"My gf hangs out with her students -- is it a problem?"

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Changing your name -- a free facelift?

Names go through cycles of fashion, as Stanley Lieberson shows in A Matter of Taste, a must-read book for anyone interested in cultural change. Unfortunately, that means that your name can quickly become out-of-date, as mine has, I was disappointed to learn. It peaked in popularity right around the time of my birth and has declined (although not plummeted) since, even if it's not obscure today. "Although," "even if" -- who am I kidding, I've never met a pimpleface with my name.

Every time I meet a high school girl at the teen dance club or the mall, or sit down with a college girl at the campus dining hall, my babyface and slender frame keep her from wondering how old I am. (Well, not so much at the teen dance club -- I get asked how old I am about one time each night, but they don't suspect I'm 27, more like 22, which is still old enough to them.) Still, once she learns my name, that will knock against the unconscious histogram she has of her male peers' names. She may not even be aware of just what is arousing her suspicion; she will just get the feeling that I'm older than I appear.

So is it worth it to change your name in order to appear younger -- not out of vanity, but just to go undetected more easily? I can understand the respect that is paid to family names, but there's nothing sacred about your given name. And given how quickly it can go out of fashion, it's like having to wear the clothing that was stylish in your birth year for the rest of your life -- no thank you. Sure, I could just keep my name and lie when I'm around youngsters, but lying is hard to get away with over the long-haul, and I could never allow them to meet anyone who knew my current name.

I know, you can barely contain your curiosity -- just what ludicrously nouveau name would I adorn myself with from here on, or at least until it too stops being stylish five years from now? Easy choice: "Dylan." Its popularity peaked in the late '80s or early '90s, so it would sound completely ordinary to a girl born then. Use this tool and type in "Dylan" with "boys" checked to see. (And if you want to feel really old, go ahead and type in your own name.) Importantly, it doesn't sound too upper-crusty (like "Preston") or too trailer parkish (like "Jayden"), so it should have wide appeal. To be fair, though, all of these names are too new and stupid-sounding for me to know much about which class they're most popular in.

Want to update your own name, or at least see what funny names kids these days have? Here's a list of the most popular names in the 1990s, although be sure to cross-check with the tool above to see whether its popularity is increasing or decreasing. For example, "Michael" and "Jessica" are the most popular, but Michael peaked in the 1960s and Jessica in the '80s, and both have been declining ever since. "Tyler" (boy) and "Taylor" (girl), while less frequent, are still near the top in popularity but are also at their peak in the 1990s.

I'm not gonna lie: my brain releases a little packet of endorphins every time I learn a teenage darling's name. It's not only their skinny jeans and ballet flats that set them apart. Just knowing that her name is Sophia, Chloe, or Madeline -- or, yes, even questionable ones like Hailey, Kailey, and Bailey -- you can rest assured that she has many estrogen-filled years ahead of her. And imagine the bragging rights when you introduce your girl to friends and colleagues: "I'd like you to meet my girlfriend, Zoe." Sure, they'll be able to tell that she's a young 'un by looks alone, but her name will lodge itself deeper into their brain. "Wait, did he say her name was Zoe?"

Use this info to playfully tease older women you want. Never ask her name first: when she asks you, you have a clear indicator of interest. But before she can respond, interrupt her: "Wait, let me guess... you look like your name would be... Rose!" Say this playfully, with a joking look. You must hit her insecurities about age if you want an older woman -- or so they say, I don't bother. Right after she feels the sting, say you're just kidding while elbowing her, and then guess a more appropriate name like "Christine" or "Kelly."

I think this would also work if you started out guessing an impossibly young name like "Riley," just to highlight how not young she is. She would probably respond, "Riley? Do I look like I'm 20 years old?" And boom, once she hears herself say that, her self-esteem will melt into a puddle and she won't be able to put up much resistance. This approach has the added benefit of not being overtly insulting like guessing "Rose" does, so there's no way she could get angry with you.

Make an Amazon your ally in battle

We've already seen that having a female wingman is likely the most powerful predictor of how easily you win over a target girl, so it's natural to ask what type of person your "pivot" should be. Basically, you're looking for a man-woman, someone who incorporates enough masculine and feminine traits that she can serve as a fluid go-between: she'll get what's going on in your head and inside the target's head, giving her a keen intuition for what she should be doing to help you get the girl.

She should be tough-minded enough to realize that playing games is necessary to win another person over, and that actions should lead closer to the goal. Still, not all such females will do -- some are too ruthless and disagreeable, and their presence will push the target girl away. And to ensure that she doesn't hog all the attention to herself, make sure she's not too neurotic -- all females are, but judge by degree.

