I gave older women a chance

And I will run back into the familiar, bear-hugging arms of teenagers and college students. Last night I decided to do break my routine and go to a 21+ nightclub, supposedly one of the most "young and hip" around, but where the average age was more like 28 - 30. The experience has left no doubt in my mind about who I should pursue, and below are seven highlights of the difference between younger and older females, leaving aside ones that should already be obvious.

I'm clearly only comparing the averages of females who go out to nightclubs, and this introduces bias into the older women I meet: they are not only not taken, but likely don't intend to be taken for awhile or ever. The music and crowd is the same though: hip-hop and R&B music, mostly White people from the Mountain Time Zone. However, what follows below is the same for girls who don't go clubbing -- if you're a socially conservative guy who hates bars and nightclubs, would you rather date the Audrey Rouget character from Metropolitan or who she will tend to become at age 30?

I also intend for this comparison to also serve as a "how to get your groove back" guide for older women. I don't have concrete suggestions -- that's for a future post -- but at least it shows which areas to attend to. Hey, some day I'll be 55 and will have to hit on 27 year-olds, so isn't it in my own best interest to devise anti-aging strategies for them?

1) Energy level



Younger girls move their bodies much more wildly when dancing, a telltale sign of being nervous and lacking voluntary control over their behavior. They are already pumped up before they see you, and by dancing with them, you serve as a lightning rod that absorbs their overflow of anxiety. As lovely as these girls are, they are terribly insecure about their looks and their appeal to boys, so your efforts to keep them from dancing alone are felt much more deeply.

With older women, Neuroticism has declined from adolescent levels, and you must invest much more effort into getting them worked up to a given level. Being more stable than volatile, they do not feel the same need for a partner to unload their excess energy onto. As a result, it is very difficult to feel like you're lost in the moment with them.

2) Initiation of physical contact

Younger girls may do some pretty wild things when they dance with you, but before, during, and after the dance, they are more coy when it comes to touching your arm, playfully elbowing you, and so on. Perhaps this is due to whatever causes call girls and adult film stars to agree to the most depraved things involving the sexual parts of their bodies, but to refuse caressing the face, kissing the lips, using the tongue when kissing, and so on. When she grinds her ass on a guy's crotch, she's just signaling that he's sufficiently attractive and cocky to give her a quick physical fix -- whereas stroking his arm and leaning in cheek-to-cheek while talking are reserved for the boys she wants to keep.

The older women who approached me, by contrast, were very physically aggressive: sitting next to me so that our thighs touched right away, stroking my tie, motioning for handshakes or high-fives for no reason, nudging me after they delivered a witty banter line, or giving me a lapdance without saying hello or even making eye-contact first. The only similar experience I've had is going to a gay club in Barcelona. They must realize that coyness works only for those whose attention is worthy enough that, when denied to the guy for a moment, would provoke him to invest more in her. This option is rapidly drying up for them, so they figure they might as well take a more direct route.

3) Flexibility



Guys don't have to be in top physical condition to do well in a dance club, since they don't have to show off so much (breakdancing requires flexibility, but this only entertains girls, rather than win them over). Girls, though, must be flexible enough to move their body in a hypnotizing way, and age is incredibly unforgiving here: hypermobility (or the tendency toward being "double-jointed") peaks at about age 12 and declines starting in the mid-late teens, which may be why gymnasts are so young. When I visit the local teen danceclub, I see at least five girls who do the splits while dancing -- as in, they get into that position and effortlessly bounce up and down like that about four times.

Older women would risk injury if they tried that; most are still not limber enough to coordinate their spine in a serpentine way. Take-home lesson: never stop your physical conditioning, and make sure you dance regularly. This is one reason why dancers age so much better than other women.

4) Scent

Younger girls must produce more of some chemical signal involved in mate attraction. You might not notice this, but I have a very sensitive palate and sense of smell. I first noticed this scent in my 11th grade math class, and I had forgotten it until I began tutoring high schoolers. It is produced either in the vagina or sweat glands, and I'm pretty sure it's produced only when they are in the high-risk of pregnancy phase of their menstrual cycle. * It's hard to describe since I'm not one of those perfume testers or gourmands who has a vast store of comparisons to draw on, but it is unmistakable. When you put 50 to 300 girls aged 16 to 18 in a single room with just enough ventilation to carry chemical signals around, it is impossible not to be struck by it immediately upon entering. It is one of the most powerful motivators: you feel like a hunting dog tracking a chemical gradient.

I did not smell this at all in the 21+ club. At first I thought it was because younger girls are more likely to wear shorts, but older women are more likely to wear skirts, which would just as easily release the chemical into the air. I didn't notice a huge difference in wearing jeans or pants. I doubt the smoke in the 21+ club had anything to do with it either: I notice the smell at a different 18+ club where smoking is allowed, and I never notice it when I'm around females my own age.

5) Silliness



This may be related to energy level, since over-the-top goofiness is also a sign of nervousness about what others think about you. Because females were not designed to think or behave in a serious way until the age when they can no longer rely on their looks to successfully navigate the social world, it was no surprise that I didn't observe any silliness in the 21+ club. And while it's not very much on display in the 18+ clubs, where girls try to act a bit more badass than they normally do, it's still there -- especially at 80s night.

6) Lust



This is distinct from energy level, which is about how little or how much input she needs to reach a certain level of interaction. By "lust" I mean how she behaves once she does get turned on. As I've pointed out recently, younger girls are hornier than older women. In the danceclub context, it means that the younger girl will straddle and gyrate over one of your thighs to stimulate herself. In a more subdued context, it means she has more sexual tension building up, and even if she doesn't try to release it with you, she will be more likely to fall for you since you make her feel that way.

7) Asking me what I do

Goddamn, we're in a nightclub -- what could it possibly matter what I do? That matters if you're looking for a long-term partner, one who you hope will support your living-above-your-means lifestyle or who will raise a family with you. Do you really think you're going to find that guy in a nightclub? We're there to forget the humdrum part of our lives, cut loose, and mingle in the dark with strangers. Asking guys what they do kills the fun vibe. No younger girl has ever asked me anything like this -- at most, where do I go to school (and there are no de facto Ivies out here, so it's not a roundabout way of asking how much money I or my parents have).

Well, now no one can accuse me of not giving older women a fair shot at winning me over, and now I'm more convinced than ever that pursuing girls who are at most 22 is the right thing to do. While I've come home from the 18+ clubs a bit annoyed that I didn't get a kiss from a girl when all the signs were there, or at other aspects of younger girls' more flakey behavior, I've never come home almost depressed by the near total lack of selection, as well as by the whole charade of it all -- here you have a crowd of people who are basically devoid of passion, carrying on as though they thought they could be mistaken for teenagers. Get real. It was like touring the terminally ill wing of a large nursing home -- these people should be with families, or perhaps in small-scale care facilities, where they can get better attention, or they should just pull their own plug. Not being a masochist, I will never go back to clubs catering to people in their late 20s and over.

* Believe it or not, the prestigious journal Science published a study showing that vaginal secretions from the high-risk phase of the cycle were judged as smelling better than those from the low-risk phases.