Image titled “Skepdate” from Cectic.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog inadvertently points out that controlled studies are more useful social indicators than random journalism assignments:

A woman carries out a speed dating experiment. She goes to one such event as a human rights lawyer, interested in economics, politics and Proust. She strikes out: the men are terrified. She goes to a second night as a ditzy, brain dead florist who says things like “why is water wet?” The men love her.

The conclusion? According to Tanya Gold, the dating guinea pig in question, men are much more interested in stupid women:

Everything my mother has ever told me about men is true. They didn’t care that the florist couldn’t recognise a chair. They liked it. The feminist revolution didn’t pierce their hearts; it only made it into human resources. If you want to be loved, just scoop out your brain and act like a child. After 40 years of feminism we shouldn’t really burn our bras. We should burn our men. Love may be dissembled but statistics never lie. Reader, let me tell you: men want me – and you – to be lobotomised.

Read the piece in context here.

Well, that sounds pretty horrible, right? Well, it is horrible. But also horribly sloppy. First, check out the methodology of the author, Tanya Gold of The Guardian

I decided to attend a speed-dating night as a fabulously successful, dazzlingly literate human rights lawyer, and then another as a gibbering idiot who works as a florist. Who would the men fall for?

As a lawyer, I walked into a Soho bar. My first date appeared. I smiled at him, and said: “I am a human rights lawyer (grin).” “I work 60 hours a week (grin).” And watched him shrivel up. “I’m an engineer,” he said (no grin). And then he was silent, so I told him I was reading Heidegger. He stared at me as if I had told him that I boil men’s heads.

...

Then came Robert. “I’m a florist,” I smiled. The reaction was instantaneous, passionate and almost molecular: “Can I buy you a drink?”

Then came Harry. “Let’s not talk about me,” I said. Bang – he asked me out. Just like that. On the spot.

...

I could have been engaged by 11.17pm. But instead I went home and sifted through the evidence. Only one in 20 of the men I met on the Soho love coalface wanted to date a woman who had heard of Proust (19 of out 20 cats don’t prefer it). Yet eight out of the florist’s 12 men wanted to be gibbered at again and again and again.

Read the original article here.

Ok, call me an unlettered lout, but pretty much all I know about Proust is that every time I bite into a madeline I think about what kind of nightmare it would be to have to read all seven volumes (I had to look that up too) of Remembrance of Things Past… since that sort of thing seemed to have driven the Steve Carell character to attempt suicide in “Little Miss Sunshine.” :-)

This is not, incidentally, an intended dig either at Proust or Scholars thereof. The point being that I’m not sure one out of twenty people, men or women, at a “So-Ho love coalface” would have heard any more about Proust than I have.

Which sort of brings up my next concern: if she’d recruited a male colleague to repeat the experiment as closely as possible how might he have fared with women? Let’s look at that first paragraph, m’kay?

If I’m speed dating in London’s Soho District (”...an entertainment district which for much of the later part of the 20th century had a reputation for its sex shops as well as its night life and film industry. It has a long history of providing a range of eating places.) and I was to plop down and say I was a workaholic pro-bono lawyer who unwinds by reading Heidegger… I’m not sure how many people (women if it was hetero speed dating, men if it was bi or gay speed dating) would take me up on it either.

But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. Ok, maybe, a little. As I read about Tanya Gold’s little unmonitored human-subject experiment I did start out wanting to mention that I thought men would fare about the same as she did. But!

As I continued reading it occurred to me that Gold had been (whether intentionally or not) mimicking the Before and After characteristics of “pick-up artists” (PUAs) in the “seduction community” (SC) who run around supporting each other’s efforts to “pick up” women.

And trust me, if your standard approach to dating is to brag about how much overtime you pull and how many Nazi-endorsing German philosophers you read, then, yeah, pretending to be a florist who says “Let’s not talk about me” is going to get you someone else’s phone number way, way, way faster, m’kay?

And to be honest, that brings me to what I really, really wanted to talk about. Something germane to both Gold’s article and the whole PUA business: only one in 20 people (male or female) are really going to be interested in a tremendously dull tosser who likes to break the ice by talking about work or dead Germans whereas three out of four people respond well when you pretend at making undemanding but playful conversation that’s more about them than it is about you. I get that. That’s pretty much the core of good pickup/seduction/icebreaking conversation, and so if you’re naturally inclined towards the first then learning how to manifest the second is going to work wonders.

But the one part I wish Gold had tried — the key to most good first-approximation experiments — would have been the “control group” experiment of pretending to just be herself! Y’know, an intelligent, outgoing, humorous and adventurous, professional woman. Because I could be mistaken but I’m guessing that in any given situation that way more than one in twenty men, and maybe not that much fewer than one in four, might have given her their phone numbers. And that’s the point I think a lot of would-be pick-up “artists” need to think about. Because when you’re shy, and you’re worried that you’re not going to be able to “score” with someone else unless you can say something interesting, and so when given the opportunity you either sit there silently stewing over “what can I say, what can I say, gawd her eyes are drifting towards her watch, I’ve got to think, got to think” or else spout out the first thing that comes to mind, like

[I got a PhD in economics at Cambridge.] It was incredibly rewarding. Are you interested in economics, Eric[a]?

... then, yeah, it’s not going to work out so hot. But here’s the deal. If you’re shy it’s easy to decide that it’s the being-an-economist-which-is-dull part that turns prospective partners off when in fact it’s the trying-to-think-of-something-interesting-to-say-which-is-dull part that’s the problem. Sure, being an economist isn’t terrifically interesting, but instead of throwing around subtle digs (PUA “negs”) or wearing aviator goggles in a bar in order to seem interesting, it’ll work wonders just to say something entirely non-clever like “Let’s not talk about me…” Even if you’re “just” an economist. Or florist!

Anyway, points to Jess McCabe for the (literally) thought-provoking link, and half points to Tanya Gold for a half-baked, massively stereotype-polishing, but still productive opinion piece.