Laura(southernxyl): I just don’t want her to go through a lot of crap before she finds someone.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but why should she be different from everybody else?

We went to see her last weekend. She’s recovering from mono, so I wanted to do her laundry and take her to the grocery store, to spare her a little bit. Her dad volunteered to stay in the laundramat and deal with her things while we shopped. She told him which of her t-shirts did and didn’t go in the dryer. While we were shopping her phone rang, and as she was fishing around for it she said, “That’s Daddy, asking me about a shirt.” And indeed it was. He went through each of her shirts, with her telling him yes – no – yes – yes – no. She put the phone away, smiling because her daddy cares about her. When we were done with the shopping he was through with her laundry, and had her little things carefully folded and stacked. This is what she is used to and what I want her to expect to give and to get.

I just don’t want her to go through a lot of crap before she finds someone.

Laura(southernxyl):
I wonder about my daughter, though.I keep seeing the idea that men think women are attracted to a-holes, and that a man has to act like a jerk to attract a woman.Is she going to be running into that?

Presumably, she’s been dealing with them since she was a 14-year-old entering high school. And presumably, since you raised her well, she’s long since grown out of the stage of her life where the charismatic a-hole seems attractive, and has discovered that the desirable characteristics in a man to date are very similar to the desirable characteristics in a male friend. If she has good taste in opposite-sex friends, I wouldn’t worry a bit. If all her friends are female (which would be an eyebrow-raiser, since from what you’ve said in other threads she’s a geeky type with many stereotypically-male-geek interests) then I’d worry.

2 – “…one would have got dates except that she began every second sentence with, ‘All men are scum!’…” and we are not surprised to learn that her dating success was equivalent to those whose every second sentence starts with “The modern American woman is an entitled princess!”.

No, there were fewer females in our divisions (and way fewer that we would have considered dating – one would have got dates except that she began every second sentence with, “All men are scum!”, which tends to make men demure as in the male mind dating is for fun and not conflict….). So we polite, well groomed, well-informed young fellows that we were either took optional courses in classes populated highly by females (all the subjective topics like Psych.) or got out and did stuff (I was heavily involved with my faith groups, S. was with a band, etc. etc.)

We didn’t talk about our specialties in mixed company – the eyes glaze over in around 3-4 seconds. We talked about what they liked and were interested in.

Don’t recall any of the guys ever having a problem getting a date….(mind you, we were tall….).

It’s analogous to fishing. If one wants X variety of fish (say bass) one goes to where the bass are.

If Laura’s daughter is looking for someone with strong values she won’t find them at keg parties or Spring Break (though if she’s looking for a thin waist and malleability…. :-) ).

I’ll end with a question.

All of my near kin who have found lifemates these last few years have found them through the online process where like-mindedness and a few basic criterion (one of my old female fellow students demanded bank statements before dating anyone, with a minimum requirement before any date would occur…mercenary, but honest :-) ) act as filters.

Have these young lasses never heard of eHarmony?

It’s as maybe, anyway, for now. There are other more pressing difficulties with a mathematical background than a terrible dating life.

As for your daughter, probably yes. Note that the disgusting “Pick-Up Artist” culture has only become as popular as it is recently. It certainly wasn’t around ten years ago when I was an undergraduate.

Anatid, my difficulty is lessened by my being 49 years old (and hence on the shelf anyway) but more importantly, having been married for all of my adult life to a man who does not think I am an entitled princess or a nonentity.

I wonder about my daughter, though. I keep seeing the idea that men think women are attracted to a-holes, and that a man has to act like a jerk to attract a woman. Is she going to be running into that?

In contrast, in the late 70s-80s, my make classmates in engineering complained about women not dating them. But no one suggested their difficulties getting dates presented a good reason to lower admissions standards for women, or provide better financial aid.

