Browsing the internet, you could easily get the impression that talking to girls was somehow equivalent to Brain surgery or Rocket science.

But now, it seems that Alec Greven, a 9-year-old kid from Castle Rock, Colorado, has managed to cut through the accumulated crap of wacky theories and spaced-out Love gurus, by releasing his own book of home-spun wisdom entitled “How to Talk to Girls“.

Alec Claims that he got the idea for his book after he “saw a lot of boys that had trouble talking to girls”.

Now, you might laugh, but the book does in fact contain some excellent advice. In fact, the advice is so good that young Alec has been doing the celebrity circuit; appearing on “The Early Show” and being interviewed by Ellen Degeneres and Meredith Viera. Even 20th Century Fox were impressed, and have since optioned the film rights to this future best seller.

So, for anyone that thinks they have trouble talking to girls, here’s what Alec recommends:

Many boys get crushes on girls. But it can be very hard to get a girl to like you. Sometimes it takes years!

Whatever happens, just don’t act desperate. Girls don’t like desperate boys.

Many boys who have crushes don’t know how to act around a girl. Some boys tease girls they like and are mean to them. Some boys say silly things to girls and act goofy. Some boys think they are acting cool by showing off.

This is not a good approach.

Make sure you have good friends who won’t try to take the girl you like.

Finally, you have to be able to get over a crush if it doesn’t work out. A crush is like a love disease. It can drive you mad.

Try not to let it get you down.

The right thing to do when you have a crush is:

• Never show off too much
• Don’t be silly and goofy
• Control your hyperness (cut down on sugar if you need to)

Other hints and tips include:

• Comb your hair and don’t wear sweats
• Don’t be the class clown
• Go easy on the compliments to avoid looking desperate
• … and be wary of “pretty girls.”

But, what’s the best way to approach a girl?

Alec recommends:

Keep it to a simple “Hi”.

If I say “Hi” and you say “Hi” back, we’re probably off to a good start.

So, with the basics out of the way, and obviously leaving the door open for a further best seller in a couple of years time, Alec comments that Dating (which he defines as going out to dinner without your parents).

[...] is for “kind of old” people, who are 15 or 16.

Posted by Jonathan as Art & Literature, Reviews at 2:27 AM GMT

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Whisky and seduction don’t usually go together, but reading through the morning paper, my attention was caught by a whisky based organisation calling itself “The Monkey Shoulder Appreciation Society“, which advertised an evening talk entitled “The Art of Seduction“, to be given by a fellow called Guy Browning.

A quick search of the internet reveals that Guy Browning is described as a quick-witted author of the Guardian newspaper’s weekly ‘How To’ column, which seems to be quite popular amongst Guardian readers. He is also the author of a number of books on both and business and humour, as well as being a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4.

Now, obviously this was all a publicity stunt, to promote a new brand of whisky, but with a talented speaker, the event seemed like it would be an interesting and probably quite fun talk, with a bonus of some whisky swilling thrown in, so I applied for tickets.

Unfortunately, even thought the talk was only advertised on the morning of the day it was to occur; it seems that through a combination of bad management, poor planning and lack of foresight, the organisers had completely underestimated demand for the event. I contacted Rob Curteis, who had replied to me (perhaps he’s the monkey’s uncle?), pointing out that I had planned to write about his event, but it seems that he doesn’t have the manners to respond to his email.

Perhaps Mr Curteis had forgotten that Valentines Day is only a few days away, and with the popularity of events such as the Barbican’s exhibition of erotic art “Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now”, a talk about seduction would undoubtedly be extremely popular.

As to the whisky, I should point out that I’m not an expert, and I haven’t tried Monkey Shoulder; but I’m dubious about any whisky that the manufacturer recommends you mix with Coke. However, I did look through some of the whisky aficionado sites, and it seems that connoisseurs have said it’s too sweet, and isn’t particularly nice.

So, I’m guessing that when it came to drinks, I didn’t miss very much.

Posted by Jonathan as Reviews at 2:11 AM GMT

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I used to think that Seduction was a science, and it’s easy to see why. If you follow a few simple rules, you end up with more love, friends and sex in your life.

