-Over the years, I’ve received countless emails from female fans thanking me for providing them with insight into the mind of the twentysomething male.  This was never something I set out purposely to do and, quite frankly, if I represent the typical twentysomething male, our entire civilization is fucked.  Nevertheless, I began to consider the facts:  I am a twenty-seven-year-old single guy and possess the unique ability to communicate with tens of thousands of people at once.  Perhaps, if I was able to codify some of this so-called “insight” about my gender, I could provide a much-needed service to chicks around the world.  And that’s when I decided to create the Girls’ Guide to Guys – a handy hook-up manual from the dude’s perspective.  You can call it “The GGG.”

-Guys typically have unreasonable expectations.  It’s not unusual, when asked if a girl is attractive, for a guy to tell his friend, “She’s cute, but if she lost like, say, thirty-five pounds, she’d be slammin’.”  We actually believe that if a girl throws back a few Lean Cuisines, she can accomplish this feat.  On the other hand, we will steadfastly refuse to change anything – our weight, our hair, or our underwear – to satisfy a chick’s even slightest preference.  Our appearance is non-negotiable, no matter what the consequences.

-Guys learned in the late twentieth century that girls don’t actually mind one-night stands, they just don’t want it to feel like one.  That’s why modern man evolved the ability to “lay groundwork.”  Laying groundwork is as simple as initiating a series of texts or MySpace messages with a girl about seven to ten days before contact is likely to take place.  This, we believe, weakens the girl’s defenses by extending flirtation over a longer time period.  Groundwork is, in essence, the opposite of a booty call.  While a booty call is spontaneous – a shot in the dark fueled by alcohol, groundwork is pre-meditated and thus harder to brush off when it inevitably blows up horrifically in my face.

-Guys operate under the Code of AFS.  Ladies, if a guy has ever tried to hook up with you in a public place, or put his finger where it shouldn’t go, or asked if your roommate – who could use a couple of Lean Cuisines herself – wants to join in the fun, he’s merely following protocol: Anything For a Story.  Nothing whips a pack of males into a frenzy faster than hearing a compatriot’s hilarious tale of perverse debauchery.  The dirtier and more outlandish, the better.  The Code of AFS also requires complete disclosure.  Even if a guy promises a girl he “won’t say anything about what happened,” it’s a sure bet that story will spread to his friends faster than at breakfast the morning after a frat party.

-Guys can always sound interested.  No matter how dull her job, inane her jokes, or boring her banter, if I’m attempting to get in a girl’s pants, I can feign curiosity about whatever the fuck she’s talking about.  Guys do this because we’ve found that walking away glassy-eyed in mid-conversation tends to be a turn-off.  As a raconteur and someone who is generally inquisitive anyway, sounding interested is usually pretty easy for me (unless the girl is a doctor, which I have a thing for – then I don’t have to pretend at all).  But in general, if you’re a girl who works in law or event planning, or who makes asinine comments such as “I like the Mets and Yankees equally,” please be aware that every male you’ve ever spoken to in your entire life was faking it.  Just a heads up.

-In the end, The GGG will be beneficial to both women and men.  Some guys may posit that revealing the tricks of our trade destroys our competitive advantage.  On the contrary, I believe that the more informed a girl is, the more approachable she becomes.  And let’s not forget – chicks aren’t stupid.  By my calculations, girls are, on average, about fifty times more intelligent than us guys.  I was reminded of this fact a few weeks ago when I was telling my friend Christina how, by utilizing some of the aforementioned tactics, I totally had this girl in the palm of my hand.  To which Christina astutely replied, “How do you know she’s not the one playing you?”  Damn, I thought to myself…that’s a good point.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-The notion that girls cannot be trusted to tell you if another girl is attractive was proven to me several years ago.  I called my gym to schedule a massage and the receptionist offered me a choice of three female masseuses.  I asked her which one was the cutest and she replied, “Definitely Jennifer.”  When I showed up a week later, I found out that Jennifer was pregnant.  Very pregnant.  Like ten months pregnant.  Either the receptionist was fucking with me, or she didn’t realize that pregnant by definition means “not cute.”

-Next week marks my one-year anniversary of moving from New York to Los Angeles.  That means the statute of limitations on telling girls, “I just moved here” is about to run out.  More distressingly, it also means that it’s much more difficult to pull off the trusty “Let’s go back to my place – you can be the first person to see my apartment!” line.

-My friend Holly was driving up La Cienega the other day, dog in tow, when a bee got in to the car and sent both Holly and her dog into a hysterical panic.  As she swerved in and out of traffic while trying to simultaneously swat the bee and calm the dog, Holly decided that her next course of action should be not to simply pull over, but rather to call her boyfriend.  Her boyfriend of course could not understand a single word she was screaming, but even if he could, was helpless to do anything, since, after all, he was not in the car.  This, my friends, is why I am single.

-Longtime readers know that since I loathe speaking to actual humans, I try to buy as many necessities online as possible.  As such, drugstore.com is one of my favorite web sites.  And, as an added bonus, they often give you free samples with your order.  The only downside is that the free samples are usually lotions – lotions no normal man would nor should ever use.  Thus in the past year I have accumulated a stockpile of exotic creams and balms under my sink that will terrify the first girl that stumbles upon them – doubly so because she’ll assume they’re all recent purchases since I told her “I just moved to LA.”

-Ladies, does your boyfriend, husband, brother, son, or male co-worker constantly adjust his crotch area?  Well, guess what – we all do that.  It’s genetic.  It’s a package deal that came with our, uh, package.  Listen, if you want us to keep the toilet seat down for no good reason, we get to scratch our balls.  That’s just the way it’s gonna be.

-And, finally, as much energy as guys expend chasing chicks, we also spend a significant amount of time avoiding those we don’t want to see.  Most guys are quite adept at evading girls – which is not surprising given how so many of us seem naturally selected for the very purpose of repelling them.  When a girl I’ve been trying to avoid calls, you would not believe the shit I come up with: “Oh, uh, hey Jane.  Where am I?  You know what’s funny?  No one here knows the name of this bar.  And there’s no sign.  And none of the adjacent streets have signs either.  But you should—” and then I hang up mid-sentence (which gives it a feel of authenticity), shut my phone off, and pretend the battery died.  Women, of course, have a much more elegant method of avoiding certain guys – they don’t bother talking to them in the first place, a devious tactic I call “pre-emptive avoidance.”  And so, The GGG remains a working document for now.  In fact, it may only be considered complete, I lament, when it’s the girls, not the guys, who are begging, “Fuck me.”

HOME