Programs to encourage women to apply did spring up– but no one ever really suggested schools lower admissions standards; moreover, no one suggested the average female student enrolled in engineering had lower high school gpa, board scores or letters of recommendation. Those in admissions complained the contrary was true. It was mostly women themselves who chose to avoid engineering.

(Laura, instead of taking a “If you say X about all women, and it does not apply to me, then I am not a woman” perspective on some of these comments, try instead “If you say X about all women, and it does not apply to me, then you’re an overgeneralizing tool.” I take a similar philosophy to the endless “all liberals think X” comments I have to wade through on this blog in order to get at the intelligent discussion.)

Laura(southernxyl): Have you ever been in the position of being invisible? People’s eyes sliding past you when you tried to talk to them?

Yes, I taught college algebra in my last professorial position.

But seriously, yeah that’s been pretty much my situation since way back. Socially, a mathematician is a nonentity. And yes, I’ve pined for the shy chemistry students as much or more than the insipid “high status” cookie-cutter cheerleader types. Those that weren’t swiftly snapped up or mooning over the high-status men radiated disinterest and unapproachability. In retrospect, maybe it was a defense on their parts, but at the time it seemed apparent that the attitude was “don’t even bother”.

In fact, that’s only true for high status males, as the quote from the article posted upthread, “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider”, shows perfectly. Even in a closed world, women don’t look to men of low status.

That quote was from one person. From there, you jump to “women”. Athletes bore the crap out of me. So do men who think they’re God’s gift to women, and feel no need to make themselves pleasant or act like they had some raising. I suspect that this eliminates high status men, so we are back to me not being a woman.

My daughter once told me what she was looking for in a boyfriend: “He has to have a brain, and act like a human being”. So she’s not a woman either.

Why does the chemistry student have to wait for the math student to approach her anyway?

Er, because when I tried I didn’t get anywhere?

Have you ever been in the position of being invisible? People’s eyes sliding past you when you tried to talk to them?

One of the things that attracted me to my husband when we first met was that I expressed an opinion and he gave me his full attention, and responded to what I said. I said that I did not like raisins, and why. From there we went to science fiction and that convo went on for quite some time. This was 1981 and I remember it distinctly. I was visible to him. I still am.

In a 60% male environment, you might expect females to be better off from a dating perspective. This is generally true. The high status women get dates, and the low status women generally do as well. This is in a perfectly closed world, which is rarely the case in the real world. In a more open world, men may look outside the 60% male environment to avoid the lower status women there to find women of higher status or similar status with different status qualities (beauty over brains, in a 60% male college context).

In a 60% female environment, you might expect males to be better off from a dating perspective. In fact, that’s only true for high status males, as the quote from the article posted upthread, “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider”, shows perfectly. Even in a closed world, women don’t look to men of low status.

If I may, a numerical example. 100 men and 100 women, each age 20. 60 of the women go to college, 40 of the men do. It’s increasingly true that college-educated women tend not to marry non-college-educated men. So, the 40 non-college women marry some of the 60 non-college men. We’re at 40 couples and 20 non-marriageable men. The 60 college women are not willing to marry 20 of the college-educated men. We’re up to 40 couples and 40 non-marriageable men (some of the college-educated men marry non-college women, but that increases the number of non-marriageable non-college men, so it nets out). Going back to our quote, half of those men are paired, so let’s say they end up married. We have 50 couples and 40 non-marriageable men, which leaves us 50 non-married college women and 10 marriageable men-and with a ratio like that, why would these marriageable men get married? In practical terms, that’s how you get single females in Manhattan with average sex partners 10-15 times the national average. If you prefer state of society grandstanding, that’s half the wombs out of circulation and half the men whose personal good is orthogonal to societal good, which may be a recipe for species-death.

Feel free to quibble with the numbers, and I’ll note I don’t agree with the state of society grandstanding, but that’s the general dynamic at play.

Laura(southernxyl): He didn’t want a date with me, I reckon, or he’d have had one.