But thinking a little deeper, any strategy I may suggest to you now will not guarantee that you the meet the person of your dreams, and it certainly wouldn’t work 100% of the time. Whereas if I told you how to synthesise some chemical compound, build an electronic circuit or even bake a cake; then so long as you take care, and have enough intelligence to follow my instructions properly, you know what to expect at the end of the process. And, as creator I would know what response someone would have – repeatedly.

However, if I were to write a play, compose music, or paint a picture then I will have had an intended response in mind during the creation process, but ultimately I cannot control what response you will have to my oeuvre. For this reason, I consider that Seduction is closer to an art than a science.

Whilst everything can be art, to claim “everything is art” is just lazy thinking. I could equally claim “everything is science”; since there is chemistry involved in painting, engineering governs much of sculpture and physics controls the harmonics of music etc. Although if you’re still not convinced, please contact me, as I have a dumpster full of art to sell you!

Now, I believe that there is a need for more serious study of art and seduction to be undertaken. Matters of seduction are too often relegated to the Humour section of bookshops, with perhaps the most serious studies being the “How to get your man to do what you want, whilst keeping him happy and upholding your Feminist principles” articles to be found in certain women’s magazines.

I would expect that art specialists would be perfectly positioned to tell us something about the relationship between biology and the erotic workings of the mind, because there are many great works of art of a sexual nature. Then there is erotica, and finally there is smutty literature of the type found in Soho sex shops, yet all depict essentially the same thing. More mysteriously, the people upset by this last category are often the same people who will gaze in wonderment at a painting of a naked lady.

Pornography and art seem to have gone hand-in-hand for longer than records exist, and with each new art medium pornography soon followed. So, perhaps originally, there was no dividing line, or maybe it just fluctuated over the centuries, as society wavered between repression and hedonism.

The Barbican’s exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein, all of whom seem to be well qualified and respectable curators. Thus, it’s disappointing that they have only managed to produce a collection of dry, uninformative pornography. Perhaps I missed something, but we learn nothing of the heritage of pornography, none of the art is put into context, and it’s not explained how the exhibited artists changed the circumstances in which art becomes porn or vice versa. Perhaps we’re just to assume that if Pornography is shown often enough, it’ll somehow transform itself into art.

During my visit to the exhibition, I found the other visitors more interesting than the artworks. The former being an interesting mixture of average people off the street, art anoraks, and the fetish crowd (complete with big boots, PVC clothing and outsize hats); whilst the latter consisted of a scant array of international pornography through the ages, and seemed to induce more sniggering from the visitors than thought provocation.

As someone who admittedly is still learning about fine arts, I left the exhibition without any clue as to whether a Jeff Koons picture, for example, was art, pornography or erotica.

The curators could have shed some light on why early pornographic films had a storyline and were very tender, yet so much modern pornography is just violent fucking. How does pornography relate to the films and TeeVee programmes we see these days? They could even have investigated differences between homosexual and lesbian pornography – but they’ve kept the exhibition almost entirely heterosexual, apart from a few early paintings.

So, ultimately, I’m not even sure why the exhibition is called Seduced. It would certainly have been more interesting if we had been seduced by it. But, unfortunately I can’t say I really learned anything new. Although I’m sure the fetish crowd could have shown the curators a few new things, given the chance.

Posted by Jonathan as Art & Literature, Reviews at 11:11 PM GMT

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Last year, a friend informed me that he had obtained some degree of success in meeting members of the opposite sex, using an internet ‘dating’ site. I therefore resolved that this might be an avenue worth pursuing, since the idea of having matches selected, and presented to me, in the comfort of my home, seemed rather appealing.

He had cautioned me that many of the members were rather too desirous to enter into matrimony, or to obtain children, but that this did not represent the bulk of the membership, and that there were a number of extremely nice people to be found.

