better off, and who's really better off, which would it be? Well, we just look at who's more eager to form this kind of relationship. We can use eagerness as a proxy for what price the person perceives the relationship to cost -- if you're really eager to form the relationship, it's as though you were demanding a lot. Say, you'd be happy to study 40 hours a week. If you're only somewhat eager, you're demanding less, like only 10 hours a week.

Assuming the relationship between demand and price is the same for both people, whoever is more eager perceives a lower "price" to pay for forming the relationship. (And so the less eager person perceives a higher "price.") Again looking at what you've seen in your own experience, or judging from cultural depictions, we know that it's the geek who's more eager to begin the study group -- by a longshot. He gives up an hour of his time, which he probably wouldn't be doing much else with -- maybe some resume-padding stuff for college applications -- and he gets what amounts to a low-pressure date with a cute girl. She has to give up an hour of her time, which is a lot more valuable -- she has a lot more that she could be doing, being young, pretty, and popular -- and she gets a small increase in her grade.

Since he jumps at the chance, while she goes along grudgingly, if anything the geek is the parasite and the cheerleader is the victim. Again, both profit from the exchange, but the closest parallel to the host-or-parasite question shows that we should feel sorry more for the cheerleader. Most smart people would automatically see the geek as the parasitized -- she's just using him to get a good grade, like all those other times he's had to pull all the weight in group work. But if you step back and look at who's more eager than the other, you see just the opposite -- that poor doe-eyed cheerleader has to suffer the creepy presence of such a geek just for a measly boost to her grade.

Arts people are generally smart but not good-looking, so most of the images we're familiar with here may show both sides, but they're much more favorable to the nerd. They reveal his not-so-pure motives, but they're shown as far less despicable than the cute girl's shallowness and boredom while around him. How different our picture of the world would look if cheerleaders wrote the social history books.

Twitter does even less than you thought

First, for Twitter messages relating to some product or brand, more are about facts than feelings. So, rather than being the "pulse of the planet," it is turning more into a Yahoo! Answers service, just with faster response rates. It's doubtful that anyone would pay to use Twitter for this purpose since you can use Google, etc. right now, and those responses are already pretty quick. You'd have to bet on there being a large enough group of people who would want information right away, rather than take a minute or two using Google. Maybe, but I highly doubt it.

Ads won't work long-term. They hardly earn money in the first place, except for companies like Google who get a decent buck from advertisers who want their product to show up when someone does a relevant search. The difference is that whereas Google has developed an algorithm for returning relevant results, Twitter doesn't provide a list of results at all -- the users who answer the question do. These users would receive none of the ad revenue that Twitter made from search-based ads. Of course, most of the people on there are completely insane, so they might not notice. Or they may be so pathetic that they'd work for free just to obtain their own slice of internet immortality, like those prolific Amazon reviewers.

The only possibility would be to charge lots for ads like Google does for its search-based ads, and give some portion of that to the users who answer questions. That seems like an awful mess, though, because then every user has an incentive to respond -- no matter how vapidly -- just to say that they were part of the response that the question-poser was looking for, and whose eyeballs the advertiser wanted to target with the search-based ad.

Trying to figure out which users really were providing useful information would be a nightmare. They couldn't hire enough people to look through every response to every question, so they'd have to use something like a customer rating system. But again, to figure out who among all responders merited a cut of the ad revenue, the question-poser would have to rate every single responder. In reality, they would likely give a high rating to one of the good responders and not bother rating any of the others, even the good ones.

They'd have to turn to something like About.com with its experts who field questions. That way, the responder can build up a reputation and assuage some of the worry that an asker might have, and a customer rating system (to determine the cut of ad revenue) would be easy with just one person responding. Of course, this is just another variant on all previous forms of pay-for-info services. It would look nothing like what it does right now, where anyone can write about anything to anyone else. There's an obvious parallel between Twitter's likely path and that of Wikipedia, where participation must ultimately be fettered in order to ensure quality -- and certainly to get paid, if they wanted to really improve their site.

