Being friend-zoned isn’t a problem I’ve had in quite a while, but it’s endemic in the nerd community and a common topic of conversation. The standard diagnosis even within the community is to blame the victim for bad intentions or a lack of confidence. The standard remedy is to paraphrase Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw: “Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.” (The Internet calls this “oneitis”.)

Personally, I’m sympathetic to the victims, and would prefer to blame the society that creates men and women who fall into this pattern. I found this definition of friend-zoning insightful:

The friend-zone occurs when a woman expects the sort of nurturing that someone would give them if they were in a intimate relationship without having to reciprocate.

I’ll break it down for you. Women and men have different needs from intimate relationships. Women need more emotional and less physical intimacy, and men the opposite. When a woman expects a man to give her emotional intimacy and refuses physical, she is actually causing him harm. This friend-zone is a woman’s version of a “booty-call”.

For a moment think about how women feel about that guy who is only around when he wants sex. He doesn’t want a relationship, he wants physical intimacy and then leaves. Women hate these guys. The “friend-zoner” is the same thing.

So, what do men want you to do? Grow up, stop using men for emotional intimacy when you have no intention of providing him the intimacy he needs.

This comic came up on Reddit today:

It reminded me of this Tyee article from last spring complaining that men in Vancouver don’t approach women often enough. Of course women suffer from a cognitive bias: when a “creep” tries interacting with them, it’s not counted as a case of a “man” giving them attention, it’s counted as a case of “there sure are a lot of creeps in this town”. They’re only going to count the cases when an interaction went pretty well.

Other biases that make it hard to get a clear picture of the dating scene:

• We mostly hear about dating success stories. No couple ever says “we met in a bar after we both had tried online dating for 6 months”.
• Only single people comment on the single scene. Nobody says “the single scene in Vancouver is great: I started sleeping with my current boyfriend before I had even broken up with the previous one”.
• The most chronically single people will comment on it the most.

Even if we’re generous and don’t say “there’s one person that all your failed relationships had in common”, if peoples’ lives are randomly distributed then some of them will be outliers of shittiness. As a result, it’s impossible to get dating statistics from anecdotes.

Of course the Tyee article is actually about a researcher who has found that people complain about the single scene in every city, although it appears that perhaps people complain about different issues in each one.

Note the order of the title, it’s not Maude and Harold, because Maude isn’t much of a character. Normally I’d take this opportunity to do my favourite off-beat reading by proposing that she’s a figment of Harold’s imagination, but I have a more important issue to discuss:

Maude, like many women in film, is not a fully-developed character – she even ends up in the refrigerator for Harold’s benefit. More specifically, she is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a very important trope in Western texts.

This extensive blog that refers to them as “Amazing Girls” explains how Manic Pixies are misogynist:

The Romantics’ ideal of the pure and naturally innocent woman, a creature morally inferior to men but capable of spiritual perfection — in short, a childlike vessel for the projection of masculine ideals.

And Eye Weekly, in doing a similar criticism of 500 Days of Summer as my own, explains the damage caused by the Manic Pixie archetype:

There’s something very underrated about sane, functional women who act their age and do not try to be spirits of pure light and joy.

Given that I’m “an soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence”, I definitely hope to “leave [my] cold, grey existence and one day meet this magical woman [so my] life will be transformed”. Yet despite my love of misogyny in cinema, I couldn’t relate to Harold. Maybe because being obsessed with death became trendy and then cliche since this movie was made? Maybe because although there’s more to Harold than Maude, he’s still not a very well-developed character? Maybe because the movie didn’t deliver an explicit sex scene (art isn’t supposed to make you comfortable)? I don’t know why, but the movie didn’t click for me like contemporary myths of the Manic Pixie.

No one is really interested in how heterosexual couples meet in general. There’s a bunch of academic research into how men-who-have-sex-with-men meet (and whether they have safe sex), because people care about HIV transmission. And marketers and online dating sites are doing a bunch of research into how people meet online. The best recent I’ve found is this report by the Oxford University Internet Institute that looks at meeting overall in order to determine online dating’s current position.

The sample is couples in European countries as well as Japan and Brazil with an average age of 40.7. So the results are not necessarily applicable to 20 and 30 somethings in Canada (who are the target readers of this blog), but it’s the best data we’ve got.

