#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

Playing Hard To Get/Easy To Lose: Science Isn't A Fan (Part 2 - MONOGAMIZED!)

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

[Part 1]

Once you’ve selected a main squeeze and changed your Facebook relationship status, ‘playing hard to get’ can do naught but shake its tiny fist and scurry off. When you’re actually in a committed relationship, it’s sort of by definition impossible to ‘play hard to get,’ but that doesn’t mean that the same principles can’t be applied.

‘Easy to Lose’ is the mustachioed, monogamous big brother of ‘Hard to Get.’ It’s the same basic strategy of stoking someone’s hots for you by implying the obstacle of real or imagined competition in your partner’s mind, except this iteration is retooled for those already in a relationship, giving not the impression that they need to work harder to earn your affection, but that they need to work harder to keep it; less emphasis on the concept of posing a challenge and more on just making them jealous as shit, but same overall idea.

And ironically, it suffers from the exact same gender-disparate pitfalls as playing hard to get. This is especially problematic as the strategy not only has a lot more riding on its success - the survival of an established relationship, not just a budding one - but also because it sees far more action in the field than its little brother.

As with ‘playing hard to get,’ guys have the luxury of a fairly proven success rate when it comes to levying jealousy as a weapon. Sure, both guys and girls will get a touch pissed once the game is afoot, but that’s where the sex-based response similarities end.

According to plenty o’ research, women have evolutionarily placed a premium on their interpersonal relationships - back in the good ol’ cave days, both their survival and emotional well-being more or less depended on it; these days it’s mostly the latter, but it’s no less important. This relationship-oriented mentality promotes the vigilant maintenance of one’s ties with friends, family, and one’s romantic partner; it’s also why women tend to notice and actively dwell on problems in a relationship whereas men take home the Olympic gold for ignoring the fuck out of them (subsequently expressing shock and surprise when they get dumped, despite the preponderance of problems that to everyone else had obviously been plaguing the relationship for a while).

As such, when a dude makes a girl jealous by flirting around, data suggests that she will (yes, get a bit peeved, but then) instinctively assume that the current state of the relationship is the problem and constructively work to improve it, thereby removing the guy’s reason for straying and protecting the relationship itself from further peril. Whether he’d hinted at more sex or more doting being on his wish list, there’s a decent chance his manipulative ass will get just that.

And once again, women’s adoption of the tactic, according to experiments and surveys, seems to rest on the implicit and incredibly generous assumption that men are just as relationship-oriented and constructive as they are. Ha! That’s what you GET for giving us way too much credit!

Evolutionarily, if it can be said that women treat the underlying problem in the face of jealousy, men seem to specifically just target the symptoms; boring relationship and ill treatment of your partner be damned - that asshole at the bar she’s flirting with is the real problem and you will crush him. Outside threats trump structural integrity on the “to do” list.

As such, when women deliberately try to make their men jealous by ramping up the harmless flirting, one of three things tend to happen, absolutely none of which resemble a ‘desirable outcome’:

1) Guy just either isn’t the jealous type, trusts you too much, or is totally oblivious and just doesn’t notice. This is more or less the opposite of what was supposed to happen, and common side effects include increased frustration, bruised self-esteem, and worst case - going from pretend flirting to real fucking around.

2) Guy notices. He notices so hard. He notices so hard that he...uh, grows sullen, retreats to the couch to watch TV, and broods by himself because he now feels shitty and just wants to be alone. Again, fail.

3) Guy definitely notices. He walks over with a vase filled with flowers and you think “Aha! It totally worked! He’s so hot and bothered over me!” right until he smashes the vase into the face of the guy you were flirting with and puts him in the hospital, thinking to himself that that’s the end of that. The worst part is that this does actually happen, and way more often than you’d hope. And in the worst cases, the asshole puts the girl in the hospital too.

Wrapping it up - yeah, the costs vs. benefits are not exactly the same for girls and guys.

The good news? It’s a shitty idea for anyone to play the jealousy card. Even though guys do come out on top in this round, any advantage conferred is incredibly short-term at best. The tactic does nothing to protect against, and really, just adds fuel to the inevitable long-term buildup of resentment a girl will feel after being manipulated in this fashion however many times. And hell hath no fury like a woman’s long-term buildup of resentment.