Related to this is the uselessness to marketers who want to know how the public perceives their product. It's bad enough that most people don't share their feelings, but even when they do, they are almost uniformly positive, and all across the internet. Of course, that means the marketers can't learn shit from Twitter's pulse -- they get a highly biased estimate from self-selected fanboys who, after opening up their new toy, immediately rush to their MacBook to send off a gushing Twitter message, typing with one hand.

It's an odd finding that those who hate what they've bought tend not to register their complaints online -- or in real life, as the WSJ article says that most word-of-mouth is positive too. But writing detailed negative reviews, or ranting on and on in person, only reminds you how badly suckered you were, and most people would rather not dwell on getting hosed big-time. Owning something makes you think more highly of it.

The only case where people could get useful feedback from customer reviews are where the rater has no stake in the thing being rated, which eliminates almost all reviews by people who own the thing. Take Hot or Not -- the people whose looks you're rating aren't related to you, aren't your friends or partners, and won't ever run into you. Thus, raters are perfectly clear-headed when judging looks and tend to give low or middling scores. (If memory serves, Hot or Not actually "corrected" for this tendency by artificially inflating scores in Lake Wobegon style. If you noticed all those fugly dogs who scored 6 or 7, that's why.)

So if you need to know how good-looking you are (or aren't), you can profit from internet ratings. If you're a marketer who wants to know what the broad public thinks, you'll have to go back to test panels or focus groups where the raters don't have a personal stake in the rating. Investing in Twitter will only hasten your descent into cluelessness.

File-sharing is for sexually frustrated losers

While playing around with the General Social Survey for a class, I stumbled on a question that asks whether or not you use the world wide web to download music. This question was asked in 2000 and 2002, before iTunes was available for Windows (and even for Macs it wasn't available in 2000), so it clearly refers to using Napster and other piracy technologies. I should put the results of what I found over at my data blog, but it's too sweet not to share with the world.

Let's start with the file-sharer's self-image: he imagines himself to inhabit a dystopian world rather like the one in Blade Runner, The Matrix, or that tentacle anime that he depleted half his tissue box to. He just as often believes that he himself is being singled out for oppression as he believes that it is his entire race of subterranean mole-geeks that's being persecuted. Similarly, the source of all evil is at one moment a sprawling, faceless hive -- the Microsoft corporation, The Government -- and the next moment an individual wielding concentrated power -- Bill Gates, George Bush. You would be foolish to expect some consistency of narrative since, after all, his religious texts did not flow from the tongues of trained wisemen but were regurgitated by the teamworking four-chambered stomach of the Creative Commons.

But it's not really important who The Devil or the legions of demons are, as the cult's focus is on what role they the file-sharers play -- the rebels who will, Prometheus-like, rise up against the powers that be and deliver free information unto mankind. Back on planet Earth, we easily see the file-sharer for what he really is -- a teenager throwing a temper tantrum all because he has to cut the yard before taking his daddy's car out.

If they were truly the bold scofflaws they make themselves out to be, then they'd surely be picking up chicks left and right. The rebel archetype has an inherent sex appeal, at least to a decent number of girls.

So let's just see what the GSS tells us about the sex lives of file-sharers. (The mysteries that a little federal funding can solve...) I limited the results to males between ages 18 to 35. The pattern is clear using even younger ages, but going up to 35 gives better sample sizes.



The first graph shows that, compared to young guys who didn't illegally download music, file-sharers are much more likely to be virgins and less likely to have had several partners in the past year. The second graph looks at it in the other direction: in the sample, 100% of virgins were file-sharers, and file-sharing declined as the number of partners increased.

Strangely, all that time devoted to optimizing their piracy programs hasn't won them the outlaw appeal they were praying for. It's all obviously the work of Bill Gates and George Bush -- they've brainwashed normal girls into viewing them not as rebels but as a bunch of bratty cheapskates. It may take one thousand creepy emails, but they will ultimately lift the veil from those couple of girls who also hang out at Gamestop on Saturday night. And let's just see The Government stop that.

GSS variables used: musicget, partners, sex, age

Why aren't guys shunned for ordering fruity caffeine drinks?

In any bar, if a guy strutted up to the counter and ordered a strawberry daiquiri, the girls would point and laugh from a safe distance while the other guys would surround him and duly begin chanting, "You! Are! Gay! -- You! Are! Gay!" If anything, guys steer toward drinks that are bitter, not sweet, in order to look tough.

