Don't lean in when talking to girls

This is so basic, yet so powerful, that it's one of the few pieces of advice to appear in every pickup artist writing, video, etc. It makes you look overly eager to accomodate, too happy to get into her space, and submissive to a complete stranger. Also, how do you even know she welcomes it?

Even -- especially -- if she is a lot shorter than you, do not give into the urge to bend over out of politeness. If she likes you, she will move her head into your space. Tonight at '80s night, a peppy 5'1 teenager asked me wasn't I hot in my suit. I yelled my answer, but it was on the loud dancefloor, so she didn't hear (deeper voices don't carry as well). Rather than bend over, I stood how I was, and she grasped my arm, stood on her tippie-toes and placed her head near my mouth so she could hear. She did the same when she wanted to make sure I heard her.

I asked another girl in the group, who was 5'3, if her friend always asks so many questions. Again, she didn't hear at first, but she did the same thing: nestled close to my side, stood a bit taller, and placed her head just above my shoulder to hear better. There is an important aspect of social psychology at work here, which I'll cover in a future post.

If I were 6'8 instead of 5'8, then I would slouch over or something, since the average girl could not stand that tall, but for the vast majority of girls, you won't have to worry about them standing up to get near your mouth. I emphasize that you should always doubt your urge to be polite -- girls don't want you to do the polite thing in these contexts. It gives a girl an incredible rush to arch herself on her toes, grab hold of your arm for support, and maneuver her head close to yours, as though she were going to whisper a secret in your ear. Have you ever seen a slow-dancing couple where the guy's head was on her shoulder? -- No? That's why.

Girls love doing things that make them feel feminine, and having to nearly scale your body to hear you is one of those things. It's like how little kids with ADD love to climb all over adults. You leaning into them robs them of that pleasure.

Are women funny?

Blogger Alias Clio is a muse for the number-cruncher, as she so often proclaims but rarely offers evidence, and she is so stubborn in her beliefs that merely pointing out how crazy they are is insufficient. *

In a post at Roissy's, the topic of sex differences in funny-ness came up, she arguing that women are more humorous than men, who are so preoccupied with farting and fucking jokes that they don't get to develop the wry, ironic style that true humor consists of. Really?

Always eager to gather some data to prove how crazy other people are, I first offered Comedy Central's list of 100 Greatest Stand-up Comedians -- 8 of 100 are female (8%). Ah, but that's just those raunchy, low-brow stand-up comedians!

All right, consider the Pulitzer Prize winners for Editorial Cartooning, a genre whose style is dry, ironic, and so on -- 2 of 82 are female (2.4%). I admit that this has a strong male bias just due to visuospatial skills, which guys are better at, but still, it's not Michelangelo-level drawing, so it would be really hard to say that it would be near 50% if only it were entirely verbal. So let's go to humorous writers and performers.

Wikipedia has a "list of notable humorists" -- 8 of 97 are female (8.2%).

Wikipedia also has a "list of satirists and satires", which is grouped by time period:

Early -- 0 of 9 (probably 0 of 10, if males wrote The 1001 Nights).

Medieval - 18th C. -- 0 of 21 (probably 0 of 22, if unknown author called "Martin Marprelate" is male).

Born 1800 - 1900 -- 0 of 28.

Born 1900 - 1960 -- 4 of 65 (6.2%).

Born 1960 - present -- 6 of 62 (9.7%).

20th C altogether -- 10 of 127 (7.9%).

Admittedly, these are not lists of prize-winners or of something measurable, but they reflect the consensus of experts, so it's surely a random, representative sample.

In none of these areas do females approach 50%, even when the medium is verbal (which women tend to be better at), and even when we look just at those whose careers began after women's liberation. The numbers are very similar for both high-brow and low-brow humor -- about 10% -- suggesting that this distinction does not matter either.