So, yes: It’s a lose-lose for everybody. If there’s a grotesque elephant in the room, don’t try to covertly assassinate it and hope no one notices - call attention to it and calmly discuss. Don’t play Cold War with your love life. Hash that shit out directly, constructively, and without criticism. The staggering amount of literature and lay-wisdom dedicated to offering every way but the direct way of dealing with relationship problems speaks volumes to how massively uncomfortable we are with simple, straightforward communication that may have consequences - but there’s also literature out there that can help you do that, do it well, and be happy.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

Playing Hard To Get/Easy To Lose: Science Isn't A Fan (Part 1 - The Courtship Phase)

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

Most of the shit I’ve written about thus far has revolved around psychological findings normally touting one bit of folksy wisdom over another after a very boring, lab-controlled or qualitatively observed grudge match between two hulking, clumsy axiomatic giants (“opposites attract vs. birds of a feather” --- FIGHT!) duking it out in the archives of civilization’s collective wisdom for the title of reigning champion o’ truth.

I didn’t remember until this morning that I’d forgotten a series of studies whose hypotheses didn’t resemble that at all --- no, they were more like if David ambled up to the Goliath - in this case, a widely accepted, undisputed cardinal rule of courtship - loaded a dinky stone into his sling, noticed that he’d brought a proverbial knife to a goddamn Giant fight, and proclaimed “shit” before going to Plan B and just launching a motherfucking cruise missile (of SCIENCE!) from a nearby naval destroyer instead. But once the smoke cleared...well it was a lot like in Independence Day when they tried to nuke the spaceship from the outside: the big bad notion of ‘Playing Hard To Get’ was still just chilling, totally unfazed, shrouded by some sort of direction-sensitive force field that conspicuously resembled back-issues of Cosmo and every romance movie or novel ever made. While a sort of disgusting number of studies have repeatedly debunked the myth that women should play hard to get, that shit seems to be as pernicious and eternal as the herp. Also much like the herp, the majority of women aren’t actually figurative carriers of the strategy, but some still mistakenly swear by it.

It’s sort of understandable, although also kind of disastrous: men and women are cognitively not nearly as different as a no talent, inexperienced hack with a mail order PhD from an unaccredited university who thinks the golden era of gender relations was the 1950’s would have you believe, but boy’s and girl’s minds aren’t exactly carbon copies of one another either. One of the big goals of psych research into interpersonal relationships and attraction is teasing apart the vast similarities from the unexpected differences, and then figuring out just what “different” even entails from quirk to quirk to overcome that nigh troublesome male/female communication barrier. Problem is that most people don’t read scholarly literature or peer-reviewed journals, and a lot of the info is too dry, obtuse, or clashing with conventional wisdom to distill for mass consumption. So instead, we humans tend to deal with unknown or uncertain situations by looking to others for cues or just filling in the blanks with something similar or analogous that we *do* know --- it’s quick and dirty, but most of the time it’s good enough.

Fact: when a GUY plays hard to get, it’s actually pretty effective. It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch, then, for a girl to assume that if it works one way, it’ll work the other. Or maybe she has no idea what to do, but her co-worker Sheila - a self-proclaimed expert on men and devout reader of Cosmo - tells her what will ‘drive a man wild,’ and she’s like well shit, at first glance that sounds pretty reasonable.

The problem with said girl’s ‘just reverse the polarity’ logic is that, as about a few major studies per decade since the 1970’s have pointed out - *this* is one of those crucial differences between men and women’s perception and reaction to certain social stimuli.

Basically - in experiments, when dudes played it uninterested, mysterious, and emotionally unavailable, this had the forbidden fruit effect of actually augmenting a female participant’s interest. In different experiments where the sexes were reversed, chicks were instructed to act either ‘easy to get’, ‘selectively hard to get’, or ‘always hard to get’ (this last condition being the equivalent of the dudes in the aforementioned experiments). As one might expect, the chick that implied she had interest in pretty much every dude ever came in last with 7% of the guys’ thumbs up. So what about the always hard to get chick? A whopping 8%, and was characterized not as ‘mysterious’ or ‘intriguing’ but ‘cold’, ‘aloof’, and I can imagine at least one ‘probz a gay’. O-Oh, Sheila... what hast thou *wrought*. Even the two women who had *no information provided for them whatsoever* came in with 10% and 15% approval rates, which is kind of a slap in the ladyballs for the hard-to-getters. Miss Selectively Hard To Get? 60% ftw.

