You were cuter in high school -- the data prove it

Steve Sailer, Half Sigma, and Razib have all commented on a new national, representative sample of body measurements in Americans. Read the study's tables here. So far, they have only focused on race and sex differences. You probably wonder why I focus so much on age -- well, no one else does. Due to how segregated our social groups are by cohort, age is one of those invisible variables for most people -- especially regarding people under 25 and over 70. I'm here to lift that veil.

Even though I have regular up-close-and-personal contact with teenage girls, I was still a bit surprised. After perusing the graphs below, you'll understand why it's so easy to find flattering pictures of a young girl, no matter how unprepared she is, while even 20-somethings struggle to look good -- let alone once they begin tumbling down the jagged cliff of the 30s and beyond. In the recent collection of Catalan girl pictures I put up, they're all 16 to 19. And these are just pictures that they've snapped at random during their daily routine -- no need for a huge room full of NASA engineers hammering away at their computers while darting their eyes back up at the big screen, and all starting four hours before her picture is to be taken.

But just in case you're curious why a 28 year-old guy would rather be around teenagers than women his own age, here are four graphs that show the ripening and dessication of the female body across the lifespan. I've already written about personality changes elsewhere (search this blog for "staying girly").

The dots are medians, and the lower and upper bars are the 25th and 75th percentiles. Each year has a point from 12 to 19, though unfortunately after that, everyone within a decade is smooshed into a single point. There are data for as young as age 2, and as old as 80-somethings, but I'm interested in pubescent and pre- or barely menopausal females. The teenagers aren't broken down by race, so I used race-neutral data for all ages. But age is not like IQ or income, which correlate with race, so there's no harm.





The median teenager is normal weight, and through age 16, the middle half lies in the normal range. Late teens are still mostly normal too. Even by a woman's 20s, the median woman is pushing right up against the normal / overweight barrier, while the 75th percentil is pushing against the overweight / obese barrier. By their 30s, the median woman is now clearly overweight and remains so, while the 75th percentile stays clearly obese. If you don't want to lose your hand in rolls of lard when you squeeze your girlfriend's ass, it's best to date young girls.

And talk about expanding waistlines -- up through 16, the median girl's waist hovers around 30 inches, which already is a bit big for someone who's 5'4 or shorter. By their 20s, the median woman has a 33-inch waist, and it just gets worse from there. I don't have anything against dating a girl who's taller than I am, but she can't have a bigger waist than I do (29 - 30 inches).

About 5 or 6 weeks ago, I was sandwiched between 4 or 5 teenagers, all very petite, and I could fit my hands around a fair amount of one girl's waist, while she gave me the motor-booty treatment. All guys will tell you there's something thrilling about being able to pick up a girl and hurl her body across the room. With older women, you're deprived of that thrill -- you might as throw on a yoke and haul her fat ass around.

Weight shows a disappointing trend after 20 as well. As with waist size, I would feel strange dating a woman who weighed much more than I do (135 pounds). Now, if she were tallish and was packing most of that weight into a jungle booty, then fair enough. But such females are genetic freaks, and therefore rare. The typical heavy woman is the reason why Wal-Mart aisles are so yawningly wide -- to accomodate the girth of their scooters.

Guys who aren't desirable enough to get girly girls love to brag about how chasing after man-women proves how macho they are -- "Well, only the most masculine guy could date a 6'3 bodybuilder with chest hair and a 5-inch clit." Yeah, you enjoy that there, buddy. In fact, any time I've ever seen the topic come up on the internet, tall guys who are desirable usually say they like petite girly females just like everyone else. I mean, when you pick up your girl and spin her around, you want her to sail in the air -- much easier when she's 130 pounds at age 16 than 155 pounds in her 30s.

Most guys don't care about a girl's height, but for those who do, they've already attained their adult height of 5'4 by age 15, and it's not easier to find really tall girls by looking at older ones (the length of the bars is about the same after 15).

If we cared about finding supportive husbands for all women, we would burn these graphs into their minds during high school health class, with a warning to get married before you turn into a giant slug by your late 20s. But we live in a society where adult supervisors see the 20s as a time for exploration and "finding yourself," even though teenagers themselves think they should grow up faster than that.

I still find it amazing that they hardly do any exercise -- even when they have a free gym membership -- high school gym class -- they refuse to take advantage of it, obviously because they don't really need it. Hang out with teenage girls for awhile, even if it's just tutoring or volunteering, and you'll hear them complain about how ugly they look without make-up or having washed and done their hair. You won't notice at all. It must be nice to just roll out of bed and look hot. I guess they still have to shave their legs and underarms, though. Still, it must be a sweet deal being a young pretty girl.