Crucially, humor almost always has to do with oneself, other people, and the social ties that unfortunately bind us; and it is always interactive with other people, whether a live audience, a readership, or what-have-you. Therefore, there is no argument to be made to the effect of "Well, women can do it, they just don't like doing it." The personnel psychology literature is unambiguous that women prefer jobs that involve people, especially socially interacting with them -- if anything, being a humorist or comedian is right up their alley. **

This is the extent of my interest in this rather obvious question, but if readers know of other lists -- preferably a list of winners of a prestigious humorist award -- feel free to crunch the numbers and leave a comment. If the ball gets rolling, I'll move them into an addendum here. I know that Clio is going to claim that these lists don't really capture what it is to be a humorist, that there are scores of unseen female humorists (who would have to be far more numerous than unseen male humorists), or that there's an Anglo-American bias. All right -- find me a dataset that shows the females are near 50%, and then I'll believe it.

Now, why funny people are predominantly male is an entirely different question. This post is just to demonstrate that they are.

* I kid because I love.

** Where females have the requisite ability and suitable motivation, they make up half or more of the field. For example, here is Steven Pinker on women in his field:

I work in a scientific field — the study of language acquisition in children — that is in fact dominated by women. Seventy-five percent of the members the main professional association are female, as are a majority of the keynote speakers at our main conference. I'm here to tell you that it's not because men like me have been discriminated against.

Addendum: Here is a running list of more stats from other sources (see comments section for detail).

YouTube's 100 most subscribed comedians of all time -- 7 or 8 of 100 (7-8%).

A second shot at girliness

Just a quick note that over the next couple weeks, the posting here will shift away from cataloguing the appeal of young girls from a hedonist's point-of-view, and toward a cool-headed way of figuring out how females can prolong the half-life of their youthful charms, beyond things that should be obvious (like staying in shape).

In a time of evaporating levels of girliness, as man-women overrun the world, we cannot stand idly by, pursuing selfish and escapist solutions, like hanging out at a dance club for teenagers when you're 27. No: altruistic logic compels us to conserve this precious natural resource for the beautiful children of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.

I've also got some hard data to analyze, something I haven't done here in awhile -- I just don't know how I'd manage to go on if I lost my internet cred as a number-cruncher. Suicide is always an option.

Do pretty girls in traditional areas have more feminine personalities?

Out here in the Mountain Time Zone, there is much less of a caste society like there is in the Bos-Wash megapolis or whatever the counterpart is on the West Coast. It is so striking that I noticed the lower degree of assortative mating in looks right away. But aside from hot women not marrying hot men as much, there is also less cross-assortative mating between hot women and ambitious, testosterone-addled men -- the trophy wife / tribal chief pattern.

Everywhere I go, I see 7s, 8s, and even 9s doing couple activities with bums. I don't mean they aren't very rich but are still ambitious and exciting in some other way -- they are just all-around dull and content to be mediocre. If you are a lazy, degenerate skateboarder, there is no better place to be for scoring with 7s. When interacting with girls in clubs, the same is true: pretty girls are more approachable (less bitchy) out here.

On the one hand, the sight of this makes my toes curl because it does not bode well for the further development of this part of the country -- at the end of the day, getting a hot wife (or two or three) is a big piece of what motivates the energetic go-getters to build and maintain society. When they come out here and see the pretty girls out with losers, they head back to a more civilized region where their ambition will be better appreciated.

On the other hand, it sure is nice to be surrounded by pretty girls who aren't hypercompetitive ball-busters! In a place where the trophy wife / tribal chief pattern predominates, the daughters of these marriages -- really, the majority of hot girls, since their mothers are monopolized by the Big Men -- inherit good looks from their mother but a more masculinized personality from their father. As this process grinds on, gene variants for good looks and dominating personalities get sorted into the same pool of upper-class families, while the lower class families absorb gene variants for ugliness and laziness, with even more generations for this dynamic to play out within the earlier settled Bos-Wash region.

Here, though, alpha males don't pollute the pool of hot women, generation after generation, with their testosterone. It's a generation-scale version of the pretty girl who remains chaste and free of STDs until you defile her on your wedding night. You'd be the first driven guy to get his seed into her family's lineage, rather than taking the sloppy seconds of all her alpha-male ancestors. We'd sleep with a hot girl who we thought had a shady past, but there would be an aversion to overcome. Likewise, we'll date a hot girl who is somewhat feisty, but we still wish she would tone it down a bit in the relationship.