From a collection of summaries, the take home points: First off - this obviously only really works if you’ve actually decided on one dude that stands above all the rest in your mind and you want him specifically. The “selectively hard to get” woman is the one who may be superficially flirty with other suitors but ultimately turns them all away (which is to say plays legit hard to get) while being naturally (read: not clingingly) receptive to the attention and woo-age of Dude Prime --- this has the effect of making it clear that the girl is appealing and in demand, but has opted to grace said guy and said guy alone with the privilege of her affection; the effect this can have on a dude is...intoxicating, very touching, and consistently boosts and/or maintains his interest. Guys like to feel special too; this accomplishes that quite handily. Additionally, women who play selectively hard to get are characterized as having the positive traits of the ‘easy to get woman’ and none of the bullshit of ‘hard to get women,’ -- namely that they come off as “popular, warm and easygoing, but not demanding and difficult.”

When faced with a consummate hard-to-getter, I’ve either just assumed they weren’t interested and taken my business elsewhere - or worse, realized they *did* have some interest and that I was an unwilling participant in a goddamn mind game for the benefit of their self-worth, ego, or powertrip and huffily taken my business elsewhere because fuck them. Maybe I need to just “sack up and play the game, man” but I have neither the time nor the inclination, not to mention I do have a modicum of self-respect (a strange condition many are afflicted with) that prevents me from wanting to play doormat.

But hey - what about that 8% of dudes who loved the hard-to-get chick? What about those guys who routinely rise to the challenge and get off on being endlessly spurned and made to work incredibly hard for their prize? Well, when you use terms like “challenge” and “prize,” it starts to sound a lot like a conquest, which I assume is bad.

Thing is, you’ve met this guy many times or heard your friend crying about him being “only in it for the thrill of the chase.” For these guys, the thrill factor is directly proportional to the challenge, and the hard-to-getters are the goddamn D-Day invasions of courtship. Even worse, sometimes when they *do* stick with a relationship, they can be emotionally abusive, manipulative, and volatile because - oh shit! - they love mind games, much like the one they gleefully played to get the hard-to-getter in the first place. Or maybe he’s not that guy at all - maybe he actually *is* just a masochistic Hollywood-type protagonist that will weather the rebuffs and emotional punishment for his uninterested dream girl, which...in real life comes off as less romantic and more just creepy and/or pitiful.

[Next week: why inducing jealousy or acting aloof even past the courtship stage is a tactic still heavily favored and - due to similar crucial sex differences, doesn’t work out exactly as planned. Which sucks, because *in* a relationship, the stakes are much higher and the consequences can be...brutal.]

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

The Matching Hypothesis: Half-baked Implications for Proverbial Ugly Ducklings and Nerdy Girls.

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

I’m pretty sure I angered H’Ttp-U’rl, baleful god of the internet, by warping his time and space with textual clusters so unnecessarily long and dense with syntactic buttfuckery and semi-fictional lexicon for the past few weeks, but...eh, here we go again.

There were a few topics floating around that I considered rambling on about, but given how pretty much all my posts have basically thus far been slipshod psychology lectures thinly veiled by boner jokes and one attempt to get you very drunk...well, not really gonna break the mold with this one.

I talked a lot in the ‘Geek Chic et Moi’ compendium about ‘Similarity’ and its statistical importance to the survival of a relationship - mostly in terms of attitudes (or in the case of my li’l nerds, interests as well) - but it actually goes a little deeper...or I guess shallower, really, than that. Lo, “The Matching Hypothesis”.

To reiterate: yes, birds of a feather seem to flock together in terms of intangibles like attitudes - but study after study after study since 1966 have noted a similar trend in the physical realm as well. Yeah, we all know and/or have seen a short, dog-faced 4 walking hand in hand with a statuesque 8 --- but by and large, self-perceived 7’s are subconsciously predisposed to shacking up with other 7’s, 5’s with 5’s, and *sigh* 10’s with 10’s (give or take a “point” in either direction). And in those major point disparities, there’s usually a good chance someone’s income is making up the difference. The good news - statistically, an immaculate personality can *also* help tip the scales; but unfortunately still not as much as hawtz will for chicas or “resources” will for dudes.

Evolutionarily and just like...generally, it makes sense: You date too far *up* - you’ll develop an actually justified jealousy and paranoia that your partner could (and may) easily do way way better than you that leads to stress and subsequent resentment; you date too far *down* - you may start to feel like you settled, begin harboring resentment as such, and then feel even shittier and stressed when no matter how often or strongly you demonstrate your love, you can’t get your boo to drop the annoying jealous, paranoid, ungrateful little shit act.