The last time respondents were single, these are the places they looked for a partner:

And here’s where they actually found one:

Bars come out much better and sports teams much worse than I’ve observed in my social group (which could be a difference between young Canadians and older Europeans?). Some other interesting conclusions:

• Almost 25% of couples met in places where people don’t intentionally look
• Despite what your mom tells you, hobbies and volunteering are a horrible place to meet people
• Men are more intentional about finding a partner, except at church
• More young people try online dating, but older people are more likely to get partners that way

The researchers mention that there are some truly marvelous cross-tabulations in the data, but their report is too narrow to contain them. An example they do give: 23% of people who looked in bars & clubs were successful, while 9% of people who didn’t look in bars & clubs met their partner there anyway. My general conclusion from this report is that people who don’t want to pick up at bars, myself included, need to get over it.

Warning: If you’re a single woman having a bitter Valentine’s Day, this post will make you more bitter.

Everybody in Victoria knows there are way more single women than men. I’ve heard as high as 200%. Girls often tell me “it must be so easy being a single guy in Victoria – you have so many girls to choose from!” Well it doesn’t feel very easy!

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that this statistic is over all age groups, including all the old widows (only a tiny percentage of which are GILFs). The other day the statistic came up in conversation and my friend Dan whispered, in his best Deep Throat impersonation, “check the Census”. So I did*:

Probably thanks to UVic, there are almost as many women under 25 as men, but right after graduation things get tough for men; women don’t become a majority until 40 and not a big one until men start dying of natural causes, but even then not enough to explain to myth.

I think part of the reason the myth gets repeated is that some girls in Victoria like to use it as a crutch: “it’s not my fault I can’t get a man, the statistics are against me”. Here’s the harsh truth: if you’re a woman who has had trouble getting a date in your 20s, when the numbers are on your side, it’s just going to get worse. You need to do one of twothree things:

• Raise your value
• Lower your standards
• Go gay

Men, resist getting desperate and marrying the first girl you can get: dating’s going to get better every year…and then you die!

* The numbers are from a Census analysis tool that merges non-commonlaw, non-married, separated, divorced and widowed into a “historical non-married equivalent”, so they may be slightly different than if you painstakingly scrape numbers off the StatsCan site. But they’re close enough that the myth is obviously false.

In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is “Relationship Status: Single” and creates The Facebook to get chicks. In reality, he’s been dating the same girl since before the events of the movie, but she got edited out. If the movie were real, Facebook would probably be doing a better job of living up to its potential as a dating service.

There’s a famous sociology result that your acquaintances are more likely to get you a job than your friends, because you already know about most of the opportunities your friends know about. Acquaintances know just enough about you to guess that an opportunity matches your skills and recommend you over a random applicant.

Currently online dating is about as sophisticated as online job hunting: you crudely filter the results and send an application to anything that looks promising; then recipients have to weed through hundreds of applications to figure out who to interview. Active match-making is unlikely to discover good matches and have can a high reputational for the match-maker cost if things go badly.

Online Dating 2.0 should work like this:

1. If I’m single and(/or) looking, I tell Facebook
2. I get expanded access to the profiles of friends-of-friends who are also single & looking
3. Facebook starts matching me with friends-of-friends based on profile data and position in the social network
4. If I see someone I like, I can message them directly (our mutual friend never needs to know) or ask our mutual friend for their blessing and an introduction
5. Repeat for friends-of-friends-of-friends

Since your dating profile is also your social profile, you don’t have to write it (or half-ass it, as most guys seem to) and you can’t lie: prospective suitors see a snapshot of you life, not ad copy. Web 2.0 theory says that position in the network is more significant than content (this is how the Google Algorithm works) and the stuff your friends post on your wall should say more about than you can.

You don’t have to accept this cause…

Evolutionary psychology says that women should only mate with men who are successful in their culture. If a guy doesn’t have money nor power, it’s better to stay celibate than have children with him.

A subculture, by definition, has a different hierarchy than the dominant culture. Instead of being rich or powerful, the alphas know the most obscure bands or have pointy teeth. Presented with an alternative hierarchy of men, women who are into the subculture should be willing to mate with the men who have low status in the dominant hierarchy.

The subcultural hierarchy needs to be built on some kind of fitness test: it doesn’t work if you can just declare yourself to be the alpha. So you need barriers to entry and honest signals about how much effort you’ve put in. Women have no incentive to put in the effort and the hierarchies work better if they’re old boys clubs.

…to accept the effect:

Subcultural hierarchies tend to exclude women. Subcultures have bodies of technical skills and knowledge, including jargons, that women are less likely to be bothered to learn – because men are more inclined to geek-out and have unbalanced lives. Getting a professional positions within a subculture requires technical skill and knowledge, and professional networks are old boys clubs, so professional positions, which direct subcultural development, tend not to be held by women.

