You can do better than these guys.

Photo by moi.

A good hairstyle success story.

In the last thread, Ceer asked:

For a men’s haircut, unless it’s quite outlandish, like a mohawk or dreadlocks, is the quality of a man’s haircut REALLY all that noticeable?

The answer is YES.  A good haircut can make the difference between a man looking sexy and a man looking plain (or worse).

A good example of the power of a good haircut is 2008 American Idol winner David Cook.  I think it’s fair to say that Cook might not have won Idol if he hadn’t gotten a very flattering haircut when he was about 6 weeks into the voting rounds of the competition.  Even though Cook had one of the best voices of the season and had turned in some very strong performances, women didn’t get excited about him until the haircut arrived.  It was only after the haircut that Cook, who had previously been considered somewhat douchey and smug, transformed in women’s eyes into a sexy, smart, mature man who sent them into a tingle frenzy.

Here is Cook as he looked at his audition:

He’s not a bad-looking guy, but there’s nothing remarkable about his looks, either.  Pretty much everything about his hair screams douchewad.

Here is Cook as he looked singing “Hello,” which was his breakout performance three weeks into the voting:

His singing put him on the map, but he wasn’t incinerating panties, either.  While the hair is improved, it distracts from his face and looks like a run-of-the-mill “young rocker guy” haircut.

Below is Cook as he looked post-haircut:

His face is now front-and-center, and the facial hair adds maturity and intelligence to his look.  He looks cleaner, healthier, more confident, more approachable, and more open.  He barely resembles the douchewad who auditioned with red bangs, soul patch, and really ugly fauxhawk.  This is the haircut that skyrocketed his sex appeal to women, and which he has more or less maintained since.

The thing to note is that the changes that Cook made to his hair aren’t drastic.  Mainly he just got a cleaner, shorter ‘do that flattered his face.  But the difference that those small changes made was huge.  His haircut allowed people to see the best in him, instead of distracting them.  (He also lost some weight on the show.  That helped, too.)

Now, Cook obviously had the help of professional stylists, and the average person doesn’t have access to that.  Cook was also starting with a more extreme look than the average person.  Still, if you’ve had the same “safe” haircut for a while, maybe it would be worth looking into something a little edgier, something that’s a break from the normal.  It’s only hair.  It’ll grow back.  At the very least, you’ll get credit for rocking the boat a little.

Most women don’t notice most men.

I feel like men in the manosphere often get cranky because women don’t notice them.  “I’m a good man, I want commitment, I have a good job, and I’m not a jerk,” they say – as if these qualities alone naturally draw women’s attention.  (Then there’s a lot of bluffing about asshole game, moving to Thailand or Brazil, and never getting married.)  The consensus seems to be that women go around intentionally ignoring men who don’t meet their 463-point checklist.  Foul wenches!

Truthfully, most of the time, most women don’t notice most men, and it’s not any grand feminine conspiracy.  It’s just how women are wired.  Women aren’t primarily visual, and so unless the man immediately pings on her physical attraction scale, or he does something (alpha) to attract her attention, he’s just not going to register.  And because most men are not all that physically impressive, and most men don’t ever approach women, most men are going to be passively ignored by women going about their daily activities.  It doesn’t mean that women are not amenable to being opened; it just means that women are not usually on alert for the opportunity.

The situation is different, obviously, in social situations designed to put men and women in each other’s company for the express purpose of (potentially romantic) mingling:  bars and clubs, meetup groups, church mixers, matchmaking ambushes.  In these situations, women are usually putting forth extra effort to look good themselves, and they will be much more aware of every male in their surroundings (some more than others, but there is a much greater active awareness than usual).  Also, men will tend to put more effort into their appearances in these situations, which greatly helps their ability to get noticed.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that if men want to get noticed more, they need to distinguish themselves in some way, either through physical appearance (better physique, better clothes, better hair, better accessories), or through approaching with confidence and humor.  If you dress like you shop at Kohl’s and get your hair done at Super Cuts, you have muscle tone like Jell-O, and you never try to talk to any women, and still complain that your good job isn’t turning you into the new Don Draper**, then it’s probably time to rethink your strategy.

**I just finished watching season 4 of Mad Men.  How is it possible that Don Draper is not suffering from a loathsome disease?  …Well, at least that we know of.  Although I doubt that “Don Draper’s got the herp!” is going to be a storyline any time soon.

Minefield.

OT: search terms.

WordPress keeps track of the search terms that people use to find the blog.  Most search terms have something to do with the blog title or my name.  Sometimes there will be searches for specific topics I’ve blogged about.  And sometimes people do searches for specific commenters.  But occasionally I’ll get hits from unrelated things, such as this one that I saw today:

Okay, fess up:  which one of you was this?

Act interested.

One part of my church’s Sunday service that I would happily do away with is the time when the pastor tells everyone to stand up and greet other people.  It’s one of the most useless ways of forcing people to “get to know each other.”  Most people are horrible at talking to people they don’t know, so just add in the pressure of being forced to do it, and you end up with a lot of really limp handshakes and lack of eye contact.  My church is particularly terrible at eye contact.  Most people I shake hands with, other than all of the old people who are delighted to see a younger person at an early service, are not even looking at me when they say hello and shake my hand.  They’re already glancing off in the distance, probably at their next limp hand-shaking victim.

