Seriously, don’t be this guy.

Embedded is disabled on this video, so have a link: “The ‘Pussy Renaissance’ is coming to an end!” [YouTube]

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Here’s a hint. From the Times (UK):

Researchers remained puzzled as to why the women most likely to settle for a one-night stand were judged to be the most attractive. It was suggested that the lack of effort required on the part of men compensated for “any costs from long-term relationship breakdown”.

Looks like you should always go for the girl you find the most attractive. Who knew?

Face gives away sexual intentions, new study says [TimesOnline.co.uk]

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But as he left the shop, a gust of wind pulled the balloon from his hand and he watched the ring — and quite possibly the affections of his girlfriend — sailing away over the rooftops.

Wow. I’d be pissed at him too — for being a dumb ass — but it seems Lefkos girlfriend has decided to show him harsh: refusing to speak to him until he can replace the ring. Taking a quick look at the prices charged by one London Floor-Fitting company, I think she is being a bit unreasonable.

Honey, will you marry… Oh. Never mind…[Yahoo News]

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I am a lvl 8 warrior seeking my adventuring companion for game play and fornication. I partake in only adventure/fantasy role play, no creepy goth stuff, it’s too weird. Only sanctioned spells allowed, costume dress optional but preferred. I have the body of a wandering Norwegian brawler and short brown hair. Please be quite buxom and imaginative for play and enjoy fantasy role play aesthetics. Please send pics, leves, preferred adventure type and spell list. We could go get dinner (under $20), and watch a movie. Also I’m allergic to cats.

He’s in Kansas City, too! I’ll call up my sister and she if I can trick her into taking him out.

lvl 8 ogre mage seeks moon queen or druid [Craigslist.org]

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A Pottsville man convinced a 15-year-old girl he was part werewolf and part vampire before sexually assaulting her, police say. … To prove to police he was indeed a genuine vampire/werewolf, Carl “showed me his canine teeth,” Joos said. “I let him know that all mammals, including humans, have canine teeth.”

Joos said Carl also told police he had a “guardian dragon that protected him from evildoers.”

Unearthly assault alleged [MCall.com]

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Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues measured levels of a protein that transports the neurotransmitter serotonin in the blood of 20 people who had recently fallen madly in love, 20 people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and 20 healthy comparison participants. … She found that the group of patients with OCD and the recently love-struck were no different in terms of the serotonin transporter protein, suggesting the brain began to function markedly differently as love blossomed.

If you enjoy reading about the chemistry that happens in our brains when we love and feel concern for others, abstracting the most meaningful emotions and experience of human existence into soulless base molecules (like I do!), may I also suggest the great blog Hug the Monkey, which follows research and study of oxytocin, a hormone that influences—or, rather, is—our feelings of comfort and love.

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Don’t order coffee. Because if you order coffee, how on Earth is she going to invite you back to her place for a cup? You can always grab desserts on the way back to her place.

How to Take a Woman to Dinner [Esquire]

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As you peddled away crying, I realized that I had over reacted. I was having a bad day and had just spent a lot of money on a new paint job, but pulling a gun on you was out of line. I’d like to make a formal apology in person. Over a bottle of wine and/or dinner, perhaps?

To the girl who ran into my car door on her bike – m4w – 49 [Portland.Craigslist.org]

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When forced to pick between crazy imbicilic cretin or white rapping fucknuckle, I always go with the creepy hillbilly mutant grown from DNA harvested from one of Paul Lynde’s turds. Attraction is not a choice.

The Five Worst Online Dating Video Profiles [Esquire.com]

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A few of you have expressed some concern about my recent fascination with the pick-up and seduction community. Thank you for your healthy skepticism. I will say this: for as many good tips and advice I am discovering, I am finding just as many cases of pathetic armchair Casanovas.

I hope this video will quell some of your worries about my judgement as this tragic character hawks his “Secrets of Seduction” video—Windows only!—and regales you with a John C. Reillyesque lisp with tales of the beautiful “ravening” brunette he was seducing just a few weeks back. This man is at the top of the mountain, friends, his stiff prick waving in the breeve.

