For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.

‘Without any mental deliberation, picture the average female porn star. Just let her spring into your mind’s eye looking however she looks. Can you see her?’

I can’t recall how I first heard about the Internet Adult Film Database—the self-proclaimed ‘premier resource for information about the American porn community on the web’, but for the longest time I knew I wanted to plunder its treasure trove of juicy information. It holds the records of over 120,000 porn films and 115,000 adult performers and is the adult equivalent of the Internet Movie Database. In a nutshell, if you’re a fan of porn or porn stars and want to look up almost anything to do with either—whether it’s the release date of Dude, I Banged Your Mother 6, or the first time Courtney Cummz had sex on film with a black man—you go to IAFD.com.

The database started out as a labour of love for Dutchman Peter Van Aarle, who in 1981 began keeping records on index cards about the porn films he watched in his home town’s adult cinema. By 1999, he’d teamed up with other X-rated record keepers to form IAFD—a place where a handful of international contributors compile masses of information on porn stars and their films, while site visitors are welcome to submit corrections and suggestions—the Wikipedia of porn, if you will. In 2011, it was visited by 20 million people¹, one of whom was me.

Fast forward a year and I’d found a way to (somewhat nefariously, but with honourable intentions) extract thousands of records from the database. Now the treasure trove was split wide open and reams of information was spilling forth into my Excel spreadsheets—names of performers, their heights and weights, their races, the sex acts they perform on film…everything. Finally I was able to scrutinize adult performers in a way no man, despite regular attempts to do so, had ever managed before, and find out once and for all which stereotypes about porn stars are true, which are bogus, and what these men and women have been doing for the last forty years. The results of my analysis, apart from the article you’re reading now, are the biggest infographic I’ve ever created (definitely check out it out if you’d like a colourful overview of every single result) and a pretty comprehensive report on the whole endeavour, both of which you can see at the bottom of this page.

Now, on with the show.

A brunette with a B-cup named Nikki

Here’s what a typical porn star’s record looks like in the IAFD database. My data set combined 10,000 of these—7,000 female and 3,000 male. By filtering and averaging the metrics I’ve highlighted on the image, I got the facts and figures you’ll read throughout the rest of this article.

The average male and female performer are the same height as the average American man and woman: 5’10″ and 5’5″ respectively.² However, porn stars are quite a bit lighter. At 117 lbs, the average female performer is a considerable 48 lbs under the national average for women, and the average male, at 167.5 lbs, weighs 27 lbs less than the national average for men. So, just how were these porn stars’ weights determined when they were typed, probably with one hand, into the database?

IAFD’s data is culled from various sources, including performers’ modelling profiles and the information they give during interviews in the porn films themselves.³ So presumably at some point the heaviest woman in my sample, who weighs 719 lbs (about the same as two giant pandas),⁴ and the lightest woman, who weighs 10 times less, at 74 lbs (the same as the average American 10-year-old girl)⁵, mentioned their weights, and an owl-eared fan heard them and rushed to the database to pop them in.

I thought that maybe if the women are overestimating how light they are, they might also be a bit too generous when reporting their measurements. It turns out they probably aren’t though, because the most common bra size for a female porn star is a surprisingly handleable 34B. Not double-D, not even a D. Double-D actually came in 4th, behind B, C and D. The most common set of measurements for the women was 34–24-34.

So, if the average female porn star is a 5’5″ woman who weighs 117lbs and has B-cup breasts, what colour is her hair? Blonde, presumably, if my friends’ guesses were anything to go by.

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Apparently not. Dark-haired porn stars outnumber blonde ones almost 2-to-1.

Of course, the vast majority of the fair-haired performers dye their hair, because only 5% of Americans are naturally blonde,⁵ but the fact that most female porn stars don’t choose the blonde bombshell look is interesting, I think. The notion of most porn stars being busty blondes (as opposed to brunettes with B-cups) must either be a carryover from a cultural stereotype (that the most sexually adventurous and available women are blonde with big breasts), or an indication that when someone thinks of the average porn star, the vision they see is an amalgam of a few of the most famous adult models, who do fit the busty blonde mold: Jenna Jameson, for instance.

We’re slowly building the image of the true average female porn star. So what colour is her skin? I chose quite an elaborate method to showcase the breakdown of female porn stars’ races: 5,000 of their headshots, each extracted from their IAFD profiles, arranged in a colour wheel to show the proportion of each race in the porn star population.

Behold: the colour of porn. Click to view the expanded version.

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In actual fact, the proportions of each race match the general American population almost exactly, despite the fact that race is still heavily fetishized in porn. Many women hold out on when they do their first ‘interracial’ scenes until the time and money are right, and interracial scenes are given their own category at industry award ceremonies.

Apart from differences in the average heights and weights of performers, race seemed to make pretty much no difference to any of the other averaged stats. For instance, the data shows that the average age of a woman when she gets into porn is 22 years old—and it has been for the last 40 years—and that’s the case for all women, regardless of race. Men have been progressively getting into the business at a younger age, though: in the 1970s their average debut age was 29, but now it’s 24. Porn stars of both genders have also been progressively retiring earlier: in the ‘70s, men stayed in porn for an average of twelve years, and women for nine. Now men on average quit after four years, and women after three.

More basic than the question of how long performers stay in the business, is how they reach it in the first place. 90% of legal American porn is produced in California’s San Fernando Valley.⁶ So from which of the other forty-nine American states are young women flocking to get there?

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As you can see from the top ten rankings by state (enlarge the image above), there’s a conspicuous absence of porn stars who hail from the West-to-Mid-West part of the country. California, on the other hand, is the birthplace of one-third of all female porn stars—that is, if the birthplaces porn stars’ claim as their own are in fact accurate. I can imagine a lot of women, even when specifically asked where they grew up, would prefer to declare that they are from California because that’s where they’re now based, than hint at where their family and friends probably still live. Or maybe the convenience of being on Porn Valley’s doorstep is enough of an incentive to explain why the vast majority of performers are true Cali girls.

When I analyzed 5,000 reviews of escorts, I worked out that the most common name for a woman working in the sex industry in the U.K. (on the escorting side of it, anyway) is Chloe. I was therefore pretty excited to find out what the most common porn star names are, given that these too are self-selected pseudonyms. Do adult performers use the classic ‘combine your first pet’s name with the street you grew up on’ method? (Pud Rutland—at your service!) Or is there another method to the creation of their alter-egos?

Nikki Lee and David Lee—the most common first and last names of porn stars. A nice coincidence that they share the same last name. It means if these hypothetical hedonists were to marry, a name change wouldn’t be needed.

Lee is only the 24th most common last name in the U.S.,⁷ which suggests that porn stars choose their stage names strategically. Veteran performer Annie Sprinkle (not her real name) had this to say on the topic in an interview last year:

“The big trend was doing a takeoff on celebrity names like Angelina or Jennifer, but that came in the ’80s and ’90s. Many girls take on celebrity names, funny names, super-explicit names, elegant classy names, or girl-next-door like ‘Sunny Leone.’ But all of these names imply sexual fantasies.” ⁸

Indeed, female porn stars definitely seem to choose last names that evoke notions of femininity, sexiness and sweetness (Love, Star, Rose), while men go for stronger, more masculine ones (Steel and Stone). Arnold M. Zwicky, Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, confirms my suspicion in some of his lecture notes: ‘[performers’] choices are very far from a random sampling of…names current in the United States, or of current American family names.⁹

The two remaining jigsaw pieces when building the visual image of the average porn star, based on the information IAFD has to offer, are tattoos and body piercings. It turns out porn stars of both genders have more of each than an average person of the same age in the general population. 43% of porn stars have a body piercing (13% more than average) and 45.5% have at least one piece of body art—9.5% more than average.¹⁰

We now have our average porn stars: Nikki and David. They’re of normal height, but both weigh less than the national average. Nikki has smaller breasts than you might expect and she’s a brunette. She got into the business aged 22 and is originally from California—or at least, that’s where she now lives. David got into the industry aged 24.

There’s more to them than their appearances, though. They’re porn stars for a reason—what they do on film.

‘Let’s talk about sexy, baby. Let’s talk about D.A.P.’

Sometimes when I hear people railing against porn, declaring it as the downfall of society, a poison infecting masculine minds and demeaning female ones, I wonder what kind of porn they’re talking about. To me, porn seems a lot like sport. I don’t mean the sex in it looks like a sporting activity (maybe it sometimes does, but that’s a separate point), but rather that there are as many types of sex in porn as there are forms of sport. Take synchronised swimming. This could be seen as lesbian porn, or ‘solo scenes’, in which women casually masturbate for your viewing pleasure. Next consider a vigorous game of badminton: this might be your standard boy-girl scene. Pretty vanilla stuff, with maybe a dose of anal sex thrown in if the match is really heated. How about a gory mixed martial arts fight? That would be comparable to a 10-man midget gangbang, maybe. They’re all sports, all types of sexual activity, but they differ wildly in who’s involved and what they’re doing with, or to, each other.

So when I hear somebody claim that porn is ‘degrading’, I can’t help but ask: which porn? Is an anal scene involving three men and one woman more or less degrading than a scene in which three women have sex with strap-ons? How about a solo scene in which a woman appears alone? And if they’re equally degrading because they’re all part of a the same industry, is homemade porn that couples sell on their own personal websites part of the same monster? Much like sport, or violence in films, or cruelty to animals, I don’t think you can really drill down into the topic on an intellectually respectable level until you’ve strictly defined your terms.

Female porn stars dictate the type of sex they have by listing in their modelling profiles the acts they’re willing to perform on camera.

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Notice that the two women above differ in what they’re up for. The lady on the right is pretty diverse while the one on the left is a bit more discerning.

These terms and acronyms are used by industry insiders, like agents, performers and directors, to decide what kind of sex happens in scenes (with the more ‘out there’ ones paying considerably more)¹¹, and they’re also used by fans of porn to keep track of what their favourite stars are doing on film.

IAFD lists the sex acts each performer does in a film next to the scene credit in their profile. By stripping out these terms into a separate spreadsheet, I was able to get a really good idea about how many women do certain sex acts at least once in their careers.

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There are probably enough percentages there to write five other articles, but the anal sex one is particularly interesting, because unlike some of the others (fisting, I’m looking at you), anal sex is an act that gets talked about a lot in ‘real life’. Porn is often blamed for warping men’s minds and making them believe that anal sex is better than vaginal sex, or that all women should do it. So, how does the 62% of female porn stars do an anal scene at least once stat compare to the non-porn, real life equivalent?

