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.
October 12, 2009
October 10, 2009
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.
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.
October 6, 2009
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.
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.
October 1, 2009
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
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
September 29, 2009
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.
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.
September 25, 2009
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.)
"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.)
All they need is a sock puppet mascot
I recognize that I'm probably the 4,295,965th person to make that connection, but still.
"So, what does your website do?"
"We empower loud, middle-aged dopes to bore the world with updates about what they're doing."
"Goddamn -- give that man 100 million dollars!"
Worth $1 billion -- lmfao.
"So, what does your website do?"
"We empower loud, middle-aged dopes to bore the world with updates about what they're doing."
"Goddamn -- give that man 100 million dollars!"
Worth $1 billion -- lmfao.
September 24, 2009
Why are girls usually embarrassed by PDA, and when is it tolerated?
First, let me be clear that I'm not talking about a guy putting his hand on his girlfriend's ass to signal possession. I'm talking about the more "I wuv you" types of PDA, along with things like bringing her roses at work (a disgusting site I witnessed the other day in Starbucks). Obviously not all girls look down on this servile behavior, but for those who do -- the majority -- what are they anxious about?
A female's health and age can be easily seen by just looking at her from afar. But other qualities, such as the many personality traits, are more difficult to figure out that way. Even after interacting face-to-face for awhile, you only get a crude estimate of how worthy she is on these other traits. But one much more honest signal of her hidden qualities is who she associates with -- in general, birds of a feather flock together. The literature documenting assortative mating is pretty large by now; for example, people tend to pair up with partners of similar intelligence, height, age, and so on.
As in many human relationships, there is a conflict of interest between the boyfriend and girlfriend. If the boyfriend is the type to lavish PDA on her, he is most likely a loser (relative to other local males). He is desperate to announce that he managed to punch just a bit above his weight. Why? For one thing, others will elevate their estimate of his quality if they see him getting away with PDA with a girl who they wouldn't expect him to get. It may also allow him to punch above his weight several more times, as female onlookers who are about as good-looking as his girlfriend will pause and think, "Hmmm, he doesn't seem so great, but if she is with him, he must have something I can't see." This is why men always resort to PDA, boxes of chocolate, roses, etc., when they are most desperate -- this is when they are most clearly reminded of how far out of their league their girlfriend is. And of course there is the hope that pleading will work.
The girl for her part wants the exact opposite. Clearly the partners will not be exactly equal -- one will be a little above the other, since the cost of searching and landing a partner of exactly equal value would not be worth the benefit, compared to finding someone who's close enough. Still, if she's the one who's above him, he may want to gloat about it to the whole world, but she will want to keep it a closely guarded secret. If her friends and acquaintances found out that she was "dating down," they might lower their esteem of her, and she would suffer the resulting social consequences. This is even more true if there is no enforced monogamy -- then, she may also be concerned that potential future mates will see her with a desperate man and think, "Meh, she looks OK, but if she's with that clown, she's not worth investing in as a wife."
The end result is what looks like a lonely father trying to smother his baby girl with hugs, while she violently pushes him back and orders him to stop embarrassing meeeee.
So are there pockets where PDA abounds? Clearly if the girl is deeply in love, that's as good as enforced monogamy, as the potential future mates are completely out of sight, out of mind. But these are rare, since usually a girl will not fall madly in love with someone far beneath her. If there is greater social enforcement of monogamy -- say in more religiously conservative areas -- then guys will be able to get away more with PDA. And in places with greater civic engagement and altruism, there is less ruthless calculation among one's friends and acquaintances -- they aren't going to jot down every little signal of your hidden qualities, because they're more trusting. So girls would be more accepting of PDA in a small Minnesota town than in Manhattan.
Which of these two forces -- enforced monogamy vs. peer esteem -- is stronger? All we need is a case where they run against each other. In middle and high school -- and even somewhat in college -- girls are subjected to heartless scrutiny of their inner qualities by all of their peers, not just their friends. For them, gossip and drama are constant background noise. On the other side, monogamy is strictly enforced -- not just by her friends, who would cast her out as a slut if she dated around, but also by herself, as girls are much more susceptible to falling hopelessly in love at that age.
Being under her peers' social microscope predicts that she'd want to shove her overly affectionate boyfriend away without even thinking about it, while the power of monogamy to cloud out her thoughts about potential mates predicts that she wouldn't care. For anyone who's been to the park or the mall in their lives, the answer is pretty clear -- monogamy is stronger than peer scrutiny. There's no mystery why a girl would allow PDA from a handsome quarterback, but a lot of the guys who these adolescent girls are with are pretty awkward and goofy. The fact that they accept PDA from them is pretty startling, so it must be that their more monogamous behavior, compared to 20-something women, outweighs their anxiety about what their peers will think when they see some doofus wrapping his arms around her.
It may be hard to remember, but monogamous behavior at that age is not driven only by social or institutional pressures and falling in love more easily. There is also the mindset that all reckless young people have -- it's going to last forever. I don't think you appreciate how strong that delusion is -- for every year since they started middle school, teenagers have seen their friends come and go as though it were a game of musical chairs, and yet they still use the term BFFs to describe people who they'll drift apart from the very next year, or at the latest by their sophomore year of college.
Natural selection must have designed the human mind this way to make sure that in the period leading up to starting a family, the partners -- who have potentially very different interests -- would trust each other a bit more. Few would stick it out through the first years of raising a family if one of them thought the other would quickly defect due to peer pressure. So a monogamous impulse had to evolve to be even stronger. Starting around her mid-20s, a female no longer has the same force of social scrutiny weighing down on her (people become more independent then), and she's more OK with dating around or practicing serial monogamy since she'd be past the typical age at first birth (the early 20s). It's only then that they start to really resist PDA across the board.
