I recently had an e-mail conversation (a "convo" is what I think the kids call it these days) with a female friend of mine about how guys approach picking up women. She was fascinated with some of the insight I was giving her about it (trying, as she was, to apply it to her own experiences with men), and once I resigned myself to the fact that I was being a traitor to my gender, I started thinking more about how we, as guys, interact with women in general. I'm going to break that down for you now. Consider this a gift to womankind, and I expect to be rewarded for my efforts with backrubs and other favors that start with the letter "b" (like "burgers").
First and foremost, if you smile at us, are nice to us, or otherwise treat us with anything less than disdain, our immediate reaction is that you are trying to tell us that you would like to have sex with us. We're going to promptly put you into the revered "possibility" bucket in our head, and there you will stay until you flat out reject us. Sadly, this means that waitresses, baristas, strippers, stewardesses, and other women in the service industry who rely on social grace for tips are going to go through the day unwittingly "signaling" men in their wake that they are hot to trot.
Many women realize this, and resort to being bitches to every man they meet who isn't Ryan Reynolds. I can't hardly blame them.
The reason for this is that most men are not very good at reading body language (this is a scientific fact) and so we will not know, in fact, with any amount of certainty whether a woman is interested in us sexually until our penis is actually moving in and out of her vagina. As a result, if we always erred on the side of caution, women and men would cease to have sex and the human race would die out in a generation or two. Therefore, we must assume that you all want us. All the time.
Of course, guys that are good at hooking up with women have found a way around their genetic gender deficiencies and have learned to bully through and succeed. My experience is that this has less to do with realizing the subtle nuances of courtship, and more to do with large egos and the assumption that every woman does, in fact, want to sleep with you, whether or not they are aware of it yet. Hence, the "nice guys finish last" stereotype, which is by and large true. Not to say that women are attracted to douchbags, it's just that douchbags don't second-guess themselves and that comes across as confidence.
It's a numbers game, really. Hit on enough women, and one of them will sleep with you. Repeat.
Women are far better than men at social interaction. Period. We are genetically designed to build things, hunt things, and burn things. Women are genetically designed to orchestrate all of the other daily workings of complex social groups, and as such are inherently more in tune to other people's needs, feelings, and status hints.
Before I get buried with hate mail from angry women, please let me clarify this for one hot minute by saying that of course women can also build things, hunt things, and burn things. What I'm saying is that men suck at social grace.
Or at least we men have to work at it. Our idea of courtship is grinding on your booty in a dark nightclub with a bottle of beer in our hand while we grin at our buddies. Women design complex mating rituals around subtle cues, sharing of thoughts and ideas, and a complicated game of give and take designed to feel out a potential partner's ability to provide, care for, and support.
Quite simply, this confuses us.
We have simply not evolved socially like women have. We are base and crude. And to further complicate and confuse things for us, women actually naturally do want this simple ruggedness in their man, but along the way, social evolution has required us to be what we are plus what we are not, in a way that is flat out contradictory to itself. We are expected to be all things at once. Ask any woman what she wants in a man, and you will hear things like "rugged" and "strong" and "dirt under his fingernails", but she will also say "understands me" and "likes to shop at the container store" and "sensitive".
To fully understand this, put your way-back-thinking-cap on and consider cavemen. And cavewomen. Our genetics do not evolve at the rapid pace that our brains do, rather they evolve slowly, across generations. Our minds evolve much more rapidly, even more so in the age of technology. Society at large is many times removed from the primitive society that lived in caves and revolved around a nightly campfire, but our genetics have not nearly begun to catch up.
Genetically we are more similar to cavemen than we are mentally. Mentally we are leaps and bounds ahead of them, but our genetics are still programmed around the camp fire. This is why it's so hard to understand human behavior, especially when it comes to the differences between the sexes. Because we're trying to frame it in the 21st century, when it really only makes sense in the pre-dawn era.
Primitive societies were intra-supportive. Families were less polar and individual than they are now. When a baby was born, all of the women of the village would care for it. When a sabre-tooth tiger was dragged home from the hunt, everyone would eat from it. Women got their social and emotional support from other women, and ran the village while the men were out procuring food for the table. Men merely had to bring home the sabre-tooth bacon and impregnate women. Those were our sole responsibilities.
Ah, those were the days.
Now, however, families are polarized even under one roof, and generations are generally physically separated. Even 50 years ago, 2 or 3 generations would live together, but now, each generation has it's own house, oftentimes in different localities. Women no longer have the always-present female support system they once had, and they don't think they need it any more, being the pants-wearing, no bra having, educated and earning types that they have become.
But they do need this female support system. And without the village, they now they expect men to provide that for them.
Gone are the days when men would see a woman they found attractive, beat other men into the ground who also felt that way, and then drag her off to a dark cave to lay seed in her belly. I say "Good riddance dark days, we have since evolved". And we have, but not quite enough yet.
The truth is that we are still genetically designed for something similar to this type of behavior, and anything else is difficult for us to process.
Which brings us to today. Today's social groups are much smaller than they were before. A couple without kids is akin to an entire village in caveman times. A man can bring home dozens of frozen sabre-tooth tiger patties from his job each day, and a woman (through the miracles of modern medicine) can conceive babies even without medical trauma. In vitro fertilization, adoption, welfare, unemployment, home alarm systems, 911; all replace the need for a tight-knit social strata by allowing us to survive on our own when we should not be able to.
But these technological advances have not replaced a woman's need to orchestrate social engineering within her social group, or a man's need to bond with fellow men on the hunt. So we turn to our spouses to fill those gaps, and they always fall short. Why? Because they're not programmed for it, as much as they might want to be.
How many men have you heard say "She's awesome, she loves sports"? How many women have you heard say "He's great, he listens to me"? Women are not programmed to love sports, and men are not programmed to listen - at least not to women's stories. Yet these become desired attributes in a mate. Why? Because we are genetically still cavemen, but no longer have the social makeup of caveman times, so we look to our spouse to fill the void.
I've digressed. But the point of my digression was to point out that men simply do not have the genetic abillity to process social cues like women do. We didn't need it. Sabre-tooth tiger had one social cue: hungry.
I'm not making this up, it's scientifically proven. SCIENCE says this. We're simply not built to be the specific pattern in the fabric of modern relationships that is expected of us; we're being asked to play a role that other women once played. Initially, we were designed (by God or science, take your pick, I'm not smart enough to get into that debate) to be involved in courtship rituals that involved hair-pulling and chest-beating. Genetically, women were designed to respond to exactly that as well, and back then, things were much more simple.
Nowadays, however, complication rules, and that is where women reign supreme.