Well, in 1992 a large national survey reported that only 16% of women aged 18–24 had tried anal sex.¹² By 2010, another major survey, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, reported that the percentage of women who had tried anal by age 24 had risen to 32%,¹³ and one third of those had done it within the last month. So anal sex appears to be growing in popularity both in and out of porn—whether there’s a causal relationship there, it’s tough to say. Women in porn have been doing anal sex sooner over the last few decades though. I noticed that in the 1980s, they waited about two years after getting into the business before they did anal on camera; these days it’s more like six months.

I’m getting a little butt-heavy now, I know. So let’s give breasts a chance. To compare the popularity of butts versus boobs in porn, I created two lists of synonyms: one for asses, one for breasts.

I then searched the IAFD database to see what number of film titles contained each word from the lists (making sure to not include films referencing anal sex in the butt count).

Here’s the volume of each graphed over the last 20 years.

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It looks like the asses have it, although in 1995 butts and boobs almost converged—statistically, I mean.

I used the same method to also investigate which female sex roles have been most popular in porn titles.

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Teens really wipe the floor with the rest, although one could argue that many of the other roles could be teen-aged (well, 18 or 19, in legal porn). MILFs (Mothers I’d like to Fuck) coming in second place surprised me. They seem to offset the youth of the teens quite a bit—or do they? Just how old is the average woman who appears in a MILF-themed porn flick? Well, I found out by sampling 100 movies from the database and viewing the profiles of the women who starred in them. The average age of a MILF in porn is thirty-three. 20% of the ‘MILFs’ were 20–25 years old, 7% were over 40, and 4% were over 50.

I wasn’t sure what to think about that result, so I looked up the average age of a first time mother in America. In 2006 is was 25 years old (22.6 in Mississippi).¹⁴

So porn, for all its ludicrous film titles and laughable plots, isn’t completely unreasonable when it comes to the casting of fuckable mothers.

It’s nice to see wife coming in third place, too, especially for fans of the institution of marriage. Unfortunately, on further investigation, I discovered that without exception every film title containing the word wife revolved around the concept of a man having sex with a spouse who wasn’t his own. Never mind.

The concept of selectivity in sex acts doesn’t apply to men in porn. They either do boy/girl scenes or they don’t. Everything else is up for grabs (and they do it for about a third of the women’s pay). Another big difference between men and women who do porn is the ratio of each that regularly gets booked to do scenes. A relatively small pool of male stars, who are known as top woodsmen, get booked to do a large majority of films. I noticed two results from my analysis that back up this point.

First, of the 100 most prolific porn stars of all time (that is, the ones who have starred in the most films), 96 are men. Next, the ten most prolific male performers, on average, have slept on-screen with 1,013 different women each (45 a year for an average career length of 22.4 years). Whereas the ten most prolific women on average have slept with 148 different men (8 a year for an average career length of 17.7 years). Nina Hartley, for instance, who made her porn debut in 1984 and has starred in more porn flicks than any other woman on earth (938), has slept with 199 different men on film. Tom Byron, on the other hand, who has more film credits than any other man (2,549), and who made his debut only two years earlier than Hartley, has slept with over five times more people of the opposite gender than her: 1,127 different women. Men in porn—in an almost absurd parody of the masculine stereotype—really get around.

It’s not easy for a man to break into porn and join the ranks of the top woodsmen, mind you. To do it, you usually have to bring a woman into the industry, or know a guy who knows a guy. It’s much easier for women to get into the skin business. However, according to some anti-pornography websites, the majority of women who try porn get the hell out of it right away.

“Most girls who enter the porn industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again.”

- Luke Ford (former pornography gossip columnist), speaking on CBS News.

That quote appears thousands of times on Google, used by people who believe porn is the devil’s work to get their message across: it’s horrible and hurts women. But is the statistic it mentions even true? Do the majority (over 50%) of women who try porn leave it after doing one film because it’s so completely soul-destroying?

Using my data set I knew I could find out. The actual number of single film quitters is between 10% and 30%. It’s difficult to settle on an exact figure, because it differs depending on how you sample the women, but one thing’s for sure: most women don’t quit after one film—in fact, the majority (at least 53%) do three or more. So, to update the quote with the facts, do most women do three films and then quit because the experience is so humiliating and painful? Perhaps. Or maybe they just don’t like it and stop.

Questions like why men and women get into porn, why they get out of it, and if they’re psychologically different to non-porn people, are beyond the scope of my analysis. Other people have tried to find out though. A recent, well-publicised study that surveyed female porn stars, concluded that they appear to have higher levels of self-esteem, social support and sexual satisfaction than the average woman, as well as a higher chance of being bi-sexual and having tried 10 different types of drugs.¹⁵

Whatever the case, the IAFD’s goal of cataloguing porn stars will go on, even if my time scrutinizing them is—at least in this capacity—over.

Well, actually, not quite. I’d built up a pretty good mental picture of the average female porn star, but what does Nikki Lee actually look like? She doesn’t look like anything of course, because she is a combination of 7,000 women. But maybe mixing the appearances of ten of the most popular women in porn¹⁶ would come close to giving her a face. Here she is.

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The Visuals

I’ve created an infographic that combines all of the results from my analysis of porn stars (some of which I’ve not written about above). It’s available to view below in various sizes. I’ve also included some blown up sections from it, like the ‘race wheel’ facial morphs, and the birthplaces.

Direct Links:
• Small — 1000px wide
• Medium — 1300px wide
• Large — 1500px wide

Direct Links:
• Small — 1000px wide
• Large — 1300px wide
• XXL — (Contact for higher res images)

Direct Links:
• Medium — 1000px wide

Direct Links:
• Small — 1000px wide
• Large — 1300px wide

The Full Report
If you’d like to receive the expanded report PDF for this article when it becomes available, please drop me a note with your email address through my contact form here.

(I can’t guarantee when it will be available, but if you’re on the list, I promise you’ll receive it.)

A Big Thank You To The Experts at ScaleFactory.com
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Sources

The data used in this analysis was extracted from The Internet Adult Film Database.

<sup>1. http://gramponante.com/deep-inside-the-iafd-preserving-porns-history-interview/
2. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf
3. http://www.iafd.com/faq.asp
4. http://library.thinkquest.org/J003238/endangeredanimals.htm
5. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/average-child-weight-by-age.html
6. Pitman, Joanna. On Blondes. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley
8. http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/2000surnames/index.html
9. http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/pornstar.pdf
10. http://www.people-press.org/2007/01/09/a-portrait-of-generation-next/
11. http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-female-porn-stars-get-paid-for-different-types-of-scenes-2012–11
12. BMJ 1995;310:540.1
13. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf
14. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db21.pdf
15. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2012.719168
16. Based on the rankings found at FameRegistry.com at time of writing</sup>

Is online dating a different experience for men than it is for women?

To find out, I conducted a 4-month experiment in the US and UK using 10 dummy dating profiles.

Here’s what happened…

Only eating and sleeping could be said to have a stronger grasp on the steering wheel of our daily behaviour than the thing in our heads that is constantly urging us to find love and have sex. But even an insatiable appetite and overwhelming tiredness are no match for the sudden arrival (or breakdown) of pure romantic love, or unbridled sexual lust. These are, after all, the states of mind that inspired every one of our direct ancestors to relentlessly pursue love and sex until they succeeded at least once in getting their genes into a new generation. We are each the product of an unbroken string of successful fuckers and lovers, so it’s no wonder fucking and loving pervade our thoughts as completely as they do.

The advent of online dating, then, must have seemed like an incredible idea. Whereas in the past the pool of single men a woman could potentially meet and attract was limited by who she happened to physically be around during daily life, now it was exponentially larger. Now the number of men she could date was limited only by how far she would eventually be willing to travel to spend time with them in person. Dozens of suitors turned into thousands, or even millions.

However, things turned out to be more complicated than that. Just as freshly-online businesses, expecting to amass untold fortunes in a new, global market, found themselves in competition with internet businesses that they would never have otherwise had to compete with, so too did online daters face the prospect of having to stand out as special and attractive amongst a much larger pool of singletons than they were used to. Whereas before a man just needed to be the best looking guy at work to get a date with a colleague, now he needed to be in the top 10% of all men to get a date with one of the women in his city.

The expanded horizons offered by online dating don’t equal unrestricted access to a ready and waiting list of beautiful people. Every man and woman online still has criteria that must be met by people who want to date him or her, and every guy and girl is still in direct competition with every other person of their gender. In that case, then, is the acquisition of love and sex online just as easy or difficult for men and woman as it is offline? Or does this new social arena amplify the dating frustrations each sex has struggled with since the dawn of time?

To find out, I decided to peek behind the curtain and get a glimpse into what online dating is like for men and women who are of varying levels of physical attractiveness.

Things were about to get sneaky.

How many unsolicited messages do men get compared to women? And what difference does their physical attractiveness make to each man and woman’s success?

Phrased another way, do women have it a lot easier than men, and do hot people in general have it the easiest? I know what you might be thinking: yes and yes. It’s hardly the unsolved question of the century. However, at this early stage I didn’t know exactly how big the gap between men and women might be, or how different a relatively unattractive person’s online dating experience might be compared to someone more blessed in the looks department. Nor did I know what to expect to see in the unsolicited messages, because men rarely get to see the messages women receive from hopeful boys, and women rarely witness the reverse. I’d have a privileged, and somewhat immoral, view into both.

Morals aside (where would space travel be without the unpleasant demise of Laika the Soviet space dog?), I set about creating ten dummy dating profiles on the world’s fastest growing online dating site: OKCupid.

I’ve used OKCupid for several months for my own love/sex life, so I was very familiar with how its system works. There are three main elements to having a presence on there: your written profile, your photos and the inane interesting questions you’re supposed to answer to help the matching system pair you with likeminded people. It’s a pretty flawed concept and one that I’m sure is only there to help them serve you relevant advertising, or make you feel like you have a hand in sorting through the horde of freaks that inevitably lurk in the shadows.

Anyway, for each of the ten dummy accounts, I answered 25 of OKCupid’s questions in exactly the same way. The questions ranged from the obvious to the ridiculous.

I also gave the ten accounts very similar sounding usernames, again, so that nothing would immediately differentiate them from each other (I wanted the photos to do that, because it was the influence of gender and appearance on the number of unsolicited messages received that I was interested in).

For the next element of the accounts, the written part, I created one single solution: a bunch of answers to OKCupid’s default sections that ALL of the ten dummy accounts would have. In other words, all ten would have the same written profile, once again so that this part of the accounts wouldn’t sway people towards or away from sending messages.

The written profile I created didn’t give any clues as to the owner’s gender and it included a few ‘hooks’—mentions of party tricks and whatnot—to give people something to talk about in their messages.

Here it is, if you’d like to read it.

Now for the interesting bit: the profile pictures. I selected five photos for the boys and five for the women that depicted men and women who I personally thought varied in physical attractiveness.

