Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6132718/Men-lose-their-minds-speaking-to-pretty-women.html

by timr • 17 years ago

55 52 17 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

msie• 17 years ago

Oh man, it happens to me all the time and I make the same mistakes every time. I just cannot prevent it!!! :(

arithmetic• 17 years ago

I wonder who funds "research" like this. And where do they do studies of this sort? The "duh" school of research?

roundsquare3• 17 years ago

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38575

sdave• 17 years ago

do women fund these 'research' ;-)

roundsquare3• 17 years ago

Hmm, I wonder if this happens if men are trying to impress women with their intelligence. There was an article on HN a little while ago about how women are attracted to intelligence.

bendtheblock• 17 years ago

I thought it was about how women aren't primarily attracted to intelligence (unless you mean a different article)? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=567807

roundsquare3• 17 years ago

It was this one actually. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799344

However, its only about birds... I'd forgotten that.

Oh well, I still wonder if it happens to guys who are trying to show off their intelligence (probably a decent strategy in some limited circumstances).

10ren• 17 years ago

Self-consciousness lowers competence.

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbour; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing. - Oliver Wendell Holmes http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/topics/ability_and_ach...

OTOH, A simpler hypothesis is that the blood supply available to their brains was reduced by the interaction.

jonsen• 17 years ago

Men have got two brains, but only enough blood to supply one at a time.

dtf• 17 years ago

When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call 'reproductively focused'.

I guess this is the scientific term for horny.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't call it reproductively focused, that's way more than most men think when they meet a pretty woman. I'd say carnally focused; reproductively focused comes a few hours later if they've forgotten a condom.

TriinT2• 17 years ago

I would still call it "reproductively focused". Condoms and being legally forced to support your biological kids have both been invented since we stopped evolving ;-)

wallflower• 17 years ago

One of my sister's friends, a short average looking bald gay man is constantly hit on by very attractive women (he lives and works in NYC). He says it might be due to the fact that he is totally non-plussed by beautiful women (since he has no sexual interest in them)

There is always desensitization training. In one day, you could probably approach fifty attractive women and effectively tame your fear. I've never done that, and I think it would be a courageous (courage comes after the action) personal exercise (probably to attempt in a city you do not live in)

ilitirit• 17 years ago

> He says it might be due to the fact that he is totally non-plussed by beautiful women (since he has no sexual interest in them)

I was somewhat nonplussed by this statement until I read this:

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nonplussed?view=uk

Sutibu3• 17 years ago

Act gay, get hot chicks. Got it.

jetsnoc• 17 years ago

Act gay... Get a boyfriend! Girls like gay guys as friends... silly.

roc• 17 years ago

More generally: If you're laser-focused on having sex with someone, you can only be judged based on sexual desirability (modified by degree of apparent desperation).

If you can hold an actual conversation, then you can also be judged on personality, intelligence, humor, etc.

So if you want to 'fight outside your weight class', keep your tongue inside your mouth.

TomOfTTB3• 17 years ago

My dad acted in the Theatre and so I had been doing Theatre tech since about 11 years old (and have many, many beautiful women as friends). With that experience in mind I can verify you sister's friend's claim.

When you come right down to it there are two things you have to realize about women.

1. As hard as it is for Men to comprehend the truth is attractiveness isn't that high on a woman's list. It's not that women don't like an attractive man it's just lower on the list. Here's an example I use to explain it to men. I, as someone who dated a lot of theatre women, like dating professional dancers (for reasons I won't be so crass as to spell out here). But I'll certainly be interested in a beautiful, smart, funny woman who isn't a dancer. Attractiveness to women is like being a dancer to me. It's a plus but not a deal breaker. Hence "average looking bald guy" isn't necessarily a deterrent.

2. Attracting women in general boils down to one simple concept: Stand out from the crowd in a good way. No women wants a guy that seems average to her. So when your sister's gay friend shows a lack of interest in a woman every other man drools over it makes that woman wonder why and gives the guy a sense of mystery to him. Hence he stands out in an appealing way which makes women want to take a shot with him and see why he's different.

ch1x0r• 17 years ago

It seems to me that men would actually very much like to believe that women don't care about attractiveness, but we do. If it was the case that women don't care about attractiveness, why is it that (if research is to be believed) most couples tend to be about the same level of attractiveness? Probably because women actually do very much care about attractiveness. Is it possible to have some personality attribute that would outweigh average or below-average looks? Yes, but not nearly as common as most men it seems would like to believe. I am having a hard time buying the hot women hitting on average bald gay guy story. It is fun to flirt with gay men, definitely, but not because we actually want to get with them, and NYC women know how to spot gay men. There's something missing to this friend of a friend of a sister of a... story.

thesecret• 17 years ago

Women are interested in men who give them the cold shoulder because it's a challenge. In her head she is thinking "He must be surrounded by so many pretty women so he is immune" or "Whats wrong with me?"