Take a person who’s been told that they’re socially worthless pretty much their entire life. Put them next to someone who’s shy and (understandably) socially defensive. Is the first person more likely to interpret the second’s behavior as shy interest or defensive disinterest?

In short: he didn’t ask you out because he thought you didn’t want anything to do with him. But, madam, I see that you still insist that the man has to make the first move. Why does the chemistry student have to wait for the math student to approach her anyway?

And we’re the misogynists?

If a male geek had sat around whining that the girls didn’t want him, yet would not ask me out, did he, or did he not, have a grievance?

And if I would have gone out with the 4, but he didn’t ask me, then when you say “Women, OTOH, will continue to ignore the 4 and go after a smaller pool of 7’s.” you are confirming that I was in fact not a woman?

He probably would have also loved it if you had asked him out.

Of course I’m ignoring the social setups both of you were in.

Mississippi, 1978. A girl who asked a boy out was a scary predator.

I don’t want to suggest that I NEVER had a date, because I did. But these were few and far between.

Laura(southernxyl): What you are missing, Bob, is that if the dorky math major had asked me out, I’d have been over the moon.

He probably would have also loved it if you had asked him out.

Of course I’m ignoring the social setups both of you were in. Maybe you were discouraged by the lack of attention. Maybe he was discouraged by the lack of responses he got elsewhere.

Anatid: So women lowering their standards would be a good first step.But your average 19-year-old, only a year away from her parents’ nest, isn’t likely to have discovered yet that the quiet, skinny chemistry major will treat her like a princess while the self-confident, handsome athlete is sleeping with half her sorority.Give ‘em time.

Advocates of Game, along with others of various philosophical bents, will respond to this by saying that despite what the girl may say she wants, or may have been told she wants, and even may think she wants, she doesn’t *want* to be be treated like a princess, and therefore it is irrelevant whether she has made or ever makes this discovery.

I personally think that both sides wildly overestimate the validty of their theories and overdiscount individual variation. It is just as foolish – and more importantly, just as inaccurate – to say that every woman wants to be treated like a princess as it is to say that every woman wants to be treated like a toy.

Bob White: If you remove the cut athlete out of the picture and the dorky math major is the only option, the dorky math major still doesn’t get a date. You seem to be missing that distinction.

What you are missing, Bob, is that if the dorky math major had asked me out, I’d have been over the moon. He didn’t want a date with me, I reckon, or he’d have had one. At the perspective I now have, I can say “his loss” but at the time it was damn hard.

I have to learn to read these things and remember that in the context, I am not a “woman”. I think that will help me to scroll on by.

Mike:
Why do you want to be a provider chump?

I didn’t say I did. But absent the majority of men becoming disciples of Game, which not only won’t happen but would make Game largely ineffective (i.e. that classic cartoon where Bugs and Yosemite Sam chase each other with larger and larger guns) men are going to take women as they find them and that is how they will find them.

Incidentally, it tends to make disciples of Game angry when I say this, but learning Game does not make you an alpha. It makes you a beta who can convincingly imitate an alpha such that less attentive and/or intelligent women will believe you are one and become attracted to you. A sheep in wolf’s clothing is still a sheep, even if all the female sheep are attracted to his false aura of danger.

John Armstrong: I like that the girls are honest that they consider half of all men on campus categorically undateable.“Yeah, guys are slovenly, cheat on us, and push outrageous sexual demands, but it’s that or date a math/science/computer/engineering guy.”

I like you. And I say that having been, literally, all four of those things.

yankee:
Of course these explanations (women don’t want men who earn less than they do, men don’t want women who earn more than they do) aren’t mutually exclusive.

Excellently said.

At least, until they grow up. The “top” of the other gender isn’t set by some pure antiseptic function. I can’t remember the study (if you really really want it I can search for it), but a group of researchers took photos of an “average” guy and, upon telling women that other women wanted him, they all wanted him, too. The entire phenomenon can be self-fulfilling. I’m sure it happens with the genders reversed, and probably also in homosexual mating.