(Much later on, when monogamy is de facto because no one else would want her, and as she becomes even more socially independent, then PDA is allowable again -- surely you've seen those revolting scenes among middle-aged married people at the table next to yours in the restaurant.)
I don't like PDA because, again, it reeks of desperation. I don't mind picking girls up and spinning them around -- that's like showing her that you can open a jar that she can't, or drive better and faster than she can. However, if you're the gushy type, we can tell where you'd find more accepting girlfriends: find a young girl in a religiously conservative area where people are more trusting than calculating.
A female's health and age can be easily seen by just looking at her from afar. But other qualities, such as the many personality traits, are more difficult to figure out that way. Even after interacting face-to-face for awhile, you only get a crude estimate of how worthy she is on these other traits. But one much more honest signal of her hidden qualities is who she associates with -- in general, birds of a feather flock together. The literature documenting assortative mating is pretty large by now; for example, people tend to pair up with partners of similar intelligence, height, age, and so on.
As in many human relationships, there is a conflict of interest between the boyfriend and girlfriend. If the boyfriend is the type to lavish PDA on her, he is most likely a loser (relative to other local males). He is desperate to announce that he managed to punch just a bit above his weight. Why? For one thing, others will elevate their estimate of his quality if they see him getting away with PDA with a girl who they wouldn't expect him to get. It may also allow him to punch above his weight several more times, as female onlookers who are about as good-looking as his girlfriend will pause and think, "Hmmm, he doesn't seem so great, but if she is with him, he must have something I can't see." This is why men always resort to PDA, boxes of chocolate, roses, etc., when they are most desperate -- this is when they are most clearly reminded of how far out of their league their girlfriend is. And of course there is the hope that pleading will work.
The girl for her part wants the exact opposite. Clearly the partners will not be exactly equal -- one will be a little above the other, since the cost of searching and landing a partner of exactly equal value would not be worth the benefit, compared to finding someone who's close enough. Still, if she's the one who's above him, he may want to gloat about it to the whole world, but she will want to keep it a closely guarded secret. If her friends and acquaintances found out that she was "dating down," they might lower their esteem of her, and she would suffer the resulting social consequences. This is even more true if there is no enforced monogamy -- then, she may also be concerned that potential future mates will see her with a desperate man and think, "Meh, she looks OK, but if she's with that clown, she's not worth investing in as a wife."
The end result is what looks like a lonely father trying to smother his baby girl with hugs, while she violently pushes him back and orders him to stop embarrassing meeeee.
So are there pockets where PDA abounds? Clearly if the girl is deeply in love, that's as good as enforced monogamy, as the potential future mates are completely out of sight, out of mind. But these are rare, since usually a girl will not fall madly in love with someone far beneath her. If there is greater social enforcement of monogamy -- say in more religiously conservative areas -- then guys will be able to get away more with PDA. And in places with greater civic engagement and altruism, there is less ruthless calculation among one's friends and acquaintances -- they aren't going to jot down every little signal of your hidden qualities, because they're more trusting. So girls would be more accepting of PDA in a small Minnesota town than in Manhattan.
Which of these two forces -- enforced monogamy vs. peer esteem -- is stronger? All we need is a case where they run against each other. In middle and high school -- and even somewhat in college -- girls are subjected to heartless scrutiny of their inner qualities by all of their peers, not just their friends. For them, gossip and drama are constant background noise. On the other side, monogamy is strictly enforced -- not just by her friends, who would cast her out as a slut if she dated around, but also by herself, as girls are much more susceptible to falling hopelessly in love at that age.
Being under her peers' social microscope predicts that she'd want to shove her overly affectionate boyfriend away without even thinking about it, while the power of monogamy to cloud out her thoughts about potential mates predicts that she wouldn't care. For anyone who's been to the park or the mall in their lives, the answer is pretty clear -- monogamy is stronger than peer scrutiny. There's no mystery why a girl would allow PDA from a handsome quarterback, but a lot of the guys who these adolescent girls are with are pretty awkward and goofy. The fact that they accept PDA from them is pretty startling, so it must be that their more monogamous behavior, compared to 20-something women, outweighs their anxiety about what their peers will think when they see some doofus wrapping his arms around her.
It may be hard to remember, but monogamous behavior at that age is not driven only by social or institutional pressures and falling in love more easily. There is also the mindset that all reckless young people have -- it's going to last forever. I don't think you appreciate how strong that delusion is -- for every year since they started middle school, teenagers have seen their friends come and go as though it were a game of musical chairs, and yet they still use the term BFFs to describe people who they'll drift apart from the very next year, or at the latest by their sophomore year of college.
Natural selection must have designed the human mind this way to make sure that in the period leading up to starting a family, the partners -- who have potentially very different interests -- would trust each other a bit more. Few would stick it out through the first years of raising a family if one of them thought the other would quickly defect due to peer pressure. So a monogamous impulse had to evolve to be even stronger. Starting around her mid-20s, a female no longer has the same force of social scrutiny weighing down on her (people become more independent then), and she's more OK with dating around or practicing serial monogamy since she'd be past the typical age at first birth (the early 20s). It's only then that they start to really resist PDA across the board.
(Much later on, when monogamy is de facto because no one else would want her, and as she becomes even more socially independent, then PDA is allowable again -- surely you've seen those revolting scenes among middle-aged married people at the table next to yours in the restaurant.)
I don't like PDA because, again, it reeks of desperation. I don't mind picking girls up and spinning them around -- that's like showing her that you can open a jar that she can't, or drive better and faster than she can. However, if you're the gushy type, we can tell where you'd find more accepting girlfriends: find a young girl in a religiously conservative area where people are more trusting than calculating.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)