Then I gave the ten photos to three other people (male and female) who would act as independent judges of the girls’ and boys’ looks by ranking them from best looking to…not the best looking. Pleasantly, for the experiment, all three judges agreed on the rankings.

At this point, I had ten profiles with similar sounding usernames, all with the same answers to 25 questions, with the same written profile and personal stats (all heights consistent, the same level of education, etc.), and each account had a different photo of a man or woman.

I then herded our collection of fake people onto Deception Airways and pretend-flew them to five different US cities, where they would be allocated in pairs. The best looking man and woman in one city, second best boy and girl in another, and so on.

Then I waited.

I must admit, I was excited. If you ever want to feel like a small-time god (albeit a somewhat meddling, devious one), I recommend creating multiple dating profiles.

Before we get into the results of this first stage of the experiment, here are a couple of interesting online dating facts that hint at the complexity of meeting people online.

• While online daters rate their photos as relatively accurate, independent judges rate approximately 1/3 of the photographs as not accurate.^[1]

• Female photographs are judged as less accurate than male photographs, and are more likely to be older, to be retouched or taken by a professional photographer.^[1]

• Men lie more about their height, and women lie more about their weight, with people farther from the average lying more.^[2]

• In a survey of online dating users, over 80% of participants registered concerns that others misrepresent themselves.^[2]

To be fair, my tinkering with the system wasn’t really helping with that last statistic. Anyway, science and all that! Onto the results.

After being online for 24 hours, the ten accounts between them had amassed 90 messages. Remember, for this experiment, it was all about unsolicited messages—I sent no messages to anyone and never replied to ones received.

As you can see from the graph above, the women got many times more messages than the men.

• Each woman received at least one message, but the two best looking women received 581% more messages than the other three combined.

• Only one man received any messages.

If this was a sign of things to come, then it seemed a sure thing that the women would get messages without any extra effort on their part, whereas the men’s inboxes would be markedly less full.

The above graph shows the results after the profiles had spent 168 hours online.

• The most contacted woman had almost 17 times more messages in a week than the most contacted man.

• Three of the men had no messages, despite their profiles being viewed about 25 times between them.

• The women’s messages outnumbered the men’s 17 to 1 (mostly thanks to the two best looking women).

• The two best looking men received 5 fewer messages than the 3rd and 4th best looking women.

In summary, when it comes to receiving unsolicited messages based on gender and photos alone, women wipe the floor with men, and very attractive women sandblast the floor with the fellas. They kill. Their inboxes heave with hellos and how are yous.

To make sure it wasn’t just an American thing, I refuelled the Deception Airways jet and relocated all of the profiles to the United Kingdom for a much longer stay. 4 months in fact.

By this point it was obvious that women on OKCupid, and probably all dating sites, get a lot of messages from men, and if a woman happens to be very pretty, she’s swamped with attention. This is not breaking news, because most women who have tried online dating quickly discover what it’s like for females online. It’s the same as offline, except exaggerated. If they are hot, the girls can pick and choose which men they interact with. If the men are hot, they will get some unsolicited messages, but the attention they receive will be several orders of magnitude less than their female counterparts.


The worst looking men and women, unfortunately, are in a similar boat to each other—the ‘Not Much Attention’ boat, which is scheduled to arrive at Love Island, but no one can be sure of when.

I left the 10 profiles dotted around England for over 4 months while I spent time on other projects, like analyzing the last words of 478 death row prisoners, then I returned to the accounts to see what had happened in my absence.

As you can see, the results after 4 months echo those from a week into the experiment.

• The women as a group received over 20 times more messages than the men.

• The two most attractive women received 83% of all messages.

• The two most attractive women probably would have received several thousand more if their inboxes hadn’t have reached maximum capacity.

• It took 2 months, 13 days for the most popular woman’s inbox to fill up. At the current rate it would take the most popular man 2.3 years to fill up his.

Apart from seeing the difference in message volume, this experiment also allowed me to see the content of messages received and sent by men and women. My impression, after reading several hundred in the women’s inboxes, is that most men compliment the attractive women a lot, they make reference to something in the woman’s profile (you would not believe how many times men mentioned the party tricks and ‘Arrow’ the cheetah from the generic profile I wrote), or they ask a general question about travel or something equally boring.

They are rarely, if ever, imaginative and I sympathise with any woman who has struggled to find any diamonds amongst the rough myriad of messages she is bombarded with each and every day. Then again, what can a man say that hasn’t been said before?

He has to make a good impression and show he’s attractive without coming off as a creep, without looking needy and without saying the same thing as every other chump.

What is the perfect message a man could send to a woman to maximise his chance of blowing her away and creating interest?

If this experiment has shown anything, it’s that men online face extreme competition with other men in getting noticed by women, especially the very attractive women.

So, what’s the best possible message a man could send to stand out from the crowd and wow the woman? I decided to write what I thought would be a very good first message and send it to the most attractive woman on OKCupid I could find (after a 3-minute browse).

The message needed to:

• Demonstrate creativity, intelligence and a great sense of humour
• Be totally different to anything she may have received before
• Be obviously unique and not a cut-and-paste job
• Show that I’ve read her profile and absorbed facts about her
• Not be needy!

I ended up writing a very long message that weaved lots of facts from the recipient’s profile into a faux-news script, as if news readers were talking about her live on television. As she read the message, she’d notice more and more clever references to her hobbies, dress sense and so on.

Here’s what I sent.

And here, happily, is her reply.

The fact that the first stage of online dating is so heavily stacked in women’s favour doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any easier for them, compared to men, to reach the end goal of pure love or perfect sex. They may have the pick of the bunch to begin with, especially if they happen to be really attractive, but they can still only date one man at a time—they must still filter the largely undifferentiated onslaught of male attention into yes and no piles. Then the yes pile has to be sorted through in much the same way as anyone else does it—by talking, bonding, finding common interests, realising there’s been a big mistake, or a wonderful discovery.

In the end men and women probably do have it about equal, it’s just a bit different for each.

Oh, and if you’re a man, it’s in your best interest to make sure your messages are really well-considered, creatively-constructed and demonstrative of your intelligence, humour and lack of neediness.

Easy. Right?

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I think this experiment roughly demonstrates the differences in the volume of messages women receive, especially attractive women, compared to men. However, it was by no means scientific. For it to have been, it would have needed much more than 10 profiles. You could also argue that it tested the same thing for both sexes (looks), whereas in reality, women mostly judge men on criteria other than how they look. Therefore, perhaps a fairer experiment would be to create a profile for men that advertises the traits in men that women pay most attention to. These would be, according to the studies I’ve read, their job, income and social status.

It should also be noted that once the accounts were relocated in England, I stopped logging into them for the following several months. This means that, over time, other users may have noticed that the accounts were lying a bit dormant and subsequently been put off the idea of sending a message. However, because all accounts would have shown the same “Last Online” date, I don’t think this could have skewed the final message totals in any meaningful way. The women still beat the men.

Finally, I know that certain aspects of this experiment are a bit shady and underhand, but apart from not having any messages replied to, the general OKCupid user base shouldn’t have noticed any discrepancies in their online experience.

That’s it. For now.

References
1. Journal of Communication, Vol. 59, No. 2. (2009), pp. 367–386, doi:10.1111/j.1460–2466.2009.01420.x

2. Pers Soc Psychol Bull, Vol. 34, No. 8. (2008)

Roughly once every 22 days, a convicted killer is executed in America’s busiest death house: the Huntsville “Walls” Unit in Texas. He cannot choose his final meal, but once strapped to the execution table, with IV lines in his arms, a chaplain’s hand on his ankle, and a microphone suspended above his head, he is allowed to choose his final words…
 

If you want to know what death row prisoners say before they die, you go to Texas. Well, actually you go to the website for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Once there, you click Public Resources, Death Row, Executed Offenders. Texas, you see, as well as being America’s capital for killing killers (Texas has executed more prisoners than all other U.S. death penalty states combined¹), also maintains a publicly accessible online record of every murderer that is put to death within its borders. You can click on any of the 481 persons listed and see their mugshot, read about the crime that landed them on death row and, perhaps most interestingly, read his or her final words—what they said literally seconds before a deadly cocktail of chemicals intravenously flooded their bodies, knocked them out, collapsed their lungs and stopped their hearts. 8 out of 10 prisoners choose to say something before they’re dispatched² and reading their statements is a sombre and sometimes chilling experience.

In an effort to discover what the average prisoner says before they are killed, and maybe even why they say it, I scraped all of the data from TDCJ’s database of executed offenders. At the time I did this, in February 2012, there were 478 inmates listed there—475 men and 3 women. The combined word count of their final statements totalled over 40,000, which is the equivalent of almost 5 hours of continuous speaking. 5 hours of ‘I’m sorry’, ‘so long’ and ‘goodbye’. Before we get to the results of the analyses I ran on the offenders’ last words, some background information on the death penalty in Texas could be of interest.

To wind up on Texas’ death row, you have to commit capital murder. Well, more accurately, you have to be found guilty of capital murder. This means that you’ve probably killed someone in a premeditated way, not in a ‘crime of passion’. The victim is completely blameless and may have been killed merely because they stood in your way or were a witness to a crime you were committing.³ Other sure-fire ways to end up at Texas’ “Walls” Unit, where all condemned prisoners take their final breaths, are by killing a child under 6 years of age, murdering a police officer, or killing more than one person in a related series of events. Convicted killers who meet the death row criteria aren’t immediately sent to the death chamber though. In Texas, they spend an average of 10.6 years at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Polunsky unit in Livingston—death row. Here they go through several stages of appeals, which can go on for months or, usually, years. The record for the longest amount of time spent on death row is currently held by David Lee Powell, who was executed on June 15th 2010, after spending 11,575 days (31 years) on death row⁴.

 

 
Powell declined to make a last statement.

When every avenue for reversing the guilty verdict (trial phase) and the death penalty (punishment phase) has been exhausted, the prosecution asks a state district judge to set an execution date, which will tend to be two to three months away.⁵

Executions in Texas always occur on a weekday, and begin at 6pm. They used to happen at midnight, but in 1995, friends and relatives of the victim were allowed for the first time to watch the executions, so the time was brought forward to better accommodate their attendance.

On the day of his execution, a condemned prisoner is not allowed to be interviewed by anyone from the media and, thanks to Lawrence Russell Brewer, is no longer allowed to request a special last meal. Brewer was executed in September of 2011 for torturing and killing a 49-year-old handicapped black male in 1998, but not before he requested the following for his final meal: two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette, a large bowl of fried okra, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream, and a pound of barbecue with a half loaf of white bread.

He ended up not touching any of it, which incensed Texas officials so much that they then revoked the ‘special last meal’ right of all soon-to-be executed prisoners. Now they have to eat from the same menu as everyone else on the row.