I was rather shocked by the excessive subscription fees that these sites charge, and the devious way that they’re hidden in the small print, clarifying that it’s only free to sign up, but anything else needs a subscription. This is clearly something that only benefits the site owners, building a user base, and is quite irritating to the users of the service, especially as the sites rely on the members to do all the searching and contacting. So, what does one get over and above simply going to a bar or some other social function, and meeting people there? It seems to be a case of – the price of a few drinks, versus several hundred pounds in membership fees – and then still having to put in effort to meet people. If I was minded to spend that sort of money, I’m sure it would be better invested buying membership of some exclusive nightclub, or similar venue.

However, various people had pointed me to a certain fish related internet site, pointing out that the service claimed to be free. And, although the service doesn’t charge your credit card, it’s actually covered in AdTurds, rather poorly laid out and remarkably slow, so I can’t really say that was a particularly fun experience.

I suspect that the word ‘free’ tends to attract every man and his dog. So, unfortunately, the service seems to be little more than a web based version of soc.singles instead of being a place to meet people for romance. During my time there, someone had planned to organise a party for members (which, all criticism aside, seemed like an excellent idea) unfortunately, they picked a bar chain with a reputation for poorly behaved customers, in rather a dodgy area of London. I pointed this much out to the organiser, who seemed rather more interested in making a reputation for themselves with their ‘fan base’, than accepting help from outsiders.

The result was that one of the attendees ended up getting attacked by someone (who, I should add, was unconnected with either the event or the website). I then made the mistake of reminded the people concerned that they could have done better, and even made some suggestions of better quality places, in less rough areas.

The reward for my effort was that my account disappeared without explanation, and after creating another, so that I could enquire as to what had happened to the first account, that account mysteriously vanished too, and the same result with a third account. I later discovered that the ‘party organiser’ had spent a long while brown-nosing one of the high ups in the management structure, and could thus recommend who they felt was desirable to have on the service (or not).

I am therefore unconvinced that internet dating has any advantage over meeting people in the real world. The main fault as far as I can see is that when one is presented with a bunch of statistics and a list of interests, there is no room for any personal flair, and so the whole effect becomes rather like looking at someone’s curriculum vitae.

Anyone that has experience hiring people will know that very often people are nothing like their CV’s. Some people exaggerate or lie about their experiences and qualifications, while some people just don’t present themselves as well as they could on paper, but in real life they really stand out. Hence in relationship terms, the internet dating sites are completely unable to match real life experience.

Anyway, of more interest to me was the fact that after signing up with the paid-for site, they insisted upon sending me much of their client base’s anthropometric data; presumably to try to lure me to pay their excessive fees.

Now, many people had told me anecdotally, that men tended to be rather more flexible in their criteria for finding a match on internet dating sites, whereas women tended to establish absolute limits. Thus, a man would consider meeting a woman a little older, younger, taller or shorter etc. than he’d specified if he felt she had other redeeming characteristics, whereas a woman would tend take the view that once the criteria are set, they can’t be changed for any reason.

With this information in mind, I was able to tabulate the data sent to me, compute some values, compare aspects of the information with data from a health study, and thus establish whether or not (on balance) the information people had submitted to the website was accurate. The summary results make interesting reading.

As you can see from the table above, every woman wanted a man at least one year older than herself, and there were considerable differences amongst all the other sought after variables. Especially interesting is the range of height variances, clearly some women weren’t fussy about height, but a significant proportion wanted a man at least a few cm taller than themselves.

Continuing, I was able to use data from a recent NHS health survey to compare with my results, and establish whether women tended to be accurate about the information they submitted about them selves. The NHS survey gave mean heights for 16-24 year old women as 163.1cm, and 25-34 year old women as 162.8cm. Since these results are very close, and the 16-24 year olds were on average taller than the 25-34 year olds, I felt that the data would not be skewed, if I took the average value for my comparison.

Data from my summary results shows a mean height of 166.15cm and a modal height of 170.00cm, which both seem significantly taller than the NHS data, but it might be possible that my sample size wasn’t big enough. Luckily, the NHS data included Standard error data, so I was able to conduct a t-test with my data (t = 20.98).