[via Boinkology]

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[Expressing intimate information happens often] on sites like Yahoo!’s Married and Flirting e-mail group, as well as on Marriedbutplaying.com and Married-but-flirting.com. “Flirting” in this sense appears to be a euphemism for talking dirty. A University of Florida study of 86 participants in a chat room published in Psychology Today in 2003 found that while nearly all those surveyed felt they were initially simply flirting with a computer, not a real person, almost a third of them eventually had a face-to-face meeting with someone they chatted with. And all but two of the couples who met went on to have an affair. Whether the people who eventually cheated went to the site with the intention of doing so or got drawn in by the fantasy of it all is unclear. Whichever, the sites sure seem like a profitable place for people like the guy behind me on the pre-Christmas flight to hang out.

It’s why your wife or girlfriend gets pissed when you flirt. I mean, it’s so obvious it’s obfuscated. You get jealous of a flirting partner because there’s a chance, however small, they might stray.

I found the linked TIME article on Digg. Delving into the comments I found a few telling replies, like this one from “Senator PJT.”

I always get pissed off when I read articles that assume everyone is socially adjusted. I don’t flirt. I was only able to get a girlfriend because I knew her on the internet first, and we’ve been together for five years so I know it isn’t just because I’m ugly or generally an asshole.

It at least proves to me that it’s specifically because I just can’t navigate that first five minutes of meeting someone, which makes it even more frustrating than if I really were just an asshole.

Dude, I know the feeling. And while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the internet as a proxy to mask your social awkwardness—better that than not having a girlfriend at all!—it reaffirms one of my realizations about all the pick-up artistry resurgence in the last few years. Normal guys aren’t going out to these conferences and reading books about meeting women because they want to turn into super-charged Lothsarios with a shiny vagina on every finger; most of these guys are reaching out to learn skills that will bring them up to what is a basic, healthy skill level of human social interaction. And it’s not just for meeting women, either, but for meeting anyone in real life.

Why We Flirt [Time.com]

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“Melton admitted that he had told employees that he was an officer,” the release stated. “When asked why, Melton said that he did it to impress the ladies. Melton said that he did not know it was a crime and that he thought it sounded better than telling the ladies that he was a plumber. Melton said that he thought it would help him get the ladies to date him.”

Dude. Plumbers make big money. Tell them you’re a plumber!

NC Man Arrested For Pickup Line [NBC17.com via Crime Scene KC]

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We haven’t talked much about pick-up and dating on Dethroner in the past, but as I’m now single, I think that’s going to change in the new year. To start, this short Q&A with Strauss, who is promoting the new book.

Dethroner: There seems to be a natural inclination from women and men alike to bristle at the concept of pick-up artistry. I know I tend to qualify my discussion of it with lots of caveats and reassurances of gallantry, even to my guy friends. What is it about making a method out of courtship that makes pick-up artistry feel so icky?

Strauss: It’s a horrible word. It implies trickery, one-night stands, and ego-gratification. In actuality, however, the goal of the game is not sex, but attraction. Because attraction can lead anywhere: friendship, sex, a relationship, marriage, alimony.

As an interesting side note, the people who have reacted the most hostilely to the books have not been women, but men. I’ve actually never received a negative email about the book from a woman.

Dethroner: Where is the line between “peacocking” and “total douchebag?”

Strauss: Someone who is a “total douchebag” is alone in the corner wearing ridiculous clothes; someone who is “peacocking” is wearing the same ridiculous clothes, but he’s surrounded by women.

Dethroner: I’ve actually been reading a lot of PUA books lately, in part because I broke up with my girlfriend (and in part so I can write
about it on Dethroner). It seems the primary take-home from all of the books, no matter what school of pick-up they may espouse, is that the average man has terminal problems with confidence and self-image. What happened to the modern man’s confidence?