“At 6:00 p.m. sharp, the prisoner is taken from the holding cell outside the execution chamber. He is walked into the chamber and strapped to the execution table, face up, his arms extended on supports. When the prisoner is in place, guards escort the two witness parties into their respective rooms. IV’s are then inserted into both arms and a saline solution is started. After the saline has flowed for a few minutes, everyone leaves the chamber except the prisoner, the warden, and the chaplain. The warden usually stands behind the prisoner. The chaplain stands at his feet, with his hand on the prisoner’s ankle. This is when the prisoner is allowed to make a last statement. He speaks into a microphone suspended just above his head.” – Texas Execution Information Center

And so to the question of what these men, and a couple of women, say before they are not-so-much ushered through death’s door, but pushed. The main things I wanted to find out when I created the corpus of the 478 final statements were the most frequently used word and the most used 3-word phrase. Would the word God be uttered more than Sorry? Would innocent outweigh guilty?

It turns out that the word prisoners in Texas most use before they are put to death for their crimes is love. Their last statements are littered with loves. Prisoners tell their families, who are often right there, behind glass, about to watch their condemned relative die, that they love them. In fact, family is the second most frequently spoken word, with thank coming in third.

Reading through the 20 or so most used words, you can pretty much form a generic last statement that sums up the sentiments of a large majority of the men who are executed in Texas. “[04 – Sorry.] [05 – God], [06 – Just] [07 – Forgive].” In actual fact, the 3-word phrase prisoners elect to include in their final statements the most is I love you.

9.5% of the prisoners executed in Texas between 1982 (when the lethal injection was brought in) and 2005 claimed they were innocent of the crime that they were strapped to the gurney for committing. This is a sobering thought, especially when you consider that since 1973, 140 men have been exonerated from death row because their conviction was overturned and they were acquitted at re-trial or had all charges dropped, or were given an absolute pardon by the governor based on new evidence of innocence. DNA evidence played a major role in establishing innocence in 17 of these cases.⁶ These facts naturally bring to mind the main question that has surrounded the death penalty for hundreds of years: do the benefits of killing the guilty definitely outweigh the risk of accidentally murdering the innocent? The justification for the death penalty acting as a deterrent to criminals has long stood on shaky ground: 88% of former and present presidents of the country’s academic criminological societies say that it’s not.⁷ And in a 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners, it was found that a clear majority of voters (61%) would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder.⁸

Of course, these statistics mean very little, if anything, to the men who have ended up on death row in Texas. Through a toxic combination of bad luck and bad choices, they have extinguished every bit of the freedom that other people, non-murderers, take for granted. The only thing certain for a death row prisoner in Texas, when all hope for exoneration is gone, is that he will get to choose his final ‘last’—the concluding remarks to his calamitous life.

I have collected all of the results from my analyses of the prisoners’ last words and created an infographic to show them. It also includes additional facts about the death row process.

If you’re interested in this subject and want to learn more about death row, its inmates, and their last words, please check out the sources listed below. Also, try to watch a documentary called Into the Abyss.

Sources

^{1. Death Penalty Information Center — http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf}

^{2, 5. Texas Execution Information Center — http://www.txexecutions.org/primer.asp}

^{3, 4. Texas Execution Information Center — http://www.txexecutions.org/primer.asp}

^{6. Death Penalty Information Center — http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row}

^{7, 8. Death Penalty Information Center — http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf}

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Compliments are ubiquitous conversation devices; we give and receive them every day. But what ingredients must a statement contain to be classed as one, and—more importantly—is there a recipe for the perfect compliment?

Over Before it Began

Mr. Hopeful tried to oil the social wheels by using a compliment in his fleeting conversation at the bar, yet it instantly morphed him into Mr. Hopeless. Why should a compliment, a seemingly positive statement of recognition, have such a negative effect? And could the man have reframed the compliment in a way that splashed the oil in the right places and got the wheels of interaction turning? The answers, it seems, lie in the study of human discourse.

The Science of Saying Something Nice

Researchers have been studying the ways humans use words for decades and it turns out language couldn’t play a more central role in our highly-social lives.

“[We] form, develop, and dissolve relationships through talk; we express personality, give social support, indicate power, demonstrate interdependence, persuade, cajole, quarrel, invite, reject, divorce, propose, proposition, and propitiate primarily in talk.”

— S. Duck, Meaningful relationships: Talking, sense, and relating.

One of the most interesting areas of inquiry into human language must surely be compliment behaviour. It sounds like such a simple idea: Person A says something nice to Person B about Person B. But in reality compliments can be incredibly complex conversation devices. To show you what I mean, let’s undress the compliment from the bar to see what it looks like naked.

Linguists love categorizing things and, by analyzing thousands of nice things people say to each other, they’ve developed three ways of easily pigeon-holing any given compliment. The first step in coding a compliment is working out if it’s formulaic or non-formulaic. You see, perhaps the most surprising thing about most compliments is how similar they are to one another—in fact, they’re downright unoriginal.

“Two-thirds of all compliments [include] one of five adjectives: nice, good, beautiful, pretty, and great. In addition, two verbs (like and love) [occur] in 90% of compliments that contain a positive verb.^[1]”

Most compliments not only contain similar words, they also employ common syntactic patterns. That is, they use the same sentence structures. Half of all compliments use this one^[2]:

Take a second to think about that—50% of all compliments use the same four-part blueprint. You could take a quartet of words and shuffle them one-armed-bandit style to produce endless combinations of compliments using this single sentence structure, and that’s exactly what people do half of the time without even realising it.

So why are so many verbal pats-on-the-back plagiarized? The prevailing theory is that it isn’t so much a product of speaker laziness, but more a strategy for improving the recognisability of compliments. If the primary function of compliments is the ‘establishment or reaffirmation of common ground, mutuality [and] solidarity’^[3] then it’s vital the recipient quickly recognizes the statement as being a compliment. If the positive statement goes right over his or her head, it fails to function as a compliment at all and its potential benefits (increasing social solidarity, triggering reciprocity, etc.) are lost. So the common syntactic structures of compliments, the most common of which you’ve just seen, act a bit like street signs: everyone shares an understanding of their meaning and knows how to respond when they’re faced with them.

The other two syntactic structures (which, including the first structure you’ve just seen, account for 85% of all formulaic compliments^[3]) are as follows:

So, let’s get on with coding Mr. Hopeless’ compliment using the first piece of criteria. Your hair is really nice. That’s a standard [Noun phrase] {is or looks} [intensifier] [adjective] right there, so it’s formulaic (which at least made recognizing it as a compliment easy for the woman at the bar, even if she didn’t seem to value it very much). Let’s move onto the next step in coding a compliment: the topic.

There are 8 different topic categories a compliment in the wild can fall under. They are:

Mr. Hopeless’ compliment topic, because it made reference to the brunette’s nice hair, gets coded as appearance. That’s sort of unsurprising, as the majority of compliments use the appearance and attire topics, with performance, personality, and possessions accounting for most of the rest.^[3]

An interesting bonus fact here is that women compliment each other on appearance more than any other topic, whereas men usually swap compliments about their possessions.^[4] So in a sense both genders live up to their evolutionary stereotypes.

The next coding criterion is whether the compliment is adjectival or verbal—this depends on whether the adjective or verb carries the positive evaluation. So, for example, an adjectival compliment might be “Your singing was really good!” because the positive evaluation is focused on the singing (the adjective). The verbal equivalent would shift the focus onto the person giving the compliment: “I really loved your singing!”^[5]

Interestingly, women are much more likely to use a personal compliment (‘I love your shoes’) than men (who are more likely to say ‘Those are nice shoes’). Only 20% of women’s compliments are impersonal, whereas men take the impersonal route 60% of the time, especially when complimenting other guys.^[6]

Mr. Hopeless opted for an impersonal, adjectival structure when he said that the woman possessed nice hair, instead of specifying that he liked or loved it. So, the complete coding for his ‘Your hair is really nice’ line is that it was a formulaic, appearance-based, adjectival (impersonal) compliment. Now you know! But it doesn’t end there.

There are two sides to every compliment, the giver’s and the receiver’s, and linguists don’t disappoint when it comes to categorizing things for both parties.

When someone recognizes a statement as being a compliment that’s aimed at them, there are a dozen ways in which they can respond. They are:

In unconsciously choosing how they react to a compliment, a person has to walk a thin line between allowing social solidarity to be created or maintained (by acknowledging the compliment as true or meaningful), and avoiding self-praise (by dampening the sentiment somewhat or putting a disclaimer on it). Most people have had the experience of giving a compliment, only to have it effectively thrown back in their face by the recipient totally disagreeing with it—Mr. Hopeless is one of those unlucky people—and it doesn’t feel good. In fact, if a person unwittingly chooses the incorrect response to a compliment, social distance (instead of social solidarity) can be created.

The woman at the bar’s response was “Oh, thanks [appreciation token]. I kind of hate it [disagreement]. The hairdresser totally ignored what I asked for [reassignment].” If her walking away a moment later wasn’t enough to demonstrate that the compliment fell through the cracks into social oblivion, then this deconstruction of her response surely is. She couldn’t have said much more to downplay the whole thing. And why might she want to minimize the force of the compliment? One likely and common reason is because she didn’t want to enter into the unspoken social contract an embraced compliment can create between the giver and the receiver. She didn’t want solidarity in that moment; she preferred to maintain social distance instead.

As long as you don’t let it invade your social life too much, it can be a fun game to listen out for compliments and code them, and their responses, using the above system. You quickly see trends appearing and you’ll notice that each person you meet or know will tend to have a ‘compliment style’ of their own. For instance, they might tend to use personal compliments (I think, I love) more than impersonal ones, or repeat the same words again and again (amazing, nice, really).

So, compliments tend to be predictable—they’re tools for minimizing social distance, maximizing solidarity, and they follow certain patterns to promote instant recognisability. Likewise, there are only a finite number of ways in which a person can respond to a compliment and the method they choose will tend to reflect how they feel about the giver of the compliment, the topic of the compliment and themselves. With all that in mind, is it possible that an ideal combination of the compliment coding criteria exists? Is there a Goldilocks-style ‘just right’ mix of the topic, formulaic/non-formulaic and personal/impersonal ingredients that elicits the best feeling from the recipient every time?

The Art of Giving Compliments

Using what we’ve covered about the coding of compliments as a base, I’m going to lay out some new criteria for how I think a compliment should be constructed and presented. The goal of any compliment, remember, is to create, maintain or improve the feeling of solidarity between the giver and receiver, so the following considerations have been devised to maximize the chance of that happening.