Excess stress kills both people and relationships. Evolutionarily that stress came from the thought that either *she* would secretly bone a dude with a bigger club and have you raise his offspring, or that *he’d* decide to shower a much hotter Neanderthal babe’s kids with his resources. It was literally an issue of genetic fitness and survival. Now it’s mostly just steady access to poon, comfort, and companionship that’s at stake.

This isn’t to say we don’t find ourselves consistently attracted to 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s no matter where we fall on the spectrum; I find Olivia Wilde and Yvonne Strahovski to be some of the most attractive women, like, *ever* - but distinguishing between “being attracted to” and “wanting a relationship with” is crucial. According to theory, despite the Destroyer-of-Worlds-class boner these women give me, some part of my brain just KNOWS they are not suitable mates because - shit, even suspending the fucking retardedness of the idea and imagining that one (or both :D) decided to call me theirs (for more than one torrid, amazing night) - I’d live in a state of perpetual crippling anxiety that they’d eventually realize the huge mistake they’d made; knowing this, my brain says “fuck *that* noise,” pre-emptively killing any motivation to even *want* to make that happen.

I mean, it’s a bad example since famous people have delusional (and often unattractive) fans constantly proposing to them from their azalea bushes right before the cops arrive, but the point is that in a non-celebrity scenario, when faced with someone we find stupefyingly attractive, our mind seems to do some quick and dirty math regarding the short AND long-term odds based on our self-perceived attractiveness, fostering or inhibiting the motivation to pursue accordingly.

On its own the hypothesis is pretty nifty, but a question I kept putting to my professors that none really had an answer for was thus: how does a *sudden, drastic shift* in one’s physical attractiveness affect their dating patterns?

Like, let’s say you have a “She’s All That”-esque scenario where dorky, largely ignored girl whose consequent self-perception puts her at a 4 suddenly shoots up to an 8 in the eyes of others. While I’m sure the newfound attention would *eventually* push her self-perception up to an 8ish, realistically there’s gotta be a transition period where she still feels drawn towards other 4’s who now - while finding her incredibly beautiful - won’t feel as viscerally drawn to her. At the same time, she’s receiving attention from the hypothetical Freddie Prinze Jr’s (just...go with it) but it registers as...I mean, almost *alien* to her; and despite her objectively thinking “yes, he is really fucking hot,” and *knows* she should want to date him, her ‘motivator’ hasn’t overcome the mental safeguard against doing so yet. It’s like some lonely, fucked state of quantifiable-attractiveness limbo.

It’s just something I was wondering because, hell, I feel like it happens more often in real life than one might think, and doesn’t even require the ugly-duckling/beautiful-swan transformation. I know plenty o’ young beautiful yet nerdy women who just kind of sat idly on the romantic sidelines until that weird time either late or post-high school when the guys suddenly realized “oh, shit, yeah we totally *do* like smart chicks now,” at which point those girls (much to their confusion) spontaneously found themselves super in demand, seemed sort of overwhelmed by the attention, and were kind of unsure how to react to it.

For many it was a turbulent transition; thrust as it were, fresh-faced and well behind the learning curve into the middle of a battle between the sexes that had been raging amongst their peers since long before they arrived, with hardened veterans - calloused by experience and versed in social nuance - already filling the ranks on both sides.  Some hit the ground running and performed admirably while learning - with curiosity, responsibility, and strength in equal measure; a few simply hid and removed themselves from the equation entirely; and others...lost both themselves and sight of who they were, abandoning caution and foresight, giving themselves over totally to the conflict and becoming an unrecognizable mess devoid of dignity in the process.

It’s a hell of a thing. It ain’t easy being nerdy.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

The Geek Chic Appeal et Moi: A Really Weak, Almost Definitely Invalid Theory and Creepy Love Letter [brought to you by self-loathing and a few too many of these.]

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

The notion that nerdy is the new sexy has been settling in quite nicely in recent times. The idea that women can put their smarts and geekery on full display without compromising their femininity or feminine appeal is one that came into vogue around the mid to late 90’s and thanks to Hollywood has since been quickly cemented as a fixture in modern (and progressive areas of) society. And once this ‘hot geek’ idea had been established as “not a mirage” and wasn’t going to vanish if geeky dudes sneezed or startled it, it was like some kind of door opened and the aforementioned geeky dudes’ imaginations took said idea and ran with it *so hard*.  

