Take another shot of courage, wonder why the right words never come
This Saturday’s link round up has a special focus on the not so honored tradition of picking up drunk strangers in bars and sleeping with them. OK, most of the links aren’t actually about this, but several of them are.
First, though, I need to tell you about the baklava. It has long been my ambition to bake baklava, and a dessert baking competition at work provided the perfect occasion. However, the small set of Greek recipes my father left me didn’t include one for baklava. No problem, Google is my friend. Having located a recipe, the next step was to put my husband to work on the critical task of purchasing phyllo, that flaky-thin dough without which baklava is out of the question. He picked up phyllo for me from the freezer section of our local Iranian grocery. For the other ingredients, he suggested a mixture of different kinds of nuts, so we went with pecans, hazelnuts, and walnuts.
The actual process of assembling and baking the baklava is easier than it looks; the most time consuming part is laying out and buttering a couple of layers of phyllo at a time (interspersing nuts mixed with cinnamon when you get to the middle). I saved eight of the twenty-eight pieces of baklava for Joel and me, and packed the other twenty (put into cupcake papers and cookie tins) for work. It actually came out well, and won first prize in the competition at work. First prize is a $25 gift certificate to Target, which actually, if you think of this as a money making enterprise, and remember to subtract the cost of ingredients, works out to considerably less than minimum wage for my cooking time. Still, the pleasure of winning is what counts, here.
Now, first for the links on getting picked up in bars. We start with a survey from the UK reporting that 1 in 20 women have never had sex sober. Or, that’s one headline drawn from the survey. If you think about it, though, that’s hardly the most shocking item from the survey, to play the game “ain’t it awful” with. After all, easily 1 in 20 people, male or female, have an ongoing drinking problem. What would worry me more, if I wanted to take this survey as grounds to freak out, are items like
40 percent of the women said they were always tipsy when they slept with someone for the first time.
Or, the item that the New York Daily News picks to lead off its report, Survey finds average woman has eight sex partners – and is drunk for at least five of them. Moreover,
On at least two of those occasions, the survey found, the average woman could not remember her bedroom partner’s name the following morning, according to the Daily Mail.
At this point, I’m starting to suspect something fishy. I was not Miss Goody Two Shoes back when I was in college; I did sleep with more than one person before I met my husband, did drink, did smoke pot, and a) I can remember the name of everyone I ever slept with, decades after the fact, and b) was not drunk or high the first time I slept with anyone (though I did smoke pot before sex at one point during the course of an established relationship). Am I really such an outlier? What’s the methodology of this survey, anyway? And why are we worrying only about the drinking of women? Don’t men resort to liquid courage just as often as women, when getting up their nerve to make an approach? And doesn’t men’s drinking, when done to excess, have just as adverse an effect on the dating scene as women’s drinking? In fact, the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports that in one half of all sexual assaults the victim has been drinking – and that in one half of all sexual assaults the perpetrator has been drinking.
Information on the methodology of the study turns out to be sketchy. The Telegraph, a conservative UK paper that is probably thrilled to deliver the bad news, reports that the survey included 3000 women, a number that sounds impressive until you realize that we have no idea how the 3000 women were selected. They could well have been 3000 women selected in a totally non-random fashion from visits to an Internet site (possibly even with some visitors taking the survey multiple times for fun). We just don’t know. Because all the information we have on the study is that it was done by a cosmetics company called Femfresh, which released its results to the media, without any discussion, let alone peer review, of the survey methodology. Sampling is everything. If I were to select, say, 3000 women found at Quaker meetings, and report to you on their average number of sexual partners and whether they often drank before having sex, you’d probably consider my results unrepresentative, and ignore them (unless the Quaker women proved to be really big tipplers, in which case you’d cite them with glee). If I were to survey 3000 women found at local bars, and report on the same measures, you might consider that people do exist who don’t meet most of their potential dates in bars, and that such people would be underrepresented in my survey. So, basically, without knowing how the women in the survey were selected, we have a result that’s totally meaningless. Except in achieving its primary purpose: publicity and name recognition for Femfresh cosmetics.
All these things said, I don’t recommend making tipsiness a standard part of your first sleeping together experiences, whether you’re male or female; it seems to me that the first time is exactly when the two of you most need clear eyes and clear communication. Some, though, are more interested in building up their nerve than in clear communication. Which brings me to that other, non-liquid form of courage, pick up artistry. Via Amanda Marcotte, I give you this Nerve article in which a woman decides to try PUA techniques herself, to pick up both men and women.
Since a major part of attracting mates is standing out from the competition, I dressed in a style both flamboyant and outsized, a la VH1’s Mystery: gold lamé pants, a suggestive belt buckle, a water bra, an enormous hat, lots of eye makeup, and gold glitter spangled across my lingerie-enhanced cleavage. I geared up to go “sarging” by listening to R. Kelly. It seemed appropriate.