Consideration #1: Motive

People are surprisingly good at recognizing not only what others are saying (the explicit and implicit message behind their words), but also why they’re saying it. It’s like every time a person receives a compliment their brain runs an unconscious check on it: Why did they say that? What are they trying to achieve by saying it? The optimal conclusion you want a person to come to when you compliment them is that you have no ulterior motive, or at least not one that they could find unpalatable, and that the sentiment of what you’re saying aligns with the statement you’ve used to express it. For instance, if you want to tell someone you really like a new piece of clothing they’ve bought (and that’s all), but their response is ‘Oh, you want to borrow it?’ [Request interpretation] then you’ve probably botched the delivery of the compliment in some way. Your motive (genuinely expressing your approval of the object) got lost somewhere.

Consideration #2: Relevancy

Mr. Hopeless (do you think he’s getting fed up of being called that yet?) used a compliment whose topic was pretty much entirely arbitrary. In other words, it’s very unlikely the woman’s hair was so remarkable that it deserved direct attention right there and then; hence it was difficult for the woman to see the compliment as being relevant to the moment in time it left the man’s lips. And, when a compliment isn’t relevant it isn’t spontaneous (an impulsive reaction to a thought or feeling). A lack of spontaneity hints at hidden motives too (the man simply wanted the woman to feel nice, to like him more), which is a contradiction of the first consideration.

When a compliment is interpreted by its recipient as being a method of achieving a social result they aren’t interested in or primed for, they are liable to reject or deflect it.

That leads neatly onto the next point.

Consideration #3: Receptivity

This is perhaps the most important thing you can consider when paying a compliment: how primed for receiving and enjoying the compliment is the recipient? The woman at the bar wasn’t primed at all; she had no reason to desire the verbal gift the man gave her. A lack of desire is like an absent appetite; there’s nothing to be fed, no void that craves to be filled. (As an aside: This is a mistake almost every single man makes when he’s trying to attract a woman. He tries to attract her before demonstrating that he’s attractive. This leaves all his work ahead of him, whereas if he had shown he was something special before indicating his interest, the attraction process would have been much easier, because the woman would have been craving his attention, instead of merely bearing it.)

The thing that most guarantees that someone is primed to receive and enjoy a compliment is if he/she feels positive about the person giving it and actually wants his/her approval, recognition and respect.

Consideration #4: Creativity

There’s absolutely a time and a place for formulaic compliments. As I explained earlier, they’re easily recognizable as what they are and they’ll usually get the job done just fine. For instance, if you’re eating at your partner’s parents’ house and they’ve cooked a meal and you say ‘This tastes great,’ the force and sentiment of that sentence will elicit the right kind of response from the host. There’s no need to make it non-formulaic and personal by saying ‘I’ve really enjoyed eating this meal and savouring its flavours’ (that is, unless you really need them to know the meal is exceptional). The compliment should match the desired response in strength and sentiment.

There are other times, however, especially when you’re complimenting your romantic partner (or a prospective one) that you are better off being more creative with your compliment construction and delivery. Intriguingly, studies show that compliments passed within sexual relationships tend to actually be less formulaic, probably because a deep, shared understanding of one another exists between partners^[7]—compliment recognisability is less of an issue and the emotions tend to run deeper.

You can increase the positive impact of a compliment by presenting it more creatively (hinting at a fact or feeling instead of plainly stating it), which allows the recipient to feel like they’ve decoded the amazing meaning of what you’ve said, as opposed to having it shoved down their throat. For instance, imagine someone gives you a sweatshirt on Christmas morning. You could (and probably should) state how much you like it after it’s unwrapped, but a much more creative compliment would be to put it on several hours later and let them ‘accidentally’ see you in it. The latter statement, although non-verbal, communicates that you like it in a way that is much more likely to elicit positive emotion in the present-giver, because it’s a creative demonstration of your feelings.

In Summary

It’s interesting and fun knowing how to code compliments. It can give you an insight into how people think and how they feel about you and themselves. However, I don’t recommend surreptitiously planning compliments in advance or double-checking that your responses to compliments fall under certain categories. That’s a recipe for disaster; you’ll probably end up showing an ulterior motive, sounding irrelevant and lacking the kind of spontaneous creativity that makes good compliments great.

It’s better to leave the really academic side of coding compliments for those social occasions where you find yourself bored and in need of some private entertainment, and during the other times—when you’re (hopefully) receiving compliments and dishing a few out yourself, simply aim to let your words and body language openly reflect the positive feelings that make compliments so…complimentary.

The brunette rejoins her friends, who part to allow her back into the group. She turns to face James, a work colleague she’s been dying to talk to privately all night.

“Well that was awkward,” she says, smiling.

“What?” James asks.

“Oh, just some guy at the…well…is my hair different tonight or something?”

James puts his drink down and conducts an exaggerated inspection of her head. He gently spins her around, saying nothing, only squinting, analyzing. She’s smiling like an idiot. “It looks all in order to me.”

He picks up his drink again while she whips her hair back into place. Surely he can feel that tension too. He starts to speak, “You know what I did notice…come in a little closer…” he motions for her to step forward towards him, “…what I did notice earlier…well, I thought I noticed…” he’s leaning forward now looking right into her eyes, “…is your eye make-up. You’ve started doing little flicks at the ends there with your eye liner, right?”

That smile breaks out again across her face. “Well aren’t you Mr. Observant!”

“So I’m right?”

“Yep, you got me.”

“Nice. I really like it. Like Cleopatra.”

A wave of excitement passes through her body as she tries to hide how happy James has just made her.

References

^{1, 2, 3. Wolfson, N., & Manes, J. (1980). The compliment as a social strategy. Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication, 13, 391–410.}

^{4. Holmes, J. (1988). Paying compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 445–465.}

^{5. Wolfson, N. (1981). Invitations, compliments and the competence of the native speaker. International Journal of Pragmatics, 24, 7–22.}

^{6. Herbert, R. K. (1990). Sex-based differences in compliment behavior. Language in Society, 19, 201–224.}

^{7. Eve‐Anne M. Doohan & Valerie Manusov (2004): The communication of compliments in romantic relationships: An investigation of relational satisfaction and sex differences and similarities in compliment behavior, Western Journal of Communication, 68:2, 170–194}

In the final weeks of 2011, I delved once more into the secretive world of the UK sex industry.

This time my focus wasn’t on men who pay for sex, but the women who supply it. So I reached out to hundreds of British escorts with one request: tell me about your life. And—on the condition that their words remain anonymous—they did.

But I got the impression from other comments that a few punters and girls weren’t such big fans.

Making Contact

There are roughly three kinds of ‘working girl’ in the UK. The first can be found on the street. She is the classic prostitute: a night-worker, selling sex to men who pass in cars and on foot. She has low prices and high risks. The next works in a parlour or brothel alongside other women and she does ‘incalls’—men visit her place of work and she provides them with a massage and a happy ending of one flavour or another. The last is the escort. She mostly does incalls but in her case the men flock to her apartment to indulge in pre-booked sessions of varying durations. The escort will either belong to an agency, which advertises her services, sends clients her way, and takes a cut of the money, or she’ll run everything herself—as an independent.

It was the independent UK escorts I decided I’d contact, for two reasons. My hunch was that I wouldn’t have much luck asking agencies to pass on my request to their catalogue of courtesans. I thought it would be better to bypass the middleman and reach out directly to the women I wanted to contact. The other reason was one of convenience. I knew that only a certain percentage of women I contacted would end up contributing to my research, so it was vital I get in touch with as many as possible—hundreds, in fact. I found three massive directories of independent UK escorts and set about harvesting their contact details. This is a good way of acquiring email addresses, but it isn’t strictly legal or respectable. In fact it’s tantamount to spamming, but I couldn’t think of any other option. I’d be as polite as possible in my email, make it clear that my intentions were strictly honourable, and hope for the best.

It was while collecting the details of thousands of women listed in the online directories that another idea occurred to me. Every one of these escorts had written a 100-word description of herself and her services for potential clients to peruse. There were 1,207 women. That equalled over 120,000 words I could analyze in the same way as the million I’d used in my first study, Dirty Words. I could therefore compare the words escorts use to describe themselves to the words punters use to describe them in their reviews, which I’d already discovered through my first investigation. Would the women emphasize the same traits men so often mention, like being slim and blonde? Would the women’s most mentioned height, bra size and dress size match the men’s? I decided I couldn’t pass up the chance to find out. I’d analyze the 1,207 self-written escort adverts while waiting for the responses to my spam email—I mean, my polite request for the ladies’ valuable input.

The email I sent out explained and linked to my original piece on the punters and outlined what I hoped to achieve with the follow-up. At the end I gave a link to the survey, which I hosted on my site and protected with a password, which was also supplied in the email (it was fidelio). The last thing I wanted was for the survey to be completed by anyone other than the escorts.

I spent a long time putting together the survey’s questions. I wanted to make sure I didn’t guide the respondents into answering in ways that might be pre-empted by my expectations or prejudices. To get around this, lots of totally open-ended questions were included. Others were multiple choice, but I think the most important ones provided a blank slate for the women’s answers. Here are the questions I asked.

And here’s what happened with the email and survey over the next couple of weeks.

The Results

While less than 5% of the women I emailed ended up completing the survey, the thirty who did do it gave more detailed, frank answers than I could ever have hoped for. Honesty was flooding into my inbox and it was illuminating.

I started by building up a basic profile of the women who responded.

While the responses trickled in, I’d also entered into email conversations with a few of the women. A couple wanted to know how much they would be paid for completing the survey (and promptly bid me farewell when I told them nothing), and one—the first woman to email me back, in fact—had a complaint to make about my use of the word girl in the survey’s questions.

“…using terms that individuals or groups use to self-describe when you do not belong to those groups is generally viewed as less than desirable behaviour (‘queer’ and ‘nigger’ being good examples). I suppose if many of us weren’t old enough to be your mother it would maybe be less jarring too…”

Indeed, several of the women who responded to the survey were old enough to be my mother, but there was also a small handful who could be my little sister—the youngest was 20, a student, and had only been in the business for 3 months. This was the first sign of many that amongst the escort population there is huge variation to be found, not just in age, but in every aspect of their lives, life stories and opinions.

My job as a writer is to find an interesting thread and tease is out. Uncover the ‘story’ and focus a light on it so that readers know what they’re looking at and maybe even what they should think. Admittedly some of the survey’s questions were included on the off chance that they’d produce such a juicy morsel for readers to chew on. For instance, the question of how old the respondent was when she lost her virginity. The average could go either way. If it came out as shockingly young, then perhaps women who are sexualised early in life are more likely to become call girls. If it was surprisingly old, maybe women who start their sex lives later feel more inclined to be sexually adventurous. The actual average from the survey results? 16.5 years old—just 6 months under the national average for women. A negligible difference. That became the running theme when I continued to sort through the responses. Where I expected to find controversy, there was none (29 of the 30 women entered into the job by choice), and where I anticipated a mundane answer I got shocked practically into silence (just wait until you see the list of ‘most bizarre sex acts requested’).