To them, like a bunch of stoned teenagers in a 7-11 giddy with munchielust and rushing to try every combination of ingestible items in numerous attempts to synthesize delicious flavors and textures each greater than the sum of its parts, the qualifiers “Nerdy” and “Geeky” became a sort of social Sriracha sauce and bacon respectively - good on nearly anything you added them to, and added to nearly everything they were.

Eclectic people are just...like, more interesting I guess, the dynamic range of their identities contributing to a far richer personality and world perspective than they would probably have otherwise, and often the stronger and more archetypically disparate the different identities are, the more vibrant the tapestry --- the geeky pro athlete, the geeky model, the geeky female soldier, the geeky pornstar, to name a few. Furthermore, the “geeky” prefix holds such appeal not just because it boosts eclecticism, but because it puts an extremely accessible, identifiable, endearingly goofy or playful face on someone who - like a pornstar or professional athlete - you may otherwise feel like you can’t really relate to at all.

But I think for hopelessly geeky dudes (such as moi), shacking up with a geeky girl may not just be awesome, as geeky girls inherently hold enormous appeal - OH SHEEEIT HERE COMES THE HYPOTHESIS - but on some level it may even be *necessary*. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Any relationship psychologist worth their salt will tell you the axiom that ‘Opposites Attract’ is statistically utter horseshit. ‘Similarity’ is one of the big 4 tenets of interpersonal attraction and, by extension, also relationship satisfaction --- to clarify, ‘similarity’ isn’t referring to interests, or even necessarily personality type (in fact, ‘complementary’ different personality types work just fine), but to *attitudes* - defined as mental constructs that basically affect how you view (especially in terms of positives/negatives) and navigate the world, influencing you on emotional, behavioral, and cognitive levels. If his *interests* include football but hers doesn’t, it probably won’t be an issue --- if his *attitudes* towards religion and right-wing politics border on outright mockery and she’s a pretty devout Catholic as well as Tea-Party Republican, even ignoring the mystery of them getting past Date #2, that’s bound to generate more than a little über-friction on a much deeper level.

In perhaps overly simplistic terms, think of it this way: your interests are what you like and what you enjoy; your attitudes are kind of who you are and what you believe.

[Note: Fortunately for people with arguably shitty or unacceptable attitudes (or those that have to put up with them), “attitudes” can and often do change, usually through experience - unlike “personality” which tends to be more stable and enduring.]

Setting that aside for a moment, let’s talk about geeks specifically. Both generally and in the context of the nerd/dork/geek/dweeb venn diagram, “geeks” are characterized by an unusually intense, borderline obsessive interest in their subject matter(s) of choice. And here’s where I’m going with this:

Geeks love shit *so hard* and with such passion, devotion, and intensity that their interests are *actually elevated* from simply ‘what they like’ to that attitudinal ‘who they are’. Real Star Wars/Trek geeks identify themselves as such with religious zeal. The debates about the superiority of Halo vs. Modern Warfare (for example) get at *least* as ugly and heated as the most intense political squabbles. Many people treat new social media as a forum to grace the world with profound little pooplets like “I ate a cookie it was good lol,” but to the geeks that have recognized its potential power and sheer scope, it’s a way of life.

For many super geeks, their interests *are* their attitudes - and in conjunction with what we now know about the dangers of combining peepz with conflicting attitudes [while effectively erasing the whole “don’t worry if interests aren’t shared” clause of ‘similarity’] you can imagine how if this is true, it might create one HUGE obstacle to übergeeks trying to cultivate a happy, long-term relationship outside the...er...geekdom, no matter how attractive, witty, or otherwise generally badass said übergeek may be. I mean - if it’s just a torrid fling, hell, all that shit is kind of moot; geek dude can have a lurid weekend with a ridiculously hot (un-ironic) Jersey Shore devotee without consequence as long as no one’s deluding themselves into thinking there’s a solid, substantive future. But for the long haul, my money is that the only maple to that übergeek’s bacon is another geek.

But I mean, hey - is being boxed into getting with a geek or nerd so bad? Like I said in the beginning, nerdy *is* the new sexy after all...

What I’m creepily stating, lovely geekettes (in an attempt to write off my glaring neuroses-related flaws that make dating nearly impossible and blame it on my geekiness) is that personally, you are the apple of my eye, but also THE OXYGEN OF MY LUNGS.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

For those of you who were confused, distressed, or simply amused by the outlandish claim that women love gaming more than sex because...I mean, (a) its credibility was about as strong as my attempts to procure a job (read: weak to non-existent) and (b) it was a claim attempting to draw a relationship between gender, gaming, and sex by Doritos --- I’m making it up to you now by leaning in the other direction in the form of an equally questionable statement from another not-exactly reputable source based on similarly borderline retarded evidence saying that female gamers get laid more often.
 