I went to MIT in the 90′s and it’s pretty hard for me to set aside my experience as a result of that. My high school classes were well over female and I had never learned to be aggressive, which was required when the scales flipped such. At least the men didn’t consider “there are 40% women but you only would consider about half of them.” Pretty much all the women were fair game, even the 17 year old freshmen, who had the distinct advantage of not having had to put up shields to filter out the aggressiveness.

My sons won’t have the same problem, which a little atavistic part of me enjoys, but being in the gender minority also has its disadvantages. They may be able to choose well, but when your mates have to compete so fiercely it becomes hard to get true signals of who people are.

Anatid: So women lowering their standards would be a good first step. But your average 19-year-old, only a year away from her parents’ nest, isn’t likely to have discovered yet that the quiet, skinny chemistry major will treat her like a princess while the self-confident, handsome athlete is sleeping with half her sorority.Give ‘em time.

Suppose that your average 19-year-old, only a year away from her parents’ nest, IS the quiet, skinny chemistry major who would treat her boyfriend with the courtesy and respect one person ought to have from another. But she doesn’t have a boyfriend, because she is not HOT. Eventually she does meet a man who appreciates her, and they have a long and happy marriage. But she gets to listen to complaints about how horrible women are, how they only want the a-holes, etc.

I do have a happy marriage, and have since 1982. But I look back to that lonely girl I used to be, who thought she must not even be female for the lack of male attention she got, and when I listen to the compaining of men who would not have given her the time of day if their paths have crossed, I have no sympathy. Nor for a person who was stupid enough to enter an unadvisable marriage, who has the absolute nerve to tell a man such as my husband that he was a fool to get married because I will certainly leave him. Or that, being a woman, it is a given that I “married up” for God’s sake. I am so sick of reading that term, as though a woman is never as good as the man she partners with.

However, I will try to be civil from now on. It’s just that I know exactly where to go to read the misogynists’ viewpoint and I’d like to find places with vigorous and interesting discussions, that don’t feature it. Beginning to think they don’t exist.

I actually think the current sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” gets it pretty much right, where each of the four male leads is a math (well, astro/physics/engineering, but still) “geek”. Of them, one can’t talk in front of a woman unless he’s drunk, one is arrogant and monomaniacal, and one is lecherous. The best of the bunch is still awkward and tone deaf in dating situations.

But there’s a converse: while the mathematically- and technically-oriented may not automatically have hearts of gold, they aren’t categorically undateable either.

As for being able to set aside the trope, I think a precondition is that these young men — as a class — feel appreciated for their positive traits. When “geeks” are seen as a valued group instead of as disincentives to be outweighed, then there will be less of a reason to promulgate a social narrative to try and do the outweighing.

That is, “geeky” guys prop up the “heart of gold” line themselves because they believe (and not without evidence!) that without something like that, they don’t stand a chance in the current society. To compare: overweight women prop up the “great personality” line because they believe that without it they don’t stand a chance in the current society.

If you’re as gold-plated as you seem to think you are, then you should have your pick of plenty of men to date. If not?

We give the exact same advice to shy guys who bemoan their inability to find a woman to date: rather than dreaming about the hotties you’ll never touch (who you don’t have much in common with anyway), instead, pay attention to the quiet cute girl who never seems to get noticed. Sure, sometimes she’ll fulfill the stereotype and is a noxious waste of time, but much more often, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

(And I have no idea where this guy got these notions about problem sets being easy. All my physics/biochem/electrical engineering/etc friends would spend hours and hours on a single set, because they’re far harder than the material on exams. But then, in a lot of these classes, 50% curves to an A.)

I’m not sure if “feminized” is the right word, though it probably is, but class content has been revamped to make things easier for the stupid kids

Charming! You associate dumbed down curricula with femininity. I can’t imagine that kind of enlightened attitude would put you at any disadvantage among today’s college girls.

Give ‘em time.