This difference must be true on a larger scale. Look at the Middle East, an area reknowned for powerful men hoarding the hot women to themselves -- this is just as true today among the people Steve Sailer calls "men with gold chains," i.e. the Lebanese or Persian businessman, his out-of-this-world wife, and their bratty and attractive children. Now, I'd rate Persian girls at the top of the attractiveness scale, but they certainly are more competitive and get-outta-my-way than I prefer girls to be. South Asian-American girls are the same way, if a bit less attractive than Persians.

Could this be the allure of the Eastern European woman? Well, we'd have to be more specific, since Poles are not the same as Russians, who are not the same as Serbs. Still, I'll bet someplace within Eastern Europe lies the European counterpart of the Mountain Time Zone, where pretty girls pair up with insipid, lazy bums. Probably not Russia, since they have had an empire and been a superpower over the past couple hundred years. The best bet is likely a rural town in Poland or one of the Southern Slavic countries, ideally one that's undergone recent population growth so that there is a larger sample to judge.

I think Spain, and perhaps Portugal, are like this too. According to meta-analyses of sex differences in personality, the two most defining traits of females are agreeableness and emotional instability, and Spanish girls are very much this way. It can't be an accident that everyone who goes there, however briefly, falls in love with at least one of the local girls. Spain was something of a world player half a millennium ago, but far before that the European inhabitants didn't have much power, and they became losers not far afterward. Certainly since the early Modern period, Spain has been a largely peasant backwater country. This probably means that the trophy wife / tribal chief pattern has not ruined the femininity of pretty girls to the same degree as elsewhere.

Now, lest this post be devoid of references to teenage girls, I'll conclude by linking to a very old post about a Spanish girl who befriended me over the internet during my stay in Barcelona. She is 15 in those pictures, and I was 24 when she contacted me. Her family is originally from the less developed region of Murcia, though they moved to Catalonia for brighter job prospects. At the risk of getting too sentimental, she is simply one of the sweetest, silliest, and most caring girls I've known. I've seen pictures of her mother when she was young, and she too was pretty attractive. And I've seen pictures of and heard stories about her father -- he's a good honest guy and all, but definitely a schlub. Still, thank God, or else Lucia would have been snippy and selfish.



Related: Are pretty girls in traditional areas less stuck up?

Protecting stranger girls in clubs

It only happens when the guy has the right motivation to protect them, and especially when they reward him for being there.

Tonight at the 16 - 18 dance club, a large group of girls I was standing near were repeatedly bothered by some 5'2, doesn't-understand-no, flabby spic. * He's the guy who breaks into a group he doesn't know, acts high-energy and goofy, and after having his foot in the door, proceeds to get too friendly with a girl (usually only good-looking guys can get away with a cold approach this fast and direct). She tells him to buzz off, and he gets upset and returns to do it all over again, each time talking trash to her in revenge. I'd seen him acting retarded all night throughout the club, and figured the girls he was approaching were simply amused by his goofiness.

But about 45 minutes before the club closed, there weren't very many girls left to harass, and a decent fraction of them were in one group near me, so I got to see how pissed off they were at him. Most 16 to 18 year-old girls are too immature to protect themselves in most situations, and a loser male can talk their ear off -- unlike the experienced 26 to 28 year-old women who would quickly cut such a guy down to size. This degenerate fatass was so irritating, though, that the girls began getting in his face, pushing him away, giving him the "don't come near me" hand, etc. You know it's gotten out of hand when girls start to stand up for themselves.

I'd had my fun for the night, I wasn't feeling as chatty or social as before, for want of alcohol, so I figured why not get some practice shoving another guy off of my territory. Any time he came near the group, I moved around dancing so that I blocked his path. Sometimes he would sit down next to a poor girl who had an empty space to her right, so if I saw him head toward her, I'd sit beside her first. He held a strong grudge against one girl who was the center of attention for her gymnastic and dancing skills, and any time he moved toward her, I moved right away to stand in front of him, while still dancing or checking text messages. I never lost my cool, always had an amused smile on my face, and was not overtly confrontational in any way.

I was not afraid, though I thought he might throw a punch at some point because he was wound up the whole night. Only a loser would act so desperately and foolishly, so nothing to fear. A loser will not stand up to someone they perceive as far above them. It didn't hurt that I was wearing a shirt, tie, and sporcoat: you never know when you'll have to put someone in their place, and dressing in a powerful way makes it go much more smoothly. He got in my face once or twice, and even tried to AMOG me by giving me dance tips (only works if you're a better dancer than I am, and not some bloated wetback oaf). Eventually he got the hint and came back less frequently, then stormed out of the club altogether.