If that's true for alcoholic drinks, why doesn't this happen at all when they order caffeinated drinks? Sit down in any Starbucks when it's busy, and it won't even take you half an hour to see the disgusting pattern emerge -- so-called men requesting a caramel macchiato, frappuiccino, passion tea lemonade, or -- worst of all -- a pumpkin spice latte. Like all other forms of pollution, the sound of a man ordering a drink with such a revoltingly cutesy name should be taxed by the government -- preferably by cutting off one of his balls, although on second thought that may not provide a very strong incentive in his case.

Those drinks are incredibly saccharine, and the guys have no excuse since they could just have easily ordered an espresso or black coffee. (And this is just as true for other coffee sellers, not only Starbucks. Look at all of those Dairy Queen blizzard wannabes that Dunkin Donuts peddles.) So, what's the key difference between caffeinated vs. alcoholic drinks, or perhaps between going to a coffee house vs. going to a bar?

We can rule out a lack of time for behaviors to settle in -- maybe at first a guy could've ordered a frappuccino and no one would have known how sugary it was, but "specialty" coffee has been entirely mainstream for 15 years. By now, people know roughly which drinks are sweet and which are bitter.

I also don't buy a costly signaling argument. It's true that the fruity coffee drinks are more expensive than the brewed coffee or espresso, while the fruity alcoholic drinks tend to be cheaper than the stronger ones. So maybe guys are just ordering whatever the most expensive stuff is in order to show off their wealth to female onlookers. But get real -- we're not talking an Aston Martin vs. a Honda Civic. If a guy wanted to look like a big spender in Starbucks, he'd conspicuously ask the barista about their espresso machines for sale, as though he were in the market for a several-hundred-dollar gadget. Or perhaps he'd order $100 worth of their ground coffee.

The other costly signaling argument is that guys are ordering fruity drinks to show how little-in-doubt their manliness is -- "Because I'm so macho, I can broadcast my fondness for 10 year-old girl drinks and no one will question my masculinity." Again, get real. These guys always look like hell, both physically and emotionally. It wouldn't work even if they weren't -- just imagine if James Bond's catch-phrase were altered to "Omigosh... I guess I'll just have an appletini."

And it's not as though the point of going to buy coffee is necessarily to load up on sugar. At Dairy Queen, we excuse guys for ordering sugar-bombs because that's all they sell. Because that's the whole point of going to Dairy Queen, we expect them to order such things. But they sell bitter drinks in coffee houses, and indeed that's probably what our mental prototype of "coffee" is -- not something with java chips, caramel syrup, and whipped cream.

I also don't believe it's due mostly to the lack of comfort that the onlookers would feel in pillorying him in a coffee house during the daytime, whereas they'd feel fine doing so in a loud and rowdy bar at night. Even if they wanted to, would guys try on pink running shoes at Foot Locker, or reach for a case of wine coolers at the supermarket -- let alone buy them?

And if you thought that guys aren't trying to look tough or impress anyone at Starbucks, saving that preening instead for the bar that night, guess again. You can't get them to shut up about the deal they're supposedly closing, the gig that their loser band has, bla bla bla. They also try to look at least somewhat successful (unless they're in IT), or at least show up in athletic gear to signal their fitness. And they often shamelessly flirt with the cute baristas. So clearly the coffee house isn't a world apart from the bar regarding macho posturing.

The only half-baked guess I have is linguistic -- there aren't any coffee names that sound badass. "Scotch," "gin and tonic," "whiskey" -- those all have a hard sound to them. But the only coffee drinks without sucrose are espresso and cappuccino -- and let's be honest, those names do sound just as la-la as macchiato and latte. Back when you could place your order for a "black coffee," that might have worked because black is inherently tough. "House blend" or "Pike Place Roast" just doesn't have the same no-frills ring of "black." Would a "Scotch, neat" have the same appeal if it were called a "Blissionata, pure"?

To test this idea, you'd look across languages and see whether men order the more bitter types of coffee where people have a more manly sounding name for them. For example, even if you don't speak Spanish, you can tell that a "cortado" sounds more macho than a "cappuccino." (And the connotation is tougher too -- it refers to espresso that's "cut" with a little milk.)