A full list of averages taken from the survey, as well as many of the women’s open-ended answers, can be seen in the (huge) infographic at the end of this article. Here, though, is a brief overview of what the women had to say on all of the most pertinent topics raised in the survey. I’ll also include some of the results from the analysis I ran on the escorts’ 1,207 adverts.

Personal stats

In Dirty Words, I found out that the average escort, according the things the punters most frequently made reference to in their field reports, was a size 8, 5’6”, blonde, with 34D breasts. The survey, however, changed the shape of that average a little—the average dress size given by the women was 12. Also, the majority had a variation of brown hair, not blonde. The height remained the same at 5’6” and the bra size was only one cup size smaller than ‘advertised’, at 34C. What’s quite interesting is that in their adverts, the average bra size mentioned is identical to what most men give in their reviews—both 34D. It seems like this might be a sort of ideal, in both the escorts’ minds and the men’s.

The majority (23/30) don’t use their real first names when they work, or advertise themselves using their actual ages—they shave off 3 years on average. 3.5 years was the average time a respondent has been in the business, while most plan to leave it in 2.5 years’ time.

Below is an image that shows the words the women used most often to describe themselves in their adverts alongside the words used by men to describe the escorts in their reviews.

As you can see, the average escort as described by punters is a slim, nice blonde. The average escort as described by the average escort is a sexy, sensual lady. The men mentioned the women’s hair, breasts and eyes the most, whereas the women mentioned their eyes, hair and smile. One difference in word rank that I think is especially interesting is that the guys’ number one word, slim, ranks way down at number 11 on the escorts’ list. The women’s list also contains many more adjectives relating to personality and intellect, like genuine and intelligent. And unlike the men, they don’t use the word nice to describe their attributes, preferring perfect and great instead.

The Work and Clients

On the days she works, the average escort sees two clients, for two hours and makes £290. She works a 10-hour week, which puts her yearly salary at about £50,000 (which I’m happy to say matches the prediction I made in Dirty Words). The question of how the women first entered the industry produced some very interesting answers. Quite a few responded to an advert put out by an agency after mulling over the idea for a while. One woman started after being offered (and accepting) £1,500 for a night of sex by a guy in a bar. A couple of the woman had more depressing reasons, like needing to support a child during hard times, and being forced into prostitution whilst homeless as a kid. Billie Piper’s TV portrayal of ‘Belle de Jour’, the high-class escort-turned-author, was also mentioned as a direct inspiration for getting into the business. However, at least five of the women said in other answers that Piper’s depiction of life as an escort was wildly inaccurate.

“Some people seem to think it’s something out of “Pretty Woman”, others expect us to have pimps and/or be coerced in some way. The complete clowns think we do it because we love sex.”

When asked if there is an average ‘type’ of client, certain trends emerged from the women’s answers (the men tend be white and in their mid 40s), whereas other common factors were downplayed. Instead, many of the women said the same thing: point to the guy in the street you’d least expect to be a punter—he probably punts.

“They seem to come from all walks of life and are all ages. My youngest regular is 18 and the oldest is 78.”

In fact the ‘point out a punter’ game was something the second youngest respondent told me about by email. She said she sometimes plays it with her boyfriend. They point out guys in turn and guess if they pay for sex. When I read that she had a boyfriend, I immediately wondered how he felt about her job, so I sent her a list of questions about it. It turned out she couldn’t answer most of them, because he doesn’t know. She keeps it a secret from him.

The women described the average client’s attitude towards sex as primarily being respectful, nervous and eager. I got the impression from the way the escorts spoke about their clients that they do respect the men who pay them for sex, but it’s mostly a professional type of respect, much like the kind any seller would have for a buyer. This sentiment shone through in the women’s answers to two questions in particular: would you consider being friends with a client? Most would, but only select clients. And would you ever consider dating a client? 77% said no, they wouldn’t. Only 4 of the 30 had dated a punter. Whether this is because escorts tend to see their clients as being undesirable in some way is anyone’s guess. It could just be that, like in the rest of life, you don’t mix business with pleasure. Clients are clients.

When I asked why they think the men choose to pay to have sex with them, their responses were mixed but did contain one theme in particular: the men don’t get the sex and intimacy they desire elsewhere, or simply prefer it without the other ‘baggage’ of a relationship.

“Who was it who said ‘they pay us to go away’? We’re their parallel universe, providing a bit of escapism.”

One respondent had an exceptionally succinct summary of her clients’ motivations for using her services.

“Because they require an uncomplicated emotionally detached sexual service as opposed to an affair. This allows them to cognitively justify the act of adultery and therefore alleviates feelings of guilt and betrayal.”

The Sex

When analyzing the 5000 field reports for Dirty Words it became obvious that there are three main things a punter considers when deciding whether or not an escort is worth recommending and returning to: her looks, her sexual skills, and her attitude. The last of those three, her attitude, is the rope that binds the other two together. The more enthusiastic and ‘into it’ the woman appears to be, the better. This makes complete sense when you consider that the most popular type of sex men buy from escorts is the ‘girlfriend experience’, which includes a sense of sexual closeness and intimacy you’d more expect from a girlfriend than a pornstar or hooker. So, in reality, how do the women really feel about the act that defines their jobs? Is their enthusiasm a charade? Are their orgasms faked? And do their favourite sex acts match their clients’?

The answer to that last question is ‘sort of, but not entirely’. The majority of the escorts like vaginal sex and fellatio without a condom, which match the clients’ top two favourite sex acts. The clients’ 8th favourite act out of 16 was anal sex, which ranked as the escorts’ number one least favourite. I asked the women what factors they consider when certain sex acts, like anal sex and ‘cum on face’ are listed on their sites as being at their ‘discretion’. The main response was the clients’ hygiene, followed by how turned on they feel at the time.

I was really interested to see what the responses would be for ‘How often do you genuinely feel turned on?’ and ‘How often do you fake orgasm?’, but they turned out to be anything but clear cut. 13 of the 30 women ‘sometimes’ genuinely climax and a similar number reported ‘sometimes’ feeling turned on. The rest of the women’s answers were spread across the other options pretty equally. It seems, as in standard sexual relationships, variation abounds.

Another pair of questions I relished the chance to hear answered was:

- What is the most unusual sex act a client has requested that you’ve performed?
- What is the most unusual requested sex act that you’ve declined?

Billie Piper’s portrayal of Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl shows her indulging a host of bizarre and baffling sexual fetishes on behalf of her paying clients, but some of the things the escorts listed in their answers to the above two questions blew the script writers’ ideas out of the water. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you all of the most shocking (check the infographic for those), but here are a few of the more ‘colourful’ ones.

“Squashing his unsuspecting wife.” ✖ Declined.

“A client wanted me to lick his nipples for an hour.” ✔ Accepted.

“Put live frogs in my underwear and squash them.” ✖ Declined.

“Anal fisting.” “Ball bashing.” “Licking a guy’s anus.” ✔ All Accepted.

“Babysitting him while he pretended to be my child.” ✖ Declined.

“I had a client that used to hire a ballet studio, bring his own tutu, ballet shoes etc and I was the ballet mistress putting him through his positions and paces to the ‘Flight of the bumble bee’.” ✔ Accepted.

In Summary

The survey contained a lot of ‘how’ questions: How much? How many? How often? But it’s the ‘why’ questions that arguably stir up the most discussion. Why do some men pay for sex and why do some women sell it to them? In Dirty Words I made a summary of the male motivation for punting that, after speaking to the escorts, turned out to be too reductive. I presumed punters just want to indulge the most clichéd of all male driving forces: the whims of their dicks. As Sebastian Horsley (a man who slept with over a thousand escorts in his time) put it, they want ‘the sensation of sex without the boredom of its conveyance’ and while this is surely true to a very large extent, it still fails to account for the full range of reasons a man might pay for sex. There’s a world of difference between, say, a disabled man hiring an escort because it’s his only chance of sexual intimacy, and a businessman arranging an incall out of sexual boredom in between corporate functions. The only constant is the courtesan; the woman who supplies the valued service (or acts as the disposable product).

When I asked the 30 escorts what the benefits of the job are, the main one (27 mentions) was money, followed by being their own boss (22) and the working hours (20). The sex ranked dead last with only 8 women including it as a positive. Of course, there’s no reason that should come as a shock to anyone. How many people, after all, could say that they do their job first and foremost because of what it is and not what it pays? A minority, I think. 4 out of the 30 women said that their dream job—the profession they’d most like to work in if they could do it with no chance of failure—was that of an escort. The others listed jobs that anyone, of either gender and any background, might choose: writer, teacher, DJ, chef, vet, midwife, wife a billionaire.

The last question I asked the women was if they had any closing remarks about themselves or the industry. One escort said she hates everything about the job and fears that her stalker, who is blackmailing her, will tell her teenage kids about what she does. Most others, though, summed up their jobs as being wholly positive, if not as mundane as any other. They stressed the benefits of being paid so highly for doing so few hours of work, but also expressed a wish that their industry could be legalized and regulated like any other, or at the very least freed from the shackles of societal prejudice that seem to have surrounded it since the first time sex was offered for cash.

The Infographic

I’ve tried to summarize as much of what the women had to say about their lives and jobs as possible, whilst also including some of the results from my analysis of their adverts. However, practically every answer and average is included in the infographic I’ve created to accompany this article. The full version is massive, but worth reading through if you want more of the results than the above article provided. There are also a couple of versions showing just the illustration.

Please give the images a few seconds to load.

• Or SUPERSIZE full version (recommended for big monitors)
• Or SUPERSIZE illustration with text (recommended for big monitors)
• Or SUPERSIZE illustration WITHOUT text (recommended for big monitors)

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of the women who kindly spent an average of 52 minutes of their time completing the survey (and apologies to the several hundred others who got the email but weren’t interested).

Like this article? Please leave a comment or, better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept informed of my newest articles and projects. Cheers!

There is an online subculture of men who review their encounters with escorts using a frank, exhaustive style you’d associate more with reviews of hotels than sex. I analyzed five thousand of these ‘field reports’ to see what I could find out about the punters, their use of language and their outlook on sex for cash.

“As soon as Autumn walked thru the door, she wrapped her arms around me, pushed me on the bed and snogged me to death. As starts go this was pretty good.”

Step One: Choose the cities

Because my main goal with this project was to create averages of word frequencies, prices, session durations and so on, I knew I needed a lot of data. I don’t have access to a supercomputer or 6 months free to use Microsoft Word’s ‘Find and Replace’ function (which was part of the text preparation process), so I settled on the figure of 5000 reviews, 500 from each of the UK’s 10 biggest cities by population. These are (or were, according to last the census, taken in 2001):

“After a short wait, Juliet entered the room and was immediately up close and personal, touchy and feely. No two ways about it, this lady spreads happiness, especially in the trouser department.”