Aside from the intrinsic pleasure I get from pushing losers around, I felt compelled to protect the girls, even though they weren't my friends. We all have our weak moments when our sense of duty and responsibility jumps up for a bit, and triggering these weak moments is far easier for a 16 year-old girl than a 26 year-old, again, because the former is too inexperienced to know what to do, and it's clear that someone has to step in.

Those who wish males would assume more traditional manly roles like protector of strangers must bear in mind this inherent constraint: some strangers are better motivators than others. It's not as bad as it sounds, though, since those who don't easily motivate guys to protect them -- other guys and older women -- tend not to get into such sticky situations (older women) or can expect to fend for themselves (other guys).

Although I didn't expect anything in return, they got pretty turned on. The girl on the end, who the guy kept sitting next to, began stroking her hair (but she was blonde, so I didn't move in on her). The gymnast / dancer cutie, on the other hand, got quite a hard-on: exhibitionistic gymnast types will only take a shine to guys who display honest signals of machismo. Suddenly, she conspired to dance into my personal space so that our arms and thighs brushed, our hips checked each others, and her ass found my hand. She did this between 7 to 10 times. The whole time, she had that cocky grin that bad girls get when they're pursuing an intriguing novelty (like a guy 10 years older than her).

By this time, the night was almost over, so I didn't want to rush an approach. I see her there every weekend, so this will provide a good opener for when I see her shakin' her thang next Friday. She had an even hotter friend, who also took notice of my protective efforts, so maybe I can get her to introduce me to her friend. She's Black, by the way -- only rarely does a Black cutie seek out a White boy who hasn't even signaled his interest in her first. Even more strangely, she had medium brown skin and slightly Eurasian features (her hotter friend was also Black and had even lighter skin and more Eurasian features) -- usually these girls only want to be seen with jet-black gangbangers who assuage their worries about not appearing Black enough.

So who says no good deed goes unpunished? In too many instances, the "good deeds" that men do require nearly no effort or sacrifice and are really just complying with simple norms of politeness. You only get rewarded for your good deeds when you risk something in doing so, and especially when you help out someone who can't help themselves.

* As Chris Rock might distinguish them from Mexican-American people.

Facebook game

No, I'm suggesting you try to meet new girls on Facebook, or rely on it in any way. But if you're looking to date or make friends with girls who are under 25, and perhaps also for those ages 26 to 30, not having a Facebook profile is like not being able to send and receive text messages -- you will instantly stand out as a weirdo. If you don't need one, consider yourself lucky, and don't get one. Although it is difficult to make Facebook work to your advantage, here are some guidelines to keep it from lowering your value. You'll notice that girls violate all of these rules, but they won't pay a cost -- you will. Some may sound obvious, but I see violations all the time. (The rules for sending messages on Facebook are the same as using email or text messages.)

As a rule, Keep It Simple, Stupid. When you first sign up, it is easy to get sucked into it for a brief while, so just don't even go there. If it looks like you spend a lot of time on Facebook, girls will feel that you aren't accomplishing things in life, either with girls or in your studies / career, even if you only visit it during your downtime. The telltale sign of investing a lot in Facebook is having a bloated profile -- you know what these are if you've seen them. Really, no one cares about who are your 100 favorite indie rock bands (updated daily), or how many funny bumper stickers your buddies send you. Concretely, going from the top of the profile to the bottom:

- Only change your status twice a week at most, and only do so in order to mention something adventuresome and exciting that you're doing: going to a club, ballet performance, skydiving, whatever. Never mention anything that's going bad, and don't whine, like "Agnostic is still sick" or "Agnostic wishes finals would end already."

- Use a profile picture where you look attractive (ask a girl to pick one, or that girls have commented on positively in the past). I have a stoic stare, not quite a scowl, and am looking a bit off to the side. Smiling seems too personal to me -- especially if you're showing teeth -- but this can be a matter of taste (it really only flies when you're a politician or CEO who seeks approval from strangers as part of your job). Do not look high-energy or make a face you wouldn't normally. Keep the shot confined to your face, maybe down to the chest; and if your clothes are visible, make sure you are projecting whatever you want to.