As a rough guide, pick someone who Alias Clio calls the Amazonian Alpha. A further advantage in choosing them is that, whatever you think of their looks, you probably will not be magnetically drawn to them, as most men prefer girlier females, and so you will not be tempted to ruin your productive partnership by falling for your pivot. My best girl friend belongs to the Madonna sub-type, although I'm sure the statuesque ones would do just as well.

But what does she get out of the deal? As Clio says, these females are awfully headstrong and often too proud for their own good, so they require someone to whip them into shape. Make no mistake: she will admit to this yearning for discipline out loud, even when you didn't prompt her to say so. No other female would dare behave that way toward her, and most guys are too wimpy to do so either. That leaves you. Just make sure to remind her how much she depends on you, and she'll bear in mind that she needs to return the favor.

The only caveat is that you shouldn't be too aggressive with her, or get too into a confrontation with her -- arguing with her can be quite exhilarating! -- as this may lead her to fall for you. There aren't many guys who would steamroll right over her, and again, that's what she craves -- to not be the steamroller, for once. * Given the knack for strategizing that these women have, if she did become attracted to you, she would subtly foil all of your attempts on other girls after that. For the same reason, this arrangement works best when you are not her ideal mate in traits other than dominance.

* Don't confuse steamrolling over a person with flinging darts at them while running past at a safe distance. Women can tell from personal interactions whether you're petty and resentful or competitive and seek challenge.

Cultural products don't tell us much about what they depict

If historians 500 years into the future scour our high and popular culture to see what life was like, they would not learn very much. They would observe an increase in the popularity of thongs and lowering waistlines during a time when promiscuity was decreasing. This is because fashion cycles play out in their own world, divorced from real life. They would also note the savagery of the upper classes in TV shows, movies, and just about everything else, even though it's mostly the poor who are barbarous.

Where does this idea come from anyway? It's not like a fashion trend, but artistic themes do live in their own realm, also separate from reality. Sure, they may be based on fact when they begin to spread, but these themes may "take hold" in the literary and artistic culture, all while the facts on the ground are shifting away. That seems to be the case with the "barbaric rich" cliches that continue to sucker large audiences. Here is a table (from this article by Manuel Eisner) showing the percent of criminals who belonged to a given social class, and the size of that class in the general population, from 14th Century Venice (click to enlarge):



Important People are neither more nor less criminal than you'd expect based on their size, Workers appear a bit less criminal, Marginal People pretty law-abiding -- well, aside from producing twice as many murderers as you'd expect -- while the Nobles produce 5 times as many rapists and belligerents as you'd expect, although neither more nor fewer murderers.

So, if a late Medieval TV writer portrayed the rich as violent, it would be fairly accurate. But once that image becomes established in the cultural canon, it can be hard to shake it out since it appeals to human envy -- those scum who have more power than I do must have gotten it through greed, violence, ruthlessness, etc. Envy of our superiors is also what drives us to see hypocrisy in all of their actions -- sure, they may act civilized, but they'd rape and kill their closest friends if they thought they could get away with it!

Even though I don't have much of an interest in history (yet...), I've still seen far too many historians using cultural products as evidence to support their hypotheses about real life. If they were only discussing the history and fashion trends of intellectuals, artists, and elite culture, fair enough. As for everything else, at best, fictional art can put a human face on the story that the non-fictional data tell. But if I have to hear one more time about how Westerners became more terrified by the irrational just because some Viennese quack duped a handful of arts majors with his psycho-snake-oil...

Lower turnover in popular culture after 1980

Do people have shorter cultural attention spans these days? Is cultural change more chaotic than before? No, judging from the popularity of TV shows, which are as good of an indicator of popular culture as any.

I used a simple measure of cultural turnover: of the 10 TV shows with the highest Nielsen ratings in a given year, how many of them were not already in the top 10 in the previous year? If it is 0, then the popular shows of last year are the same as this year; if it is 10, then last year's popular shows have been completely replaced this year. Choosing the top 10 instead of 20 or 30 is arbitrary, but I just want a feel for change over time. (This is how Stanley Lieberson, in A Matter of Taste, measures cultural turnover in naming tastes.)