The 'challenge' theory also applies to guys who are married or who have girlfriends --- it is a challenge

bad_user2• 17 years ago

I could tell you that without a "research study". And any of my grandparents were also aware of it.

These kind of studies leave me a bad taste. It's as if they ran out of funds and want to produce something entertaining that sells stories and that looks like real research.

It also promotes sexism. I mean, what would be the natural conclusion coming out of such a study? Stay away from beautiful women? Don't hire them because you'll go nuts?

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

I believe nuts are the problem . . .

restruct• 17 years ago

Unless they fake the data, researchers do not have control over the results.

Yet I hope the article is not being upvoted as startup advice: "Don't hire beautiful women."

Perhaps heterosexual men can also train themselves to think of beautiful women as people first instead of as sex objects primarily.

joeyo• 17 years ago

True, but don't discount the importance of interpretation of results.

bad_user2• 17 years ago

> Unless they fake the data, researchers do not have control over the results.

Yes they have. In any statistic, you can introduce bias (many times without even knowing), the most common one being selection bias.

For example, I'd bet that the results for this research done on men coming from fields that are male-dominated (like engineering, finance), are totally different from the results of men coming from female-dominated fields.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

reproductive organ is a redundancy.

Sutibu3• 17 years ago

We need science to tell us this?

lutorm• 17 years ago

We do. Just because something that was found to be true sounds completely plausible a posteriori doesn't mean everything that sounds plausible a priori is true.

I remember Al Gore quoting Mark Twain in an Inconvenient Truth: "It's not the things we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's the things we know for sure that just aint so."

rottencupcakes• 17 years ago

Being software engineers, I don't think we need to worry about pretty women in the workplace degrading our work performance.

Hacker News itself is 94% male, according to the poll that was up a while ago. That's a ratio that goes unmatched at the nerdiest tech schools.

tricky• 17 years ago

Yeah, but there are always those women who are "IT" hot. You know, the ones that wouldn't get a second glance out in the bars, but look pretty good in the workplace talking about hardware and whatnot.

andymism• 17 years ago

Ah, you're talking about the "geek goggles".

Of course there's always Leah Culver, who's just plain hot no matter how you slice it.

dgabriel4• 17 years ago

And the men are also "IT" hot, so it evens out.

ardit33• 17 years ago

on my previous company, there was this hot admin..... . i mean hot.

Sometimes it was hard to concetrate, but sometimes it was actually motivating. It brought the competitiveness out of me, and I actually was pretty productive, while i was not thinking about stuff.....

But the upside of the whole thing that I drank a lot of water, since the kitchen was on that way, and I got to upgrade my wardrobe to look good.

Since then, I started dressing much better.

fatdog789• 17 years ago

Not all of us are software engineers. I work in the legal field. My office is 60% women. SoCal women.

acg• 17 years ago

In my experience women are far more self-conscious meeting the opposite sex, displaying a complete range of behaviour from being nasty to people they like through to completely avoiding them because they can't cope. It seems this is one of those articles destined for women's magazines.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

There is something in women which evolved for millions of years. Like many products of natural selection, it is highly complex. It works on many levels, some of which are banal, some of which are fascinating on the deepest intellectual and aesthetic levels.

It drives me crazy how many women hold themselves in low esteem. (I think it's worse in the US.) Even the plainest, most homely woman can light up given the right circumstance.

yosho• 17 years ago

wow, thank you captain obvious...

electronslave• 17 years ago

Awesome. This totally precipitated the requisite defensive responses from the younger crowd.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it: press release interpretations (especially of gender studies) are playground arguments, in this case over whether guys or girls are better. If you didn't get it out of your system then, you're probably still in it.

That is, the only people who care about the outcome are those sad, insecure souls who think every generalized test of some self-confirming experiment likely crafted in a Ritalined-up haze by a disingenuous grad student MUST apply to them.

Need proof? What is this experiment testing? Would you put college kids in a computer lab for an hour to test general rules about gender and attraction in society? No. No you wouldn't.

No, HN, this study is not very good, and neither is the silly reporting about it. But if you want, you can have social awkwardness as a door prize.

omouse• 17 years ago

fuck this noise, take this pseudo-science off of hacker news please.

Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women

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