Well, this data on adult women is pretty depressing -- luckily I'll be hitting up the teen dance club tonight where I can block it all out. And anyhow, I won't have to worry about aging for at least another 30 or 40 years.

Forecast: eternal youth

Tonight while cooling off on the club's patio, some guy came up and started small talk, and pretty soon got to "How old are you?" I couldn't tell if he was gay and good at hiding it, due to the conservative environment of the Mountain Time Zone, or if he was sent by some girls who were too shy to ask themselves.

Guess, I said.

"Uh, 21?"

Pretty close.

"Ummm... 20?"

I told him, no, other way, but pretty close, and then interrupted the interrogation by asking how old he was.

"I just turned 23."

Now, I could see if he was a teenager who had no experience with 20-somethings. But at 23, he should be able to spot a guy in his late 20s. I usually hear 22 or 23, but it's always a treat -- even if it's from a guy -- to hear a year or two younger. I can't believe he went lower when I told him 21 was only close.

I don't really worry about the pretty young things finding me attractive -- they'll do so even when I'm clearly over 40. But if they view you as too far out of their age group, they'll only be into you as an exciting fling. Nothing wrong with some college girl booty on the side, of course, but I don't want for my only steady dating options to be with women over 25.

That must be why the lead singers of rock groups have so many willing young groupies -- there are other good-looking, famous guys in their late 20s and beyond (such as actors and athletes), but the lead singer is full of energy, confidently performs in front of a crowd, and sings about things that teenagers not only relate to, but feel as if the singer wrote the song for them. "i mean, he may be kinda old, but i feel like he gets me. i dunno, y'know? plus he's pretty cuteee."

They'd not only fuck him for fun -- they crush really hard on him, just as though he sat in the back of their math class. It's too bad the dumb shits tend to marry women their own age, often older, surely out of laziness. Billie Joe Armstrong, Gerard Way, John Lennon, Paul McCartney -- what a waste of potential. When I become a professor (or whatever I end up as), there's no way in hell I'm marrying an academic my own age. There will always be those cute students who feel that they share a special connection with you, god bless 'em.

Getting to tag tight-bodied 20 year-olds when you're over 30 must be pretty sweet, but the young ones are also really affectionate and romantic toward their crushes, as their mothering genes haven't been switched on yet. As I always say, nothing wrong with women getting all maternal, but you should be getting kids out of the deal. Otherwise you only suffer the costs of their changing hormone levels and enjoy none of the benefits.

I'm not freeze-spirited

This week it snowed fairly heavily. On my way to campus, I couldn't believe I saw someone braving the possible accusations of stuffiness by bringing an umbrella. But he -- a grown man -- compensated for it by wearing Bermuda shorts and knee-high socks, in the middle of the snowfall, and a windbreaker instead of a coat.

Still, I've yet to see someone top the guy last year who, while it was snowing so hard that you couldn't see 30 feet ahead, wore loose athletic shorts, ankle socks, sneakers, and a hoodie. You can look informal -- I'll look non-hypothermic.

Shabby people pride themselves on not following fashion, but they're kidding themselves. They're slaves to their own silly trends, like shorts during a blizzard. If they valued usefulness and comfort, they'd be bundled up, not stripped down -- all to convince the crowd that they're an authentic, organic commoner.

When they bury their hands into their pockets to avoid frostbite, offer them your gloves and watch how anxious they get. They cherish their street cred more than an indie rock geek who refuses to borrow your iPod because it has some Metallica on it -- "what if someone saw?" Wearing gloves in winter would be like when their mom forced them to put on that stupid bike helmet when all my friends were looking.

If you're like me and your Christmas shopping plan is to just loot the mall while it's a complete ghost town, here are three simple things you might pick up, which I couldn't survive the winter without:

* Thermal underwear from American Apparel. The most comfortable kind I've ever worn. Not too prole, yet not too fabulous.

* Angora scarf from J. Crew. According to Alan Flusser, having light skin and dark hair, I need something with a bold pattern and high light-dark contrast near my face.

* Umbrella from Brooks Brothers. Go ahead -- be an asshole and take up lots of space. Those collapsable ones are so small that they barely cover you -- might as well just hold a newspaper over your head. Recession-time bonus: this is the cheapest stick umbrella I could find.

More evidence from prostitutes that women are most bangable around 23 to 24

Before I showed that the average porn star is 23 years old, judging from LA Direct Models, which represents the more famous ones. The average beauty pageant winner in recent years is 21, though. (And of course, sex symbols have been getting steadily older for as long as we have data.) So now let's look at a group of women who are also chosen almost entirely based on looks, though probably for having a daring and calculating personality too: prostitutes.