The data start in 1951 and go through 1999, with only 1987 excluded due to a goof in the website's lists. If a TV show was listed twice in a single year (e.g., if its Thursday and Saturday episodes were both highly watched), I expanded that year's list to include 10 unique shows. That only happened twice. Here is the turnover rate across the decades:



It looks like there's a downward trend after about 1980, but let's be more specific. Using either of two rank correlations between year and turnover rate shows a significant and negative relationship: Kendall's tau = -0.22 (p = 0.037, two-tailed), and Spearman's rho = -0.32 (p = 0.048). The median and mode of the turnover rates are both 4, so we can look for when the turnover rate was consistently higher or lower than 4. For the below-4 values, there is a very clear separation between a chunk from 1980 onward and a handful of outliers in the '50s and '60s. Likewise, for the above-4 values, there is a chunk pre-1980 and some outliers afterward. I've shown this by modifying the graph above:



The pre-1980 period is characterized by a high turnover rate -- 4 above-median values for every 1 below-median value -- while the post-1980 period shows greater stability -- 3.7 below-median values for every 1 above-median value. So, it was the popular culture of previous generations that showed greater fickleness, a shorter attention span, and so on. Of course, members of those generations will spin these results as showing that their popular culture was not fickle but innovative, while the current one is not focused but static. This is how Steve Sailer describes the recent history of rock and rap music, for example, and oddly enough he pegs the start of stylistic stagnation in the early 1980s as well.

Whatever emotional coloring we give to the facts, there's always a downside to innovation: more failed experiments are broadcast as a fraction of the whole, and what good stuff that is produced doesn't last very long. Wild innovation is great in science, and when used by a genius in the arts. However, science permits greater experimentation because the only constraint is that the innovation be on the right track in modeling the world. The arts are far more constrained: they must please the human mind, which is a picky eater. Especially when you get to the level of talent found among TV show writers -- just find something good and stick with it as long as you can.

Miley Cyrus wearing only a wet white t-shirt in the shower

Sh-boom! I normally don't cover celebrity gossip, but I figured I'd beat Half Sigma, who usually posts notices whenever the Disney star does something salacious. There are at least two pictures, and if internet rumors are true, the guy who stole them has others that are even more compromising.

In these depraved times we live in, we can only long for the good ol' days when 16 year-olds didn't have their underwear pictures leaked on the internet, but instead were photographed naked for Playboy centerfold posters (see here for facts; no nudie pictures).

The sweet charms of the pure, flawed teen: 5

Charm #5: Needing you to accompany her

Because she is at or near her peak level of appeal to males, and because she cannot protect herself from the deluge of unwanted advances, she feels safe when you're there. You have to walk her back to her dorm, arrive first at the dining hall so she doesn't have to sit there alone while creeps leer at her, stare down these creeps once she does show up so that they leave her alone, socially castrate any loser guys who come near her to chat her up, and repel sales assistants at the mall who would otherwise lift her wallet.

(I know that arriving late, so that she gets nervous, is a common tactic to increase her attraction to you on a first date. I'm talking about once you've gotten to know each other.)

In addition to having to be there to protect her, you also need to accompany her in some cases because she is in a venue where being alone -- or at least, being without a boy -- marks her as an undesirable, which she will take to mean "ugly." When she is older, her male peers will have enough balls to approach women, so that attractive females will never be alone. When she is young, though, boys her age are nearly all too chicken to go up to her, so that many attractive girls are left alone, feeling that they must be repulsive to boys. See here, starting around 3:00, for how this feels:



At a young age, this is one of the worst feelings she can have, and as the night wears on and she becomes more convinced of her hideousness, she will deflate somewhere in the background. (Women my age can rewind to middle or high school dances when they stood alone, hopefully at least with their girl friends, while the DJ played Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" or "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" by Boyz II Men.) So when you ask her to dance, she is grateful to you for convincing her that her ugliness is all in her head, and will repay you by smiling and laughing bashfully the entire time, holding your hands or arms firmly, and gazing up into your eyes:



It's hard to underestimate the appeal of a girl who makes you feel like her protector -- it's not a need that can be even partly met by spending money, god knows, and there's nothing you can do in your relations with other men to fulfill it. And unlike sex -- another need that only females can help you out with -- the satisfaction is longer lasting. Any girl can fuck you, and a fair number can even fuck you very well, but something else has to fill in the gaps in between.

That's what some guys mean when they say, "You'll regret it if you don't date a smarty-pants," but there are other ways to fill this void. Boosting your sense of self-worth -- and yes, even getting that warm, revolting feeling when you take care of helpless things -- works just as well.