- Basic info just to the right of my picture says only what networks I'm in, my sex, if I dig guys or girls, and my home town. If you want to state that you're single, remember that most girls will interpret this declaration unconsciously as "desperate for a date." Stating your political or religious views is off-limits just as it is on first dates. When editing your profile, choose the option of "Don't show my birthday in my profile." Age difference is a potential obstacle -- even for friendship -- and if it comes up, you want to be able to deal with it right away. You can't do that if you blab it out in the top of your profile.

- Contact info should have an email address at most. No quality guy gives out his cell phone number, let alone address, to the entire world.

- Education is tricky. If you went to a good school, you want that to show since they will think better of you. On the other hand, it can give away your exact age if the person is willing to do the math. Personally, I don't think the boost from having "good school" cred outweighs the potential for introducing the age difference issue too early. I keep the school info at the very bottom of the profile, just to show that I'm not hiding age info, in the off-chance where she balks at an age difference: "Gee, you're getting kinda weird on me all of the sudden -- I thought you saw that I graduated in XX, so I assumed you were cool." It hasn't come to that yet, but just in case. Oh, definitely do not include where / when you went to high school.

- Job I would leave blank unless you are a hedge fund manager or something, for the same reason that PUAs recommend being as evasive as possible about your job in bars and clubs. It weeds out golddiggers and leaves her wanting to know more about you.

- Personal info you should keep to a bare minimum: fill out as much as you feel like, then cut out 75% of it or more. Just like with your status info, this should only reflect your exciting qualities, like how adventuresome you are, how cultured, and how little you care about what people think of your interests and activities. But don't beat people over the head with your good qualities either: reveal one extreme sport you play, and save the rest for personal conversations. You can be cocky / funny, but don't try to be a comedian or be sarcastic.

- Groups are an extension of the personal info section. If you want to join five or fewer groups to give a tease of what you're like, fine. It's cool not to join any groups, since you won't participate in them at all.

- Friend list don't really mean much, so don't bother sending friend requests to lots of people to convince others that you're Mr. Popular. Girls know that guys try to friend lots of hot girls in order to make themselves look like pimps, but no one is fooled. If lots of hot girls write favorable things about you on your Wall, or if you're in pictures acting nonchalant around hot girls, that's different.

- Photos are different, since you can prove rather than claim. Put up some pictures of yourself, your family, your friends, you with your ex-girlfriend (uploaded when you were dating), places you've traveled to, unknown fun spots around your neighborhood or city, appetizing food that you make, athletic things you do, and so on. Girls won't downgrade your status so easily if they see you doing gushy things in pictures. So if you're tempted to say "I think the world of my adorable cat Simba" in your personal info, instead just include some pictures of you scratching under his chin and it's clear he appreciates what you're doing. Even if the girl suffers from a love of dogs, she will still say "Awwww!" Showing pictures of you playing with nieces and nephews is also better than saying how important family is to you.

- The Wall should accumulate comments slowly, since if you have lots of them, the girl will infer that you spend a lot of time writing on other people's Wall, and are a dork. Don't write on other people's Wall very much, saving any comments for private messages. Only do so when you know that their response on your own Wall will serve as a testimony to what a great person you are. As with other DHVs, it's best if they come from females, especially those who know you well, are not obviously solicited, and where she is remarking casually, not to purposefully help her friend out with some girl.

For example, if you go out with a female friend and protect her from creepy guys at a club, you can leave a comment on her Wall about how fun it was, and joke about how isn't she lucky you were there to protect her. She will leave a response on your Wall thanking you for protecting her from creepy guys, a very desirable quality. This isn't manipulation or lying since you actually have to do these things for people to remark on them, and why not make your good side known? And by keeping it so that the majority of your Wall comments are like this, the reader won't have to sift through a bunch of garbage to find them.

- Anything additional should probably not be there: personality tests, your scores on trivia games, bumper stickers, etc. There are some that might work for you, like a map highlighted with "countries I've traveled to," but they can easily bloat your profile, so try not to add anything. I have iLike, which embeds an audio or video song clip, and that's it (I change the song once a week or less frequently).