I happened upon this data after reading an NYT article on how the global recession is affecting demand for Czech prostitutes. The brothel profiled allows guys to pay an entrance fee and have sex with the women there, who get paid wages plus commission per act. They're filmed for an internet audience, whose subscription fees provide the brothel's revenue. Here is their website's list of girls. From this list, we get the following distribution of ages:



The average girl here is 24 (median 23.5), and the distribution is highly skewed (skewness is +2.96 S.E.). That is, most of the girls are in the lower end, with just a few in the upper end. No surprise there: younger is better, even when almost everyone is under 35. And look at how many are 18 -- about 11%. If you imagine what the graph would look like with ages 15 to 17 included to the left, it's obvious that those bars would not have negligible height -- and certainly not zero height. There is clearly a big demand for girls that age. After all, that's why there are laws against under-18 prostitutes: finding no minors at all among prostitutes is not a situation that would happen naturally in a libertarian society.

In fact, for 16 and 17 year-olds the bars would probably stand taller than those of the over-30 women. I'm going to sell motivational posters for over-30 women who are still "exploring their options" on the dating market: it'll be a stern-faced picture of me, and under it, "You were hotter in high school. So settle already." Take a lesson from your treasured retailers and think up some sort of "buy one, get one free" offer involving your enabler -- er, best friend -- to make sure you get married to someone before your assets evaporate.

Lastly, it's interesting that the beauty pageant winners are quite a bit younger than porn stars and prostitutes. One misgiving I have about chasing teenagers is that, as tight as their skin is, and despite their indefatigable energy level, their asses can't compete with those of a girl who's about 23 to 24. These girls have more raw fuckdoll appeal than the younger ones, who specialize more in being cute and enchanting.

A girl who's 23 is at or near the age when the average woman would've had her first child in most places and times for our species. So, she's the one you want a one-night stand with: she's decided to have a kid, and all you need to do is be there and leave some other guy to raise it. To get her for a greater length of her salad days, like before 23 as well as during her mid-20s, you have to invest more in her, since she's not quite as promiscuous as she'll be in a few years. Because guys would rather not invest anything, they must be tricked and manipulated into doing so -- and youthful charm, plus super-firm flesh, is one of the few weapons that young girls have to get past a guy's resistance to commitment.

(Again, a note to any women planning to go husband-hunting after 30: it's like trying to rob a bank with water gun.)

Hanging out and partying with young girls: a recession-proof investment

Everyone over 25, and especially over 30, is having a nuclear meltdown over the nuclear meltdown of the economy, understandably. On the other hand, my undergrad friends, and the high school people at one of the dance clubs I go to, couldn't be more oblivious of what's going on. It feels better more than ever to be around them.

It seems counterintuitive, but when there's basically no one in adult-world to reassure you that things are OK -- other than those who are completely delusional -- you have to rely on the blissfully ignorant to ease your nerves. Soldiers in wartime must feel the same way watching their little daughters dancing around the house, unable to appreciate what daddy is going off to face pretty soon.

When Wall Street went into free-fall, I figured that within a few months at the latest, I'd be in some sort of Last Days of Disco situation. Sure, the young 'uns aren't too integrated into the national or global economy, but their parents are -- wouldn't they stop giving their kids $10 to go out dancing every week? And any jobs they may have themselves are likely to be in sectors that "fell off a cliff," as they say, such as retail.

So far, though -- nothing. They're still going out in about the same numbers as before, except for the sketchy illegal Mexicans, who I believe I've seen fewer of recently, thank God. They're still as upbeat, as willing to sandwich me, toss their hair, and all those other wonderful things that make a guy feel great.

Best of all: no annoying small talk about the things they're doing to save -- "I've completely given up my weekly spa appointments" -- or their half-baked theories about what caused the crisis and how we can get out of it right away, usually parroted from some numbnuts in the mass media -- these must be the "intelligent conversations" that I've been told older women are superior at. A girl who's happy to have no opinions is better than a woman who's happy to have stupid opinions.

Rich vs poor gap in Republicanism as a function of state wealth

Audacious Epigone has a post on the rich vs. poor gap in voting for McCain, as a function of the state's level of McCain support, and as a function of the state's wealth. For wealth, he used gross state product, which seems more difficult to measure than median household income. I took his index of the rich - poor gap in voting McCain and plotted it as a function of median household income:



As you can see, the richer a state is, the smaller the gap between rich and poor in voting for McCain. In poorer states, the rich are far more likely than the poor to vote Republican, compared to in richer states. (Spearman's rank correlation is -0.38, p = 0.008). This is as strong as the correlation A.E. found between the rich - poor gap and the percent of a state that voted for McCain. So, how rich a state is still tells us something about the size of the rich - poor gap: we explain 14% of the variation in the rich - poor gap by making it a monotonic decreasing function of state income.

