Cougar Night in Silicon Valley

http://vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/silicon-valley-cougar-nights-love

by pdog • 13 years ago

25 15 13 years ago

ignostic• 13 years ago

Interestingly, this relates to the recent Time article summarizing Pew research.

>"The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully."

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....

I'd ask Vanity Fair for their studies and numbers on cougars, but I don't think I'd hear back.

pdog• 13 years ago

I could give you a few numbers on cougars ;)

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

I know a few people who could give you some numbers as well, but I think they study the other kind of cougar.

Jun8• 13 years ago

Somewhat relevant: from a study cited in this (http://whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/2009/08/14-lop-sided-...) interesting post we learn that

"unbalanced gender ratios did not seem to problematize proportionally. The research showed that as the sex ratio augmented in favor of women, at first, as you would expect, the women simply turned fussy and went for richer and more powerful men. But at a certain point a curious thing happened: the amount of socioeconomic status a guy needed to get girl increased way more than the math would predict. Specifically when the ratio was tilted in favor of women by 10%, low status men became not 1.1 times less likely to get a girl but 2.3 times less likely and high status men 1.3 times less likely."

The post uses this as proof for the fact that SF hooking up prospects are so bad.

btilly3• 13 years ago

Fascinating. I wonder if the same tendency ruins online dating?

My guess as to a reason is that women who have been hit on aggressively by some number of men eventually get cynical. But once you're cynical, you reflexively reject all of the aggressive men, and never spot the less aggressive men, with the result that you're in permanent "fast reject" mode.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

> Fascinating. I wonder if the same tendency ruins online dating?

Yes.

Luckily, most men never really try that hard on dating websites.

mynegation• 13 years ago

The situation is reverse in Russia and Ukraine. One may notice how most younger Russian women are well-dressed and well-groomed, whereas men... not so much. Tobacco, alcohol, local wars, high crime an high incarceration rates decreased gender balance in favour of men and it shows.

sobbybutter• 13 years ago

Nonlinearities like this are pretty interesting. You can see similar effects in systems like traffic grids (where the addition of a small number of vehicles can make congestion much, much worse) and commodity prices (e.g. small shortage of oil causing incredible price shocks), among others.

xfoo• 13 years ago

Why pay $30,000 to get "11 introductions" (with no guarantees, apparently), when you could have sex with 100 women by just giving the money directly to escorts instead?

Also if I paid $30,000 I would at the very least want a guarantee that the matchmaker will find girls that are definitely down to fuck that night, and will supply me a new girl every week at least.

btilly3• 13 years ago

Good question, if crudely put.

The answer is that the kind of men who want to use a service like this want something other than straight sex. They want to fall in love. An escort can deliver sex, but the odds of love coming out of that are really, really bad.

Also you're probably not going to go to a service like that if $30,000 is a lot of money to you.

xyzzy123• 13 years ago

I guess what surprises me is that there are people who can casually drop 30k and are having trouble meeting interested / interesting people.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

These kinds of matching services tend to prey on the clients' insecurities and worries about not just getting a one night stand, but actually finding someone with whom they can have a quality relationship.

cwb71• 13 years ago

I continue to be confused by the use of the term “Cougar Night” to describe Thursday nights at the Rosewood.

Isn’t a cougar an established older woman looking for casual sex with a “boy toy?”

Seems like a better name for this would be “Gold Digger Night” or just “Rich Old People Trying to Hook Up.”

Cougar Night in Silicon Valley

Related Stories