Step Two: Grab and prepare the data (boring!)

Actually, this step wasn’t totally boring. This is when I started to skim-read dozens of field reports and notice some interesting things. First was the way a lot of the punters write their reviews. The database punternet.com uses provides certain standard fields for the user to fill out and these cover specific facts about the booking, like how much it cost and what the girl looked like. A lot of punters seem to relish the opportunity to voice their views and go to great lengths to describe their experiences in detail—often graphic, hilarious detail. They don’t all write essays; some are more business-like, all about the facts. Like this:

“Great GFE 10/10. Great OWO. Passion 10/10. Eager to please. Clearly loves sex and it shows, loves her job. Treat her with respect and she will make u happy.”

GFE means girlfriend experience, OWO means oral without a condom. The punter subculture has a lingo all of its own and we’ll get to it shortly.

Other reviews are written like erotic fiction: the reviewer describes his booking in massive depth, with no details overlooked. I got the impression that some punters gained an additional sexual kick from the chance to retell their story. Either that or they had nothing better to do. 500+ words isn’t unusual for the ‘comments’ part of the report, which is typically where the punter describes the sex that took place. It was while reading the comments that I made my next observation. The punters often describe the girls and the sex they have with them in a way that wouldn’t be out of place on lastminute.com—it’s right to the point, highly superficial and everything you’d expect of a review that is meant to guide other men into making the right decisions the next time they fancy a punt. Case in point:

“Extremely unpleasant, appalling personal hygiene, stinking down below. Booked 2 hrs, couldn’t tolerate the odour. Asked her to wash below… Happily agreed, no better, agreed to cancel and refund the second hour.”

But there are very rarely, if ever, comments that could be classed as abusive, woman-hating or anything of the sort. In fact, a lot of the guys display attitudes that are not only highly complimentary of the girls, but bordering on sycophantic.

Again, though, if the service isn’t up to scratch, the punter will always let the community know: accuracy seems to be king, with flattery second and cringe-worthy outdated UK colloquialisms for sex acts and body parts coming in third, like ‘frig’,‘bonk’ and—brace yourself—‘cunny’.

“Gabriella came into the room as I was watching the porn, naked on the bed. I asked her to stand over me and strip, and then to frig herself while spitting at me. She was happy to do this.”

I’m sure she was.

Step Three: Analyze the results (interesting)

First, some figures. As you’ll see in the infographic on the next page, the average cost for a UK escort is £103 ($161) per hour and the average duration of a session is 75 minutes. During this time, the punters indulge in whatever sex acts they’ve agreed with the escort. These almost always seem to include oral sex without a condom. Penetrative sex without protection doesn’t happen or, more likely, just isn’t included in the reviews I looked at because of PunterNet.com’s guidelines for submission: “Reasons for rejecting Field Reports…The report stated that unprotected vaginal or anal intercourse occurred or was offered.” So it seems the admin of the site does have certain moral imperatives. A link to Crimestoppers is provided for anyone who suspects an escort might be underage or working against her will—there’s even a video about trafficking for visitors to download and watch.

All of this aligns with PunterNet’s advertised goal of “…promot[ing] better understanding between customers and ladies in hopes that everyone may benefit, with less stressful, more enjoyable and mutually respectful visits.” ‘Mutually respectful’ is an interesting term, I think, and it does seem to run through the field reports as a theme. Many of the most interesting reviews are ones in which the punter wouldn’t recommend the girl and, as a result, the girl responds with a rebuttal to put her side of the story across. It’s really rather civilised (but still frequently uncomfortable reading):

“This was the most unhorny punt I think I have ever had. Why he came to see me I do not know, because I don’t think he got anything out of it, I know I certainly did not. I think he killed it for me when I started giving him OWO. I had just got started when I smiled at him and asked him if this was nice and he replied ‘I’ve had better’.”

It’s while reading the rebuttals that one gets a slightly different perspective on the business. Clearly the punters’ reviews are their memories of the bookings, not the escorts’, who I dare say often have different feelings on certain matters to the men they’re having sex with. One rebuttal mentions how the client, without warning, decided to bite down hard on the girl’s nipple, which she didn’t take kindly to. This goes unmentioned in his retelling of the events that took place, but understandably features prominently in hers.

Rebuttals are few and far between though—87% of guys would return to the girl in their reviews and 92% would recommend her to other punters. This is a good time to talk about ‘other punters’. PunterNet is designed with the punter community in mind and the escorts they visit, but it’s not just online that the men rub shoulders. Many men literally cross paths at parlours and brothels.

“I should have walked away when they left me waiting outside the building for 10 minutes. When I did enter the flat I bumped into another punter who was just coming out of the room (not good etiquette).”

If you think that’s bad, you haven’t heard the half of it. Another reviewer mentioned being able to taste the dry saliva of a previous punter on the escort’s nipple while he sucked it. Yet he diligently continued, apparently only partly perturbed. While this casual approach to sharing juices and ‘sloppy seconds’ might not be the norm for punters, it does exist, which speaks volumes about the attitude they carry with them on every visit to a parlour or brothel. It’s a ‘punt’ to them, in both senses of the word. They take their chances and report back on how things go, good or bad, recommended or not. Like any online repository of reviews, it’s beneficial for both the buyer and the seller: good reviews mean better experiences for the men and more business for the women.

“Lidia is someone you need to invest in to get the ultimate GFE — however once she tunes into you then it’s all good. Great BBBJ, great sex in many positions. As always YMMV however always found her to be great fun and delivers.”

Terminology was the first thing I wanted to investigate when I had the idea of analyzing escort field reports. ‘Escorts’ is the first interesting word to consider—what does it mean? When I initially heard about escorting I presumed escorts always go on dates with the clients (hence ‘escorting’), however from what I can tell now the only way one could argue the punters are ‘escorted’ is towards an orgasm or two by the hand, mouth or ‘cunny’ of the working girl. The sessions are in-calls (a brothel, parlour or the girl’s flat) or outcalls (the man’s home or hotel) — trips to theatres or restaurants are practically non-existent. ‘Escort’, then, is a euphemism for prostitute in same way ‘curvy’ is used to mean fat. It’s the same thing, but with a lot of the negativity stripped out.

Punters and escorts have terms and acronyms for all of the most common, and a lot of the more uncommon, sex acts. PunterNet even provides a dictionary of terms and abbreviations for the more inexperienced johns, which includes gems like:

• Basket shopping: Observing the male organ through clothing

• Petticoat discipline: Punishing or humiliating a boy by dressing him as a girl.

• Vagina: Orifice of female sex organs

If the punters don’t know what the last one means I really don’t know what they’re expecting for their money – an anatomy lesson, maybe.

I used the full dictionary to draw up a shortlist of the most common sex acts punters buy and their associated terms and abbreviations, then checked which were the most mentioned in the 5000 reviews. Here are the top 20.

The fluid way in which the men incorporate these slang terms and abbreviations into their reviews hints at how immersed in ‘the hobby’ most of them are. It’s part of their world. They’re super casual about it too—you see the odd first timer writing a report, but most are serial punters with dozens of happy endings under their belts. One man, using the pseudonym ‘The Godfather’, has racked up 249 reports on the site over an 8-year period that have a total cash value of £30,768 ($48,391). Not so much a hobby for this Don Corleone of punting as a career. He has plenty of criticisms of the girls he hires though and seems to have made at least one working girl, called Blaise, an offer she could refuse:

“I asked for owo but she shook her head and replied in that strong Brazilian accent of hers ‘sorry beiby..I daon do’. Unbelievable. I’d coughed up 200 smackaroons to see this girl, going £50 over the limit that I usually set on myself and here she was, treating me like some stinking old tramp.”

Whether that was a fair assessment of this man of leisure is anyone’s guess. Blaise didn’t write a rebuttal.

Next page: Conclusions & Infographic →

There’s a curious form of temporary self-consciousness created by radically altering something about one’s outward appearance that gives the feeling of suddenly sticking out like a sore thumb. Whether it’s a drastically short fringe, or a new style of jacket, you swear even strangers you pass in the street will notice the change in you. But are you any more conspicuous after a haircut and while wearing your new spectacles, or is this quirky social sensation just a trick of the mind?

Just Short of Perfect

My favourite film is Taxi Driver—not a very original choice, I admit, but I like it. As with a couple of my other favourite films, I went through a pretty long period of obsession with it. I made it my mission to know all I could about every aspect of the film’s script, production, actors and props. I even went as far as using a Japanese middleman to ship me a recreation of the Vietnam-era bomber jacket worn by Travis Bickle (the film’s protagonist), complete with faithfully reproduced military patches and luxury padded lining. The makers of the jacket didn’t ship outside of Japan, hence the need for an intermediary to get it into my sweaty hands. Sweaty because I’d spent weeks tracking down the jacket and hours trying to make confused Japanese clothing store employees understand the words ‘Taxi Driver King Kong Company Jacket’.

I was mostly worried about the size. The process of sending the jacket back through my middleman to get a refund or replacement would have been almost impossible, so it was a case of crossing my fingers and hoping it would fit.

Eventually it arrived and I slipped it on very carefully. I was so eager for the whole thing to be a success that I awkwardly and audibly reassured myself that it wasn’t a tad short and that it wasn’t riding up at the back that much. It was fine! It’s a bomber jacket and they’re supposed to sort of leave the back of my belt exposed like that. ‘It’s totally wearable,’ I told myself, while scrutinizing it from all angles in my full-length mirror and occasionally tugging it down a little. ‘That’s £450 well spent.’

The only thing was, I’d become a bit blinded by the pursuit of the jacket. Now I had it on my back—sort of—I started to question whether I’d even feel comfortable wearing it in public. It wasn’t just a similar jacket to the one in the film, it was an exact replica, patches and all. Would I look like a wannabe anti-hero? The last thing I needed was to come off as an obsessive fan. I just wanted to look like I was subtly paying my respects to the infamous pimp-killing, prostitute-saving 1970s sociopath Travis Bickle.

‘But how will people know that I don’t actually think I’m Travis? They might shout at me in the street, call me a sad case. At least I can shout back “You talking to me?!” Wait, what am I thinking? Most people won’t even remember the jacket, even if they’ve seen the film. No, no. They will just think I’m one of these young army types who wears all the gear and has a massive collection of air rifles and whatnot, but absolutely no real affiliation with the military—just an affinity with the lifestyle. That’s as bad as the movie nerd thing. Maybe worse.’

I put the jacket in a protective bag and hung it up. New Hairstyle Syndrome—that weird feeling of self-consciousness caused by changing your appearance in a new, ‘risky’ way—had put a stop to my wearing of the special jacket before it had even properly begun.

As Travis would say: “Goddamn.”