And a dash of FUCKKK YEEAHHHH!!!When reading something like that, I...I just want to just stop after the headline, put some pants on for a change, and walk around the neighborhood performing charitable acts by giving obscene sums of cash to children (while assuring their parents my intentions are totally noble and please don’t call the police ma’am) because - holy shit - all is right in the world, as the internet just poured me a verbal fatty, gilded chalice full of Kool-Aid, scotch, and epic guitar solos.
 
But even as I run from the sirens and belligerent mothers, ripping my jeans while vaulting a fence post and hemorrhaging the last of my twelve dollars onto the pavement, I know the sinking feeling in my stomach isn’t from the fading cries of the confused children or the wounds sustained by guard dogs in stranger’s yards - it’s because I know that the study is too good to be true, and also because the highly unstable methamphetamine-derivative is probably wearing off.
 
And without getting too much into the flat lining, being resuscitated by a homeless man who just wanted to know where Subway was, reading the rest of the press release which confirmed my fears and triggered another cardiac episode, flat lining again, and finally waking up here, handcuffed to a hospital bed - yeah, the study was pretty much total bullshit.
 
“I want to run away with you.”The survey, administered and compiled by some online UK game rental company (which, as far as I can tell no longer exists), polled an earth-shattering 200 women over the course of a month on the sociologically concerned hunch that “the recent influx of the likes of Pink PSPs and DS Lites would affect gamers’ sex lives across the country.”
 
If you haven’t been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of retard and lapsed into a seizure yet, let’s continue.
 
My favorite part of the whole press release (by, keep in mind, a game rental service targeting potential consumers) is the totally unsubstantiated claim that many of the women who just recently started playing games “said that they now have sex more often than before. Gamers never had it so good!”
 
It sounds its death knell and goes where you’d expect it to go after that, basically cozying up to what they view as their naive, gullible nerd audience and whispering “Hey, bro, what I’m saying is this - Valentine’s day is coming up; fuck the candy, fuck the flowers - if you want more puss-ay, slip her this here copy of Elder Scrolls IV (after your first monthly fee of course) and watch as her lady parts literally repulse panties, guy.”
 
“One look at this guy and her undies are gone, bro.”In short: fuck those guys. But unlike the “gaming trumps sex” article before, this one actually raises an interesting question, in that while this study proves nothing and I feel is actually laughing at me while sharing its findings: are female gamers generally more...appreciative of the carnal arts than their non-gamer counterparts? Intuitively, anecdotally, and with absolutely no empirical evidence - I actually do want to say ‘yes’. And not entirely just out of wishful thinking.
 
I’m definitely not agreeing outright with the simple statement that “gamer women have more sex than non-gamer women,” just that in doing a quick inventory of the population of female company I keep (which is questionable at best, as even now they’re reading erotica while sharpening their combat knives), a large, large group of them openly/vocally own and celebrate their sexuality - and while I can’t make any assertions as to what the composition of this group is re: geek/non-geek, what I have observed is that a higher proportion of the geeks I know belong to that non-bashful, “Yeah, I like/love sex, what of it?” group than the proportion of non-geek ladies I know. An excellent example of an easy, candid, guilt-free attitude towards sex is our most excellent host, who is wont to casually discuss sex dreams and masturbatory habits conversationally without making it feel weird or inorganic. Unlike the “study,” I’m not addressing geeks and their frequency of sex, but rather their attitudes toward it.
 
I’ve thought a lot about why this is (yes, yes my mind is in the gutter) and have layperson theories like “Oh, well of course a specific social denomination that stereotypically engages in activities and interests that stimulate the imagination, promote catharsis, and engage people on a very visceral, primal level should be able to readily identify with the concepts of sex and sexuality,” but...I mean - I just don’t know. Most available literature confirms that for women, sex is largely a mental activity; lady-geeks thrive off of mental activities - the connection seems sensible. But maybe it’s just neuroses that are correlated with sexual proclivity. Or nearsightedness. Or Japanophilism. I have no idea. I don’t even know if this is a general trend or just limited to my own maybe hypersexually skewed social circle. Any peer-reviewed literature anyone wants to throw my way regarding “geeks + sex + super awesome” is welcome to do so.
 
...And until I muster the energy to make the Herculean effort of showering and finding a job, I’ll definitely have time to read it.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.