How to preserve this charm

Assuming you're over 25, you probably won't have to worry about guys approaching you, so just concentrate on conveying to him that he's your protector while you're dancing, strolling around, or whatever else. You still remember how to look up into someone's eyes and smile bashfully, don't you? And how to press yourself closer to him when you're walking outside, or rest your head on his shoulder? Of all the girly charms that can break through a man's defenses against commitment, this one is probably the easiest to maintain, or to fake when it's no longer there naturally.

You might also try what Method actors do, by recalling vividly a previous time when you felt the way you need to feel. Again, just rewind to those awkward middle and high school dances in your mind, play one of the songs that made you feel desperate for a boy to dance with, and this should put you in a more grateful state of mind before going out.

Why adults are misled by slut culture

The popularity of thong underwear or pop music lyrics such as Britney Spears' "Gimme More" cannot tell us much about the actual behavior of adolescents, as young people became more and more chaste during the same time period when thongs came and went (which therefore shows no correlation), and as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and The Pussycat Dolls have risen in popularity (which shows a negative correlation).

Looking back, it should have been clear, as slut culture really consists of items associated with 20-somethings rather than adolescents -- one-night-stands, for example. Adolescents have too much of their lives ahead of them to accept the one-night-stand ways of 20-somethings and beyond. Rather, a female teenager will only start having sex if she is in a long-term relationship and cannot control her emotions around her boyfriend. So, when teenagers give a guy a standing lapdance in a club, or sing along to "Dirrty," it's just a goof to them, and you often see them smiling and laughing while doing it, as they're not serious about it.

One thing I never see at the teen dance club, or at the college-kid '80s night, is slow-dancing. On the dancefloor, girls will do the most raunchy things imaginable to your crotch with their ass, but just try threading your fingers with theirs without even having spoken to her. Since she hasn't fallen for you, it ain't gonna happen. Fast-paced slutty music may get them bouncing around, but that hyperactive state of mind is not conducive to falling for someone. (It is conducive to distracting a 20-something long enough to get her back home for the night, though.) Wearing down the defenses of a teenager requires the intimacy, especially the prolonged eye-contact and head-on-the-guy's-shoulder positioning, that slow-dancing affords.

Adolescent females may be able to identify with the aggressiveness of slut culture, as teenage social life is more dog-eat-dog than it is for adults. However, slut culture is fundamentally about being in total control of one's emotions, about being strong and a bit butch. Well, if there's one thing that teenage girls are not, it's emotionally tough. Imitating what they see and hear in slut culture is as likely to turn them into actual sluts as mimicking the words of an Obama speech will bring a verbally clumsy person into political office.

Indeed, typical female teenagers do not have sex by clubbing a boy over the head, or by acting on a whim with a total stranger, like a club slut does, but by falling hard for a boy and losing control. Her boyfriend will always be pushing for sex, but it's only once she's emotionally gone that she surrenders.

So, don't worry if your daughter is singing and dancing along to Britney Spears. Be more afraid if you hear "Angel Baby" behind her locked door, a song that, by the way, the singer Rosie Hamlin wrote when she was 14 and recorded when she was 15. (I wouldn't be surprised to find out that female pop music stars are getting older, as there was a fairly good discussion at Steve Sailer's blog on aging male rockstars.)

Alias Clio endorses my plan for female self-improvement

Well, not so directly, but in her post on the female heartbreaker she calls The Eternal Ingenue, she describes the person I've been writing about in my staying girly posts. Unlike the other types she's written about -- The Gold-digger, The Waif-Neurotic, and the Amazonian Alpha -- this girly girl, she says, has men calling her "charming" and "enchanting." Also unlike the other types, according to Clio, the Ingenue provokes envy and jealousy in other women, a sure sign that she is their most powerful competition. Study her ways, female readers: that's your best shot at trapping a man.

I've already written four mini-posts in her comments section, so I won't add anything here, except to note that there is considerable overlap between the Eternal Ingenue type and the typical ballet dancer, who I gushed about here quite uncharacteristically, as I don't find most women very inspiring (or men for that matter). But, god damnit, those dancers just know how to get ya. As Clio notes, Eternal Ingenues aren't necessarily maneaters; she is just pointing out one type of heartbreaker. Most of the ballet girls I hung out with last school year didn't seem like femme fatales * -- a fair number had steady boyfriends -- but I'm sure quite a few of the unattached were the flighty heartbreaker type who couldn't stay infatuated with one guy long enough to turn it into a long-term relationship.

* English pluralization of the French term, just to give Clio an unscratchable itch. Claw at the computer screen all you want; you cannot change the way it looks.