A.E. defined "rich" as earning more than $100K, and "poor" as earning under $50K. Andrew Gelman, one of the authors of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, showed similar results by cleaving the rich and poor as those earning above vs. under $50K. See here and a follow-up here.

Aging, feeling joy, girls, and religion

Using GSS data, here's the average number of days in the past week that people felt "excited" or "overjoyed" as a function of their age (grouped into three-year bins):



Everyone's more likely to feel excited than overjoyed, perhaps because overjoyed implies that the thing you were excited about actually worked out the way you'd hoped. Age is not correlated with feeling excited -- good news -- but it is with feeling overjoyed. * It declines from the late teens to the early 40s and levels off afterward.

This pattern serves young males because it builds team spirit among their coalition of desperate risk-takers, which older independent males don't have to worry about as much. And it serves young females because it makes them cute. When was the last time you saw a 30 year-old woman give a guy one of those run-jump-hug thingies?

When I'm 50, I hope I'll be self-deluded enough to say things like, "Well, I've been there and done that, and I don't need a girl who's overjoyed so often -- too much drama. I need someone who's calm and still." Probably I won't be, if my current inability to repress ugly facts is any guide.

Middle-aged guys get fired up themselves when they're coaching a winning team, as they watch their junior foot soldiers overwhelmed with emotion. And what father doesn't light up inside when his daughter is on cloud nine and runs up to give him one of those "Daddy!!!!" hugs for no apparent reason? Obviously we continue to value this trait in our close friends and family members as we age.

The only reason we say at that age that we don't want a romantic partner who's easily overjoyed is that for most of us, that type of partner -- namely, a young one -- couldn't be farther out of our league. It's better for the ego then to make believe that it's not what we really value and just get on with life. (See this related post on how guys' attitudes toward girls change over the lifespan.)

Since your own level of joy will probably hit bottom around age 40, you'd better have an outside source to give you a daily shot in the arm, probably from interacting with young people. Hopefully that means you'll have a 20 year-old wife. But even if not, working with young guys and especially young girls should do the trick. (One of the few fringe benefits of teaching.) And then there's having kids of your own -- although they're not exactly going to be a reliable source of joy in your life until they leave for college, those exceptional moments aside.

As for 40+ women, don't do this. Working with high school or college girls every day will just depress you as you become unable to block out how pretty you used to look when you were their age. And the young guys will mindlessly blurt out something about you being old, or make you the object of their fantasy where you'll be an easy lay, unlike the girls with annoying high standards their own age. There's always the religious life -- many middle-aged women seem to get a lot emotionally out of that, rather than going to church just because they have to.

I wonder if that's why Jesus is so much more popular than other central Christian figures -- having died relatively young, he can't be imagined as an aging man. Women can view him either as their surrogate son or as the not-too-young rockstar whose undivided attention will make them feel young and special again.

Look at any painting of Saint Paul, though, who lived into his 60s -- he always has either a widow's peak or a bald head, a wrinkled face, and other signs of age. Not the joy-spreading performer type who women will naturally turn to in order to feel younger and fulfilled. Some psychologist must have studied the frequency of women having erotic dreams about Jesus vs. other important Biblical figures.

I'm sure this is why flaky Gaia worship will never convert more than a tiny percent of middle-aged women: there's no younger dude to look upon and speak to you.

Whatever you turn to, plan ahead so you can ease into it gradually. Born-agains and the creepy old guy in the club appear more unhinged than their same-age counterparts who've been at it for awhile.

* Pearson correlation is -0.58, two-tailed p = 0.012.

GSS variables: EXCITED, OVRJOYED, AGE

South Africa and Zimbabwe continue their spiral into oblivion

Zimbabwe is rocked by a cholera epidemic because the government hasn't been maintaining sewage pipes.

Relief workers said the near breakdown of urban water systems in Harare and other cities was an important factor contributing to the disaster. "Water and sanitation infrastructure have deteriorated significantly," said a spokesperson for Oxfam, the UK agency. "Sewage pipes have been allowed to deteriorate significantly and are now leaking directly into drinking water. The infrastructure has been crippled."

Nor have they maintained the necessary chemicals for treating water.

