

Cougar Night in Silicon Valley - pdog
http://vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/silicon-valley-cougar-nights-love

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Jun8
Somewhat relevant: from a study cited in this
([http://whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/2009/08/14-lop-
sided-...](http://whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/2009/08/14-lop-sided-gender-
ratio.html)) 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.

~~~
btilly
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
> _Fascinating. I wonder if the same tendency ruins online dating?_

Yes.

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

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cwb71
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.”

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xfoo
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.

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

~~~
btilly
It doesn't surprise me. It is easy for people who are well off to meet people
who want a piece of their money. It is much harder to meet people who are
smart, attractive, and have enough going on for them that they don't need your
money. Doubly so when your success comes from your ability to be a workaholic,
but you've never developed dating skills.

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ignostic
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....](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html)

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

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pdog
I could give you a few numbers on cougars ;)

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

~~~
dllthomas
I would assume that confusing the two could be problematic.