Strauss: I don’t think it’s a new problem. What’s new is that men are actually admitting it and seeking help for it, rather than just putting on false bravado and defensive posturing.

However, when we reduce problems down to a generalization, it makes them harder to fix. All my life, I’d heard the advice “just be confident.” Better advice would have been: “Just be successful,” because success breeds confidence. And for some men, this is a longer road than others.

Dethroner: The more I absorb the applied psychology and, I don’t know, “gene selfishness” that seems to comprise most of pick-up theory, abstracting the emotions from the equation, the more I feel like an DNA-driven automaton. Which, at least according to what I generally believe to be true about human evolution, is pretty much what I am.

But boy does that take a lot of the romance out of it. Do you ever struggle with this? Is couplehood supposed to be a Randian meeting of two complete, confident souls, or does clearing away more of our faults, even in exchange for confidence, mechanize the whole endeavor of love?

Strauss: I read the same books you did. But that wasn’t my takeaway. I read them because I was learning some counter-intuitive behaviors, and in order to internalize these behaviors, I needed to understand why they worked. So rather than rob me of my imagined individuality, the ideas gave me freedom. They helped me see the so-called matrix.

And though the courtship process can be mechanized, as you put it, love remains a mystery – though Erich Fromm’s Art of Love does a good job trying to break that down. But that’s another discussion for another blog post.

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I love the gauntlet he faces at the end, as he tries to match celebrities with places they’d let their guard down:

How about Renee Zellweger?

“I think she wants to talk and be talked to. I would take her to Tia Pol, impossible to get in but I would arrange it. She would be impressed. It’s not expensive but it’s serious food.”

Scarlett Johannsen? “She’s a smoker. So I would have to find her a place where she can smoke. That would impress her.” (”Try Cipriani Downtown,” I suggest. “They think they’re in Italy.”)

Nicole Kidman? “ L’Impero. It feels sexy, isolated from the city. Food is very good. Not so expensive. Perfect for Nicole Kidman.”

Sharon Stone: “The Four Seasons for lunch in the Grill.”

“But how would you get a table?” I want to know.

“Are you kidding? I’m with Sharon Stone.”

“My problem is Barbra Streisand,” he blurts out.

Sex, Seduction, Chocolate [Insatiable-Critic.com via Kottke]

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Don’t let the tenor of this faux news piece fool you—it’s clearly a promotional video for SpeedDate.com, an online videodating service. But it does show the basics of how the service works: three-minute video dates over the web, with big “Yes” and “No” buttons to judge your experience (and suitor) after the chat is over.

I can’t figure out what the prices might be if you use the service (and going to their website starts a sample video date playing automatically, which is really annoying). But it seems both terrifying and intriguing. Would any of you single guys actually use something like this? It would obviously take a lot more prep and effort than using other online personals—almost as much as going on a real date.

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After each Web meeting, WooMe asks users to select either “I’m Wooed” or “No thanks” for the person they just met. They can also leave one-word “tags” describing the person — a feature that could lead to some pretty cruel collective judgments. If couples forge a love connection, they pay $1 each to get each other’s real contact information. The service will open to the public next month.

Similarly, San Mateo-based Speeddate.com is a project that emerged from a Stanford University business class. The site asks members to reveal a few details about themselves upon signing up, and then matches them up in Webcam or text chats for what must seem like an eternal three minutes. Connecting through the site is free, though the company says it will consider a subscription fee in the future.

Does This Webcam Make Me Look Fat? [Bits.Blogs.NYTimes.com]

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This was probably inevitable: “Mystery,” one of the primary protagonists of Neil Strauss’ The Game, is now staring in a reality series on VH1, where shlubs will compete to pick up ladies with the “Mystery Method.”

If you do a little searching on the internet you can find the videos Mystery made of his conquests over the years (as Strauss wrote about). They’re mildly interesting/cringe-inducing, but I can’t imagine the VH1 series is really going to be any better, even with the contest aspect.

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