Perhaps coffee houses should invent mixed bitter tasting drinks and brand them with harder sounding names. It's good that they already call them "shots" of espresso, but that won't do for larger serving sizes. (Ordering 10 shots would make people think you were crazy, not strong.) I was going to suggest something subtle like "Thor's Hammer," but I see that's already been claimed by the alcoholics. However, this problem would work itself out during the competition between coffee houses: those who couldn't think of an appealing name would find their sales undercut by those who could. The winning names would have proven themselves.

Girls compete in such funny ways

We laugh when we see two meatheads flexing not so subtly in front of each other, the one observing the other to size him up. "Who would win in a fight?" they're thinking, but it all looks rather gay to us.

I saw something similar today, only between two girls. It wasn't brute strength they were competing over -- I wasn't on the DC metro's green line -- but instead how cute and seductive they could make their voices. One of the girls who works at Starbucks always uses an over-the-top raspy-girly voice, hoping to fool the guys into thinking that, like, dude, she totally digs them. She's not dumb: most surely are suckered.

Well, today some teenager came in and ordered her drink in an even cuter voice. Not to be outdone, the barista asked her some unnecessary question about whether she wanted this or that as well -- just to signal that, when it came to the imaginary hunk they were fighting over, her voice would hook his attention better. And just like those two bespandexed guidos pacing around each other in the gym, they went back and forth a couple times before deciding that they'd gathered enough vocal information. It was a pretty close fight, but I'd give the win to the teenager. (The barista is cute too, and only 21, but she met her match today, at least voice-wise.)

I've seen girls get nastily competitive face-to-face before -- seeing who can flip their hair the hardest, or who can give the most pitying look at what the other is wearing. And I've seen girls both ratchet up their cuteness when they're actively flirting with the same guy, or sense that they're being watched by a large audience. But this time the guy wasn't even there, just as the girl who the gym rats are trying to impress isn't there judging their performance. It was the first time I'd seen a purely hypothetical cuteness contest -- just to see who would win.

It's no wonder that when they've grown up, women are such emotional trainwrecks: in almost every competition they've ever fought in, they couldn't simply tear the other bitch apart (verbally or physically), but had to smile and out-cute their opponent -- and to do so effortlessly, lest her strained smile or barely concealed sarcasm reveal her anger and thereby undo her feminine facade.

A little self-restraint goes a long way

At '80s night I saw some girl going up to several guys, working her ass around in their lap for maybe 10 to 15 seconds, and then moving on to dance with her girl friend for awhile (often using the same moves in order to attract attention -- girl on girl). She was obviously ovulating and shopping around. The guys there are either high school seniors or college students, and a handful of 20-somethings, so her earlier targets must have given off the stink of desperation once she'd gotten close.

"DUDE, a hot chick's actually letting me touch her!"

Really, what does she have that you haven't seen?

A little after "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" started, this girl climbed up on the smallish stage where I was hanging back and just bouncing my leg to the beat. She started right off by wiggling her tight little butt around, bending over and bouncing her knees, etc. There were no other guys on that stage. Rather than inflate her ego even more by piling on her right away, I stood back for a good 20 to 30 seconds with a knowing smirk on my face. But you can only hold back for so long, and I walked up and grabbed her by the hips from behind.

The club is 18+, but she looked like she could have been 15 or 16 with a fake ID. One of those five-foot energy factories (I'd guess she was / is a cheerleader or pom in high school). It's hard for me to recall a girl exploding that hard on the dance floor, but it was all because I didn't move in right away and let the urge swell up inside of her. She kept dropping it like it's hot, and girls are content for you to just stand there and take it. But they get even more fired up if you can hang with them that way, so we went along together like two dragonflies mating in flight.

Take-home lesson: if you react too soon, she'll think you're desperate, and she'll feel gipped because you didn't let her libido balloon first before going in to pop it.

(By the way, I love how the new shoe fashion among teenagers is to wear low-top canvas sneakers with no socks like Kelly Kapowski circa 1989. Takes me back to the first celebrity I really lusted over in elementary school.)