- Set your privacy preferences so that nothing you do gets broadcasted to your friends, to your Mini-Feed, etc. Remember: no one cares, and it bloats your profile.

I never thought I'd have to think about any of this, but when part of your social circle includes those under 25 (especially undergrads), and when the girls you like are in this age range, you can't avoid having a Facebook presence, and that requires that you maintain a good image there.

Do larger posteriors correlate with manlier faces in girls?

This is something only assmen would have enough anecdotal data to know about -- particularly their frustration in finding a girl who meets their preferences but also has a cute, pretty face -- and I suspect it's true for several reasons:

1) To recap two previous posts on the psychological differences between boobmen and assmen (see here and here), boobmen seem to be the gregarious guy's guy sort, while assmen tend in the Type-A businessman direction. The workaholic likely has higher testosterone, evidenced by his drive and ambition. So, whichever females the high-T males prefer are likely to inherit the genes that drove her father's T level up so high. This has the unpleasant side effect of giving her a more masculine face (and personality). If high-T males are more likely to prefer ass to boobs, then their daughters will resemble their mothers in booty size and their fathers in T level.

2) On average, porn stars nowadays have much more manly faces compared to those of the '70s or '80s or even most of the '90s. They also reflect the recent shift in the larger culture of focusing on ample rumps rather than large breasts. From what I've seen, this is true on an individual level today as well: the few who have flat or small butts are more likely to have girly faces.

3) "Bag over the head" jokes -- don't they refer more often to a girl with a nice ass than a nice chest?

4) Change over the lifespan: unlike the more precocious breasts, a girl's derriere doesn't really reach its maximum size until the mid 20s, which is when she may begin to look a bit more manly in the face than before, however girly she may have been. Case-in-point: Natalie Portman. The girls in the local teen dance club have pretty girly faces, but almost all have zero booty.

5) Population differences, perhaps? African girls definitely have bigger butts and manlier faces. Northern Europeans have flat butts and feminine faces. Mediterraneans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians have medium-to-large asses, but I'm not sure how feminine their faces are. East Asians have concave butts and 6 year-old girl faces.

This is one reason why boobmen are so much more faithful than assmen: their girlfriends tend to have a face worth sticking around for. For me, though, a beautiful face and a girly personality still win over a large, firm rump. Soon I'll get a girl like Mya who has both.

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.

Miley Cyrus dominates Ryan Seacrest

Watch this video of Miley Cyrus and her friend Mandy Giroux being interviewed over the phone by Ryan Seacrest, starting at 3:30. He shows surprise that he's being included in a video they're making for their YouTube channel. Miley responds:

"We had to have a special guest, and you're all we could get."

"We tried to get a Jonas brother, but apparently they're super expensive."

You can see from the look in her eyes that she wasn't trying to be playful: she's shifting her eyes impulsively as if deciding which brand of TV to steal during a looting spree. She wanted to see how much he would take, and he didn't defend himself at all. What a pussy -- who gets pushed around by a 15 year-old girl? Note, though, that she has a masculine digit ratio (you can see during the first 5 seconds), so she's more butt-kicking than the average girl.

Actually, many guys overestimate how well they would handle sassy whippersnappers like her. I saw it time and again at my tutoring center: the guy tutors are helpless against teenage girls. If the girls act bossy, the guy flashes back to high school when the popular girls walked over him, and he freezes. At best, he gives some bitter loser comeback, usually to another tutor when the student is gone. If the girl puts on a cute act, the guy flashes back again and thinks, "Wow, this girl would never have talked to me in high school!" and gives in to her demands or believes her lame excuses. Suckers.

Those high school girls are overflowing with hormones and are pretty low in Agreeableness, so their rebelliousness is pretty intense. It would be much easier for me to order around women in their late 20s. Most of them get away with their protests all the time -- with their parents, boys their age, older guys (such as teachers), and so on. That is, until they meet me. I'm never bitter, petty, or angry with them; I just lay down the law, though I also joke a lot with them. I would whip Miley Cyrus into shape so well, she would request to work with only me as her tutor (it's happened before). Too bad my schedule wouldn't permit it.