Unreality Unravelled

The sudden social conspicuousness (SSC from here on) created by New Hairstyle Syndrome is a psychological feeling. It can be a help or a hindrance, it all depends on whether you consider the new aspect of your appearance to be good (a social asset) or bad (a social liability).

Good SSC can arise from almost anything, like wearing new, fashionable clothes; losing weight; or having your teeth whitened, while bad SSC could be caused by feeling bloated and fat, having an outbreak of zits, or chipping a tooth. The factor that links both forms of SSC, positive and negative, is that you feel like you’ve deviated from a former version of yourself. You’ve either moved towards an ideal or away from it. And if you perceive the change as being major enough, you then presume other people’s perceptions of you will be altered too. You think strangers will appreciate your new haircut as much as you do, and they’ll also be as condemning of the 10lbs of fat you gained over the Christmas period.

The funny thing about the reality of SSC though is how little of it is actually warranted. Your new hairstyle, in actuality, is only new to you and people who have seen and remembered the style that preceded it. Strangers have no idea that it’s different to how it used to look and therefore spend no time dwelling on the fact that it may or may not be a step in the right direction for your appearance.

For a long while the only part of visiting the hairdressers I worried about (albeit only a tiny bit) was the 4 seconds it took for me to exit the salon doors after the cut was finished. That brief moment was the only time I could reasonably presume someone might think about my hair, if only for about half a second, and if they did give it a thought it would only be because they’d seen me leave a hair salon. “He’s just had a haircut,” they might think. And that’s it. As soon as I was lost in the crowd, I was just another guy.

I’m not saying that some people don’t draw attention to themselves for either looking bad or good. Some people really do have awful hairstyles, or amazing dress sense, or incredible physiques. What I’m saying is that the vast majority of the time, feeling conspicuous because of something you change about your appearance is just a result of your mind projecting your own feelings onto the psyches of other people. Strangers usually have no reason to notice the cause of your SSC because nothing stands out to them as being unusual. An awesome pair of new shoes in your mind is just another pair of unremarkable shoes in theirs. Your primary focus is their background detail. Sure, the stranger might happen to recognize your new shoes as being really nice in their own right, but there’s no way they’ll feel the same sense of invigoration that you get from wearing them.

Another reason to take SSC less seriously than you perhaps might is because of the way first impressions are formed in people’s minds. It’s pretty rare that a single aspect of a person’s appearance dominates the perception a stranger has of them. A first impression is usually a combination of dozens of visual and auditory pieces of information.

Awful scarring, chronic acne, a shirt drenched by a whole bottle of ketchup, or a startlingly beautiful woman—these are the sorts of things that really get the attention of otherwise uninterested onlookers. These things and others like them differ enough from the norm to be worthy of attention, because they aren’t commonplace. Feeling SSC because of these things is understandable, because you actually are more conspicuous than the average person. It’s really just a bizarre quirk of our self-conscious minds that they so often consider relatively minor personal changes as being much more significant than they in fact are.

The Utility of Standing Out in Your Own Mind

To further illuminate the illusion of SSC, consider the following:

• Imagine dressing in your most casual, acceptable, unremarkable clothes. You aren’t pushing the envelope or showing off—you look utterly normal. Now you’re put on a plane and flown to an island in the Indian Ocean to meet the Sentinelese tribe—probably the most isolated group of people in the world. To them, your jeans, watch, trainers and belt buckle are totally bizarre. Everything about you, despite being perfectly mundane to you, is a mystery to them. They don’t even notice that your jacket is a bit short at the back.

• Look at a photo of yourself from 5–10 years ago. The chances are that something about your clothes or hair will stand out as either being a big mistake or something you couldn’t get away with today for fear of being mocked in the street. Yet back then you actually chose to look like that. You considered it the best way to physically express yourself.

So if SSC is usually a temporary mirage created by our minds to protect and pamper our egos, is it useful, or should it be ignored?

Positive SSC puts a spring in your step and a smile on your face, which can only be a good thing, even if the real reason for your good mood goes totally unnoticed by the people you meet. They might not notice your new hairstyle, but they’ll still register the confident vibe it has inspired in you.

The trick to utilizing SSC in daily life then, I think, is to understand how illusory and insignificant it is when it makes you feel bad and self-conscious, while fully embracing its empowering influence when it helps you feel good—even if that influence springs from a source only you are consciously aware of.

In the end, I squashed my New Hairstyle Jacket Syndrome by debuting it at a New Year’s Eve party. I even spent £75 on a pair of cowboy boots (which I’ve still only worn once) so my Travis Bickle outfit was totally authentic. The thing is, nobody really seemed to notice.

They were all busy laughing their heads off at a guy dressed as Ace Ventura.

If you’ve ever felt sudden social conspicuousness, please leave a comment describing what caused it…

The social significance and intellectual respect of women have come a long way since Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse in 1913 to further the suffrage movement.

However, there’s a certain type of advice, written ‘for girls, by girls’, that is undermining the cause with every trite, superficial recommendation it makes.

Every inquisitive boyfriend has leafed through his girlfriend’s magazines at one time or another. They’re a treasure trove of information and with even the most casual of inspections it’s immediately obvious what they’re all about. In essence they address the most common and ‘pressing’ female issues, namely how to look attractive and have successful relationships. This isn’t a big revelation and nor is it a bad thing; women as much as men need advice on how to live and prosper in our 21st Century world.

I was recently inspecting my girlfriend’s bookshelf while waiting for her to get ready to go out

(how’s that for a relationship cliché?) and noticed a book called Top Tips for Girls. ‘Top tips!’ I thought. ‘As advice for women goes, this book must surely contain only the purest and most helpful gems of wisdom for the fairer sex.’

To say I was wrong would be a gross understatement. What followed were several minutes of being floored and refloored by the some of the worst advice for women I’ve ever laid eyes on. Every recommendation was more ill-thought-out than the last.

What made it worse was that this book was a compilation of the best advice given by women on a website that was specifically designed…

God forbid!

Here are some of the wise words from the dating and relationships sections.

This first one comes from a woman who goes by the online name of ‘textinthecity’—a subtle nod to Sex in the City, I presume.

As lists go, this one isn’t hideous. It’s sensible and contains some decent attributes that any right-minded woman would certainly want in her boyfriend or husband. If I were to nitpick, I would say that it could do without the sentence fragments. ‘He shows you’ is great if the man in question is showing you his feelings, but not as ideal if he’s showing you his collection of Nazi memorabilia. And ‘he tells you’ is wonderful if he’s telling you how splendid you are each night when you return from work—not so good if he’s telling you to prance around in said Nazi regalia while he goose steps about the place. Clearly that’s unlikely to happen, but some extra specificity wouldn’t have gone a miss for this one.

Good advice score: 7/10

This list started fine—decent things you might expect a woman living in 2011 to live by. But then suddenly it degraded into a list of commands that would be more at home in 1928.

‘You impose a two-drink maximum on yourself.’

Why? Are the readers of Top Tips for Girls the biggest lightweights in the world, or are they liable to embarrass themselves and their partners at the first sip of their third drink?

‘You watch your language.’

A piece of advice more suited to an 11-year-old than a grown woman.

‘You say yes.’

Nope.

Good advice score: 3/10

And that’s as good as the advice from this book is going to get. Behold these clangers.

Amazing advice! But only if you add the word suicide after commit. I can’t even begin to work out a) Why Cheekster might think this is a good idea b) Why Kate Reardon, the person who collated these ideas into the book, would decide it was good too.

Good advice score: 0/10 (Not a single point. Not even for trying.)

‘Oh! It’s a comedy book!’ I thought after reading this one. So I flipped it over to check the back cover.

Reference!? Not comedy, but actually a reference book. Let’s ignore this toilet-based titbit. I’m sure it’s just an anomaly. Slipped through the net, so to speak.

I guess not. Anyway, let’s get back to real dating and relationship issues — the kind all women worry about.

I can imagine that kind of advice leading to a situation not unlike the following:

Boyfriend: I’ve loved these past few weeks.

Girlfriend: Mmm, me too.

Boyfriend: It feels like our relationship is developing so much, don’t you think?

*Girlfriend abruptly hangs up*

Girlfriend (to herself): Hehe, that’ll keep him keen.

Boyfriend: Hello? Well, guess not. I’ll go to the strip club with my friends after all.

Which I suppose would explain the next extract:

Ludicrous. Anyway I thought I’d finish on these two extracts. One directly follows the other in the book.

Woah, woah, woah. Wait right there.

Then right after that comes:

Hmm, let’s see. Some signs your partner is cheating might be that they are receiving flowers with no name attached, they always hang up the phone halfway through the conversation, they poop like a ninja and they frequently congratulate you for sitting while you pee.

Final thoughts

This book is objectively awful, but it’s not the only one. There are literally thousands of them out there, with new ones published every day, each packed full of inane, intellect-draining advice that has no place in any woman’s (or person’s) mind. Magazines are just as bad, if not worse, for attempting to help women conquer stereotypes and socially prosper, while at the very same time perpetuating the idea that women are harebrained, obsessed with beauty and genetically-programmed to fail with men.

Clearly there’s also some very good literature out there for women, and smarter girls have no problem with the crap I’ve dissected above because they simply avoid it — but even so, I think an upgrade of this kind of advice would be a very good thing.

Oh, here’s an extract that I simply could not understand no matter how many times I read it.

I must be missing something here. With interior design? Like, if he brings back lots of books on the subject and materials for sprucing up the place? Or does it mean if he comes back to your home, which happens to make use of interior design, then make sure the design doesn’t include lace and stuff? If you know what this nonsense is about, please leave a comment below. I’d love to know, just so I can be sarcastic about it.

Sigh. The end.

The universe seems to have a really clever, and frequently brutal, way of equalising good and bad. Every fresh relationship has the potential for giving its participants the greatest good there is: boundless, passionate, harmonious love. But the greater the potential for this bliss, the more massive the risk that it will all come crashing down. For every giddy person gently replacing the phone handset after a perfect transfer of positive feeling with their lover, there’s the trembling hand of another, doing the same thing after a heart-wrenching, relationship-ending conversation. The universe balances itself out.

If you’ve had your heart broken, you will have experienced emotions that are probably almost identical to countless jilted lovers who have come before you and countless more who will follow in your heavy footsteps. In thinking about my own experience of heartbreak, it struck me how similar it is to living through a physical injury. The shock, denial, suffering and healing are all almost identical in pattern. I’m not the first to think this, but I nevertheless decided it might be interesting to put the 8 stages of heartbreak into an image that compares each with a stage of a healing physical wound. Here it is:

Or supersize for a clearer view by clicking here

If you’ve had your heart broken or would like to share your thoughts on the ‘8 stages’ I’ve come up with, feel free to leave a comment below.

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