A shortages of the chemicals needed to treat water has also hit services. The managers of Harare's Morton Jaffray water works stopped the pumping on Monday, mainly -- according to the pro-government newspaper, The Herald - owing to shortages of aluminium sulphate, one of four chemicals used to treat water.

Just as a reminder, Zimbabweans already have no food, though white farmers recently won a legal case against Mugabe:

A group of white Zimbabwean farmers scored a rare victory against President Robert Mugabe's regime on Friday night when a regional court ordered it to halt a programme of land seizures that has contributed to bringing the country to the brink of starvation.

The cholera epidemic may well spread to South Africa, where another government has failed to maintain waste treatment facilities.

In the decades since the 1980s, spending on treatment works, pump stations, reservoirs and other items has fallen sharply.

Look at the graph to see how sharply spending has fallen, to basically nothing right now. Three guesses for what is meant by the circumlocution "in the decades since the 1980s." Give up?

This fall, says Mr Turton, was matched by a skills shortage. Qualified engineers, most of whom were white, were not replaced by younger, men and women.

Many are now close to retirement age, and younger whites, says Mr Turton, have been discouraged by affirmative action and many have simply left the country.

And in case you'd forgotten about how awful AIDS is in South Africa...

Harvard University scholars estimate that the policies of Thabo Mbeki, the previous president, were responsible for 365,000 additional deaths as people were denied anti-retroviral drugs and other treatment. It is nine years since Mr Mbeki began his catastrophic embrace of dissident scientists who denied that HIV causes Aids, while his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, espoused herbal remedies and traditional healers instead of conventional medicine.

The whites who really have blood on their hands regarding southern Africa are those who demonized the colonialists, making criticism of black successor governments impossible. Sure, you can criticize this or that extreme policy, but not the underlying fact that life was better under white rule, leading us to conclude that we should allow them to rule rather than their successors, if we value the welfare of the citizens above the party cronies who, on the other hand, have had a pretty nice life since decolonization.

And you can't even criticize the "moderate" policy of affirmative action, since that's sacrosanct here already. When whites are the majority, the top 15% of them is still a large number, and a few of them losing their deserved spots to AA quotas won't cripple the system -- it'll just be like living in Atlanta. But when whites are a minority, the top 15% of them is a pretty small number. When these few are shoved aside for AA quotas, the entire society collapses.

A Martian ecologist with no feelings toward human beings would note the parallel between these events and a parasitoid species whose population size was too large relative to the size of the sustaining host species.

Watching them grow up

As part of the ongoing effort to make this place a little easier on the eyes...



She's 18 and in that "taking pictures of your feet" phase that arty girls go through. Most of the things that people do in order to "find themselves" are silly, but so are a child's first words. It doesn't make them less cute. And how else are they going to master speech?

Growing an emotional attachment to a girl depends heavily on observing her while she's blossoming from an adolescent into a young adult. The faster a person changes, the more often we have to update our mental profile of them. Since we don't just erase our previous profiles, more frequent updates means a richer record that we have of them, like a wall filled with ticks marking the progression of her height, which accrues hardly any new marks after age 20 or so.

If I know a woman from when she's 25 to 30, I don't need too many pictures to capture how she's changed in appearance (or personality). But to see her development from 15 to 20, I would need a shoebox overflowing with polaroids, just like the ones that parents keep of their children before they reach a certain age. With more pictures for my mind to run its fingers over, the young girl's profile makes me feel that I know her more deeply than someone my own age who I've known for the same length of time.

Fortunately for us, girls don't need to see us change and mature to bond with us -- otherwise 27 year-old women would have crushes on developing teenage boys. They want someone who's already pretty unmovable to stand guard while they're going through their little metamorphosis, when they're least able to protect themselves -- their "I don't care what anyone else thinks" cocoon notwithstanding.

The skin stretched tight over their newly fattened thighs, or large eyes that leap out of their sockets, appeal to the libido -- admittedly a huge piece of falling for someone. But these signals about "look at how I've changed!" threaten a man's psychological independence even more, as a rich record of memories can't be as easily thrown out and replaced as a snapshot of high, supple buttocks. For this reason, you probably still remember your crushes and girlfriends from high school or college more fondly than the last random piece of ass you got.

PS -- anyone who plans to work with teenagers should bear this occupation hazard in mind. Unless you're a grade-A, Angelina Jolie-worshiping girl-hater, the crafty little devils will find a way to get you attached to them. The trick is to get them attached to you too. I was blessed for my interactions on the job with teenagers to have been mostly of the "unspoken love" / "forbidden lust" quality, running in both directions. I can see, though, how other guys would be driven crazy by working with adolescents.