This got me thinking about interactions with the opposite sex.  If you’re on a date with someone, or even meeting someone, it’s important to make eye contact.  If you’re trying to talk to someone and they’re looking everywhere except at you(r face – boobs don’t count), it’s pretty obvious that the person is not interested and has a bunch of other things they’d rather be doing.  It’s pointless to talk to the side of someone’s face.  I hope that the next time this happens to me, I’ll just walk away rather than politely endure the awkwardness.

If you were a swagger coach: bassoon quartet edition.

This is the most purely nerdy thing I have ever seen on the internet.  (Pure nerdiness lacks the repulsive desperation/shame factor commonly associated with nerds.)  I encourage everyone to watch the video, but if you don’t, this is what it contains:  a bassoon quartet playing selections of score from the Super Mario Bros. video game series.  This video is special because pretty much every aspect is nerdy to the hilt.  To wit:

• Bassoon quartet.  You have to be a very dedicated band geek to play the bassoon, because bassoons are not cheap.
• The music is from a series of video games, which someone obviously had to take the time to select and arrange.
• I didn’t realize until the musicians stood up to take their bows that the blonde on the left is female.
• Everyone in the quartet is wearing glasses.
• Everyone in the quartet has a dorky haircut.
• The Asian in the back stops playing and beatboxes unironically at two different times and occasionally makes sound effects noises.
• Everyone is wearing the same custom shirt, which features four bassoons and which I assume is their group outfit.
• Everyone is wearing stone-washed jeans that look like they came straight out of 1996.

If you were a swagger coach and were hired to prep these kids for a night of sarging cheerleaders, what would you advise?

OT: the cover that wasn’t.

Athol Kay has revealed the cover of his new book (which looks great, and a big congratulations for getting the book done!), but oh, what could have been!

(For what it’s worth, he also rejected my other idea.  Barbarian.)

A premature proclamation?

Suzanne Gosselin recently wrote an article at Boundless called “Recognizing the One,” in which she recounts that she knew her now-husband was “the one” when the Holy Spirit told her so (which just so happened to be at a moment when Kevin, to whom she was already attracted, was alpha-ly going on about his passions and plans for life…funny how that works).

In the comments, someone named Andrew3 wrote of his criteria for a future wife:

This is my criteria for knowing if a woman is “The One” for me:

1. She believes in Jesus Christ as her Saviour.

2. I can imagine her bearing my children through the method designed by God at the beginning of creation. (Genesis 4:1)

3. She wants to marry me.

That is it! The first woman who fulfills all three of the above criteria will be my wife for the rest of our years on earth.

Now, maybe he really means this, but I highly doubt that these are his only criteria.  What if the woman also…

…had three kids by three other guys?

…pole-danced not for Jesus?

…had $50,000 worth of credit card debt?

…had two ex-husbands?

…had a lot of male Facebook friends who liked to message her?

…liked to post pictures of herself in a bikini on Facebook?

…had no female friends?

…made more money and/or had more education than he did?

Maybe Andrew3 is just really young and therefore hasn’t thought any deeper than his three criteria.

 

Pole dancing for the lover of your soul.

Okay, so, apparently there is a fitness studio in Houston that offers a free “Pole Fitness for Jesus” workout on the second Sunday of each month after church.  Only Christian music is played, and to get in, you have to show your church program.  The proprietor, Crystal Deans, is a former dancer who decided to bring the parts she liked about dancing into the studio.  Judging by Deans’s quotes in the article, she’s encountered a lot of criticism (which I would expect, being that she is in Texas):

“Just to get past the whole stigma of the whole thing, I’m very Christian. I go to church every Sunday and I pray. I talk to God things like that I think there’s nothing wrong with what I do. I teach women to feel good about themselves, to feel empowered and we get in really good shape. God is the only person that judges so anybody who wants to judge me, feel free to but I’m good with God, so that’s what’s important to me and I really don’t care what people think.”

Two points on this.  One, while I think the idea of pole dancing to Christian music is…incongruous (I mean, are they working the pole to a techno version of “My Jesus, I Love Thee”?), I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Christian pole dancing classes.  The classes appear to be women-only and fitness-oriented, and Deans isn’t encouraging the women to go out and get hired.  And, more generally, anything that (a) promotes fitness and (b) helps women feel sexier is a good thing.  I know the manosphere likes to get all up in arms about how women these days have too much self-esteem and fat 5s think they’re slender 9s, but the average woman constantly compares herself to women in TV and film.  That is why you have things like the fat acceptance movement (women who have surrendered to futility) and widespread plastic surgery (women who refuse to give up).  Telling women “Hey, fatty, just go on a diet” isn’t very helpful because most women tie their value to their looks, and therefore rejecting a woman for her looks means rejecting her wholesale.

Second, Deans’s statement that “God is the only person that judges” is the kind of statement that makes the hairs on evangelical ears stand on end for traces of impostor-ism.  Deans may be relatively new to the faith and therefore has not yet become fluent in Christianese, but the proper way to say what she said is, “I felt God calling me to this ministry to other women, to help them heal their self-image issues that they are burdened with in this culture of superficiality.”  Saying “only God can judge” is tantamount in Christian circles to saying, “nyah, nyah, you’re not the boss of me!”.  It’s much better to frame anything controversial as a “calling,” which is very personal and therefore nearly impossible to refute.  Plus, by labeling something a “calling,” you get irrefutability PLUS Christian cred by the implication that you and god are tight.