An example is dance music culture as described in articles from the Journal of Dance Music Culture. Becoming a DJ requires geeky technical skills. And being accepted as a DJ or successful as a promoter requires approval by the existing network of male DJs and promoters. Musical subgenre names and other jargon act as a divider between casual members of the subculture and party members, which according to this paper is one reason why there are so many subgenre names in electronic music. The outcome is that women are excluded and vaguely oppressed by dance music culture, which is why they tend to check out sooner or later.

For the lulz, Brynn asked me to respond to this Jezebel post, criticising this AskMen dating advice article. I don’t drink The Game‘s koolaid, but I can debate from that perspective:

1. Every guy who hits on a woman in a public place has either picked up a woman in a public place themselves or talked to a guy who has. Guys will not accept rules women set if they are different for hot guys. If women don’t want to be hit on somewhere, they need to collectively agree to refuse all such attempts, like they have at clubs.
2. I agree the example is lame but how about a constructive suggestion? What is the correct way to approach a stranger you’d like to meet?
3. Oh yes, because women never have ulterior motives.
4. “Buying signals” is sales jargon – it implies the woman is the buyer and the guy is the object being sold.
5. Where’d this one go?
6. Oh, does that mean Jezebel agrees with #5 (the 15-minute rule) and #6 (probing for relationships)?
7. Agreed
8. Ouch!
9. I hope Jezebel doesn’t agree with the classic wing formation?
10. Women never close me, which is proof that I’m right about #13
11. This one is a chicken-egg problem to implement – is that why Jezebel didn’t bother?
12. I agree – I am perfect!
13. All of this pickup stuff is trying to figure out how to operate within The Patriarchy, under the assumption that a few guys can’t destroy it on their own – once women are liberated, we won’t have to treat them like slaves.

I’ve been thinking about another interpretation of the beauty vs message graph for women messaging men that I posted last week:

The message curve looks like it’s been shifted to the right a constant amount. Because it’s so constant, it can’t be explained as women valuing personality/wealth over beauty. (OkTrends might be controlling for that somehow? They don’t really discuss their methodology.)

There’s a theory that women’s conscious and non-conscious desire is poorly linked. I’m thinking of research where women watch porn while their physical arousal is monitored and they report their psychological arousal. Women get physically aroused by mysoginistic porn. A recent result with animal porn led to the theory that women get physically aroused by the possibility of near-future sex whether it’s voluntary or not (ie: “you’re gonna get raped!”).

An alternate explanation is that women’s non-conscious mind likes to watch animal porn but culture has repressed that. Men are simpler creatures that have a direct connection between physical and psychological arousal. Or men don’t even have psychological arousal except caused when they observe their physical state.

This theory could explain the OkCupid graph by saying that women consciously claim all men are ugly but their non-conscious mind would still hit that.

The funny thing is that for the few men who are admittedly attractive, the messaging rate still drops. My theory is that attractive men can more easily cheat on a partner, so they’re best avoided in planned situations like online dating. This predicts that women would prefer more attractive men in unplanned situations like one-night stands.

I’ve been thinking about another interpretation of the beauty vs message graph for men messaging women that I posted last week:

I was quite surprised that the men’s graph didn’t follow a Pareto distribution: the 20% most attractive women should have received 80% of the messages. I had to refresh my economics to understand why.

Consider the (unembeddable) bar scene from A Beautiful Mind. This excellent article explains the economics behind the scene. The scene is not an example of a Nash equilibrium, it’s an example of a coordination game.

A Nash equilibrium is when no one can improve their lot by a selfish action. A Pareto optimal outcome is where the total happiness of the group cannot be improved. In this case, the Pareto optimal Nash equilibrium is for one of the men to get the blonde and the other three to get brunettes.

The question is how to determine which of the men should go for her. Women set prices for themselves. Men, based on their attractiveness and other qualities, have “money” to spend on them. Think of the women as having probabilistic prices: a brunette is more likely to go home with an average man than the blonde; the blonde is more likely to go home with an above-average man than an average man.

The payout for every individual man is the probability of getting the woman he targets multiplied by the value of that woman. If the blonde knows her value, she should set her price at a level that makes her more attractive than a brunette for the man with the most “purchasing power”. Then the market will tend to an equilibrium where that is the man who goes after the blonde and everyone else goes after a brunette.

So, without any cooperation, we should end up with people paired off who have relatively the same value. The women with the lowest attractiveness are not getting messaged either because the low-value men believe they will be happier single or because the price signals are distorted at that end of the market. The women with the highest attractiveness are not getting messaged as much as their slightly-less-attractive competition because men perceive their price as being too high (either because the women are acting irrationally or because the price signalling is noisy).