…
I’m generally a monochrome-wearing, makeup-free person; i.e. not big on flair. I was almost more worried about peacocking than anything else, until I remembered I live in New York, a city in which it would take a crown of radioactive antlers to make me the most ridiculous-looking person on any given block. In a city of peacocks, I could focus on other anxieties, like trying to get strange, hot people to fuck me.
Finally, also via Amanda Marcotte, we have an unhappy woman who writes to Cary Tennis. She wants to get married yesterday, she also likes having sex approximately right away with any hot guy she meets, and she’s kicking herself because she’s losing their respect by giving it up too soon. Or, that’s one reading. I think Amanda actually has the woman’s number when she points out that she’s actually the female equivalent of a Nice Guy™. A Nice Guy™ is not to be confused with a guy who is actually nice; the capitalization and trademark symbols are meant to signify a guy who thinks he’s nice, and thinks that’s the reason he’s losing out with women, who, darn it, are broken, in that they just won’t response when he tries to figure out their cheat codes. Similarly, Amanda points out about this woman,
… As a well-trained woman, she is overtly making this about herself—she knows the rules say that everything is a woman’s fault, including men’s choices—but let’s face it. She’s blaming these men for being too weak and stupid to understand how awesome it is that she’s spontaneous. Guess she’s going to have to adopt a bunch of negative traits, starting by being more manipulative, in order to get that goddamn elusive ring that men just hang onto like they’re so fucking special anyhow.
It’s true; on the one hand, she’s lamenting about how it’s all her fault for being a slut, but on the other hand, darn it, the only way she can win a man is to lose her spontaneity and become more manipulative. She knows she’s supposed to say that she’s in the wrong for being too quick to sleep with the men she likes, and it’s not at all their fault because of course they’re going to drink the milk without buying the cow as long as the milk is free. But she doesn’t like it, and she’s letting you know that it really is a positive quality of hers that men are failing to appreciate.
In fact, though, the number one reason that having sex on the first date gets you a lot of men who have sex with you and then leave you is that it’s a first date. Doing anything on a first date, routinely, means that you’ll do it with a lot of people you don’t see again. Most relationships don’t progress beyond the first couple of meetings; it’s the nature of the beast that those first meetings are about winnowing people out. So, no matter what you do on the first date, have sex, don’t have sex, go to the zoo, go to the bookstore, go white water rafting, whatever, a lot of those people won’t work out. It’s true that guys exist that will think worse of a woman who sleeps with them quickly, and, though they’re hardly stand up guys that you want to marry, you might prefer never to have had sex with them either. But, whether the guy really has a Madonna/whore complex, or whether he’s a happy slut who has no problem with other people being just as slutty as he is, it’s still the case that most dating relationships fizzle, on one side or the other, within the first few dates.
Now, on to the other links:
A survivor talks about his leap from the Golden Gate bridge. Via my husband.
My dog sees my hallucinations. Via Bipolar_Blogs on Twitter.
The Hobbit meets the Nigerian scam. Via my sister. (As she says, could have been better executed. But it’s still fun.)
Brigham Young cancels Euripides play over problematic sexual content. Via my RL friend John.
John also writes, at his blog Mind on Fire On no longer wanting to “be safe.”
Hand Hygiene Habits Improve. In these days of worry over swine flu, it turns out that behavior that I thought was a sign that I have borderline OCD is actually to be emulated. Everyone follow my example and scrub your hands like a surgeon.
Study finds more men gossip than women. Unlike the British study I referenced above that reports that women have sex drunk all the time, this British study involves only 300 people, but it compensates by having a credentialed Ph.D. present it at a science conference, rather than a marketing rep presenting it in a press release. The guy presenting the study is Dr. Nicholas Emler, if you want to try Googling him to find more information about it. If you just want to smirk about how men think women are such gossips, but now we know better, then you already have all you need.
Friends Committee on National Legislation intern blog.
Crossing the Finish Line — The surprising facts about high school GPAs.
The Sultan is dead, long live the Sultan: Robert Farley, who makes a habit of following long deposed dynasties, reports that the heir to the Ottoman Empire is dead, and the new heir is somebody else I’ve never heard of. To my ancestors, news like this would actually have made a difference. (While I’m at it, I’ll note that Farley let us know weeks ago that Turkey and Armenia established diplomatic ties.)
*Christopher on Lex Ordandi, Lex Credendi Again (Sigh).
The Monkey Cage has A brief reminder that not everyone finds politics all that captivating, featuring Glenn Beck, ACORN, Tea Parties, and Max Baucus. It turns out that a surprising number of people can’t identify any of these.
Centered Politics has a post on whether a Mayo Clinic model can constrain health care spending, or whether coastal areas are just doomed to spend more than the Midwest.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Civility My Ass.
A blogger at the Economist on Reasonableness as a political stratagem.