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[Note: I’ll be traveling today. I’ll check in later this evening —fl]

According to Em & Lo of Sex. Love. And Everything in Between it looks like the little-red-Corvette/midlife-crisis meme is no longer what its cracked up to be. Assuming it ever was.

Apparently one of the “biggest surprises” of the study was that the classic MG Roadster car turned women’s heads when it was empty, but failed to impress if a dude was driving it. Well, that’s only surprising if it has never occurred to you that women are more likely to fantasize about driving a classic sports car than they are about dating a man who owns one.

They said it here.

Makes sense to me. This is not to say that there’s no virtue in “signaling.” Nor that, as Matthew Yglesias says, signaling as a drive doesn’t motivate people to do actual virtuous things. It’s just that past a certain point (for instance wedding extravagance, SUV horsepower, PETA ads, almost any opinions expressed on cable news, redness of cars, maximization or minimization of one’s “number”) the symbols stop signaling what you want them to.