I recently ran across an old article which was titled “The Science Of Picking Up Men” on the Hypercube website (October 24, 2007), which was written by Laura Morgenthau. It wasn’t by any stretch cutting-edge but it was amusing.
It seems she set out to try some pick-up lines on guys and she targeted presumably nerdy guys at an MIT student bar. And to make a long story shorter, she decided to compile a list of the best science and math pick-up lines.
These were the four she came up with:
1. Physics / Math: “If I were a function, would you be my derivative? Because then you could lie tangent to my curves.”
2. Biology: “Could I be your DNA Helicase? ‘Cause I really want to unzip your genes.”
3. Chemistry: “What does it take to get over YOUR activation barrier?”
4. And, for Astronomy, there was: “Are those Moon Pants you’re wearing? Because your ass is out of this world.”
They’re all pretty lame, of course … a nerdy guy trying one of those on a woman he’d just met would almost certainly come away empty-handed.
But that’s the point: almost any pick-up line will work on a man (including “Hi”). If a woman is even reasonably attractive, actually shows up and then doesn’t say “No” (or telegraph that same message with an icy glare), she’s likely to get hit on.
What about women who are
less than “reasonably attractive”?
They’ll usually get hit on also … often more so than a more attractive women might.
How could that be?
Easy … most guys feel very intimidated by women. And they tend to assume that the better looking a woman is, the more (and hotter) will be the guys she is used to having hit on her.
As a result, most guys assume that they would have zero chance with her and could expect to be humiliated by her (for daring to think that she’s not “out of his league”) if they did approach her.
“…
if 85% of guys are hitting on the women within the bottom 50% of the female pulchritude scale, being unattractive is a lot less of an impediment
…”
But of course, if 85% of guys are hitting on the women within the bottom 50% of the female pulchritude scale, being unattractive is a lot less of an impediment to a woman getting picked up than you may realize.
So as university research projects go, this one was a no-brainer. But, truth be told, I had also done some pretty lame experiments in my university days. That includes a research project to test whether eating chocolate-chip ice cream raises people’s IQs.
It didn’t, of course, but that’s the beauty of research: there are no right answers. Every finding is equally valid … even if it just confirms “the null hypothesis”.
If you have to do a research project for a course, you might as well pick something easy to do that’s also fun. And that seems to have been the case here.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