Based on my sample size, the results, using the information I tallied have a <1% chance of occurring at random, so women submitting height data to the internet dating site were either measuring their height with their shoes on, or simply exaggerating. Unfortunately, no data on weight was sent to me, so I was unable to conduct further analysis to see if there was a tendency towards over-quoting of height and under-quoting of weight, as one might expect to find if people were attempting to give a statistically better impression of their

The analysis and testing I was able to conduct with this data was limited, but I can see potential with a much larger and expanded dataset to determine the optimum age range that people of various ages should be trying to meet in order to maximize their chances of arranging some romantic activity. Furthermore, additional data would be extremely useful to test the theory that people have a tendency to submit flattering data to the internet dating websites; and the extent to which they over or under exaggerate.

Should anybody reading this have access to such data (made anonymous, of course) then I should be delighted to hear from you.

Posted by Jonathan as Analysis, Reviews at 11:05 PM BST

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We have seen the book ‘Sperm Wars‘ cited as some type of super seduction guide several times, by several different people. This is quite puzzling, because the highly controversial ‘Kamikaze Sperm Hypothesis‘, which is the main theory behind the motivation for this book was only ever a biological theory that caught the media’s attention for a short span of time.

The Kamikaze Sperm Hypothesis has never been proven, and the author offers very little evidence for his theories in this book, or even his previous ones. In fact, the book has no index, no bibliography and mentions no other researchers; it therefore denies the reader the opportunity to examine more rigorous scientific studies that may give some evidence for the proposals put forward in the book.

Sperm Wars could by no means be classed as serious science; I suppose this is why the cover notes feature quotations from Cosmopolitan and Elle magazine, rather than any vaguely scientific publication.

The author, Robin Baker, proposes that something called ‘Sperm warfare‘ is the basis of all human life, and that everything we do, either consciously or unconsciously is to ensure the survival of our genes, and to pass our DNA to future generations. So, apparently every aspect of sex i.e. doing it, wanting it, talking about it etc. is because of this theory.

The author then takes his insights into the biology of sexual behaviour further, and mixes in a lot of speculation with it. The resulting book is a collection of thirty seven sexually explicit narrative sexual scenarios: such as sex in the woods, bad dates, drunken confrontations and husband-swapping; each of which Baker attempts to explain in terms of evolutionary biology, and Sperm competition.

Whilst the book claims to be grounded in evolutionary theory and natural selection, the reader is not given any sort of detailed explanation of either.

For those who may not be aware, Sperm competition is a scientific theory that has been around for about thirty or forty years. It has most often been applied to non-human animals, and uses evolutionary biology as an attempt to provide an explanation for how ejaculations from different males compete to fertilize the eggs of a single female. Robin Baker and a former collaborator (Mark Bellis) took sperm competition several steps further, and used extrapolation of animal models and behaviours, to claim that this theory works in humans.

So, the Wars referred to in the title of the book concerns competition between two or more men’s sperm within the same women, and also a sort of ‘battle of the sexes‘ that may occur between a male and female sexual pairing.

In the first type of sperm war, Baker claims that different types of sperm are each programmed to carry out a specific function. Some are ‘Egg getters’, programmed to attempt to fertilize the female’s ovum. The remainder, often the vast majority, are programmed for a Kamikaze role. Instead of attempting to find and fertilize ova themselves; their role is to reduce the chances that the egg will be fertilized by sperm from any other male.

In the second type of sperm war, Baker claims that a woman’s body might be ‘trying’ to avoid conceiving with a particular man, whereas a man’s body will be ‘trying’ to fertilize her egg.

Both types of ‘Wars’ are highlighted through the book, to illustrate various sexual behaviours and experiences that fulfil the objectives of each type of battle.

Unfortunately, the author fails to mention that other researchers have failed to reproduce most of the experiments that underpin his research, and that his Kamikaze Sperm Hypothesis has been disproved repeatedly by scientists, using more modern data and analysis.

The book therefore only seems to be a cursory nod to science, followed by an immoderate attempt to appeal to Frat boys, using fierce imagery of chemical warfare and destruction occurring inside women’s bodies, as different sperm do battle to the death.

Posted by Jonathan as Art & Literature, Reviews, Sociobiology at 1:39 AM BST

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