Undercover Sex Signals

Gentlemen, lest some of you feel you've been lax in neglecting to make passes at the lasses you've lusted for, relax. You see, you probably think that dame hunting is your responsibility every time you walk into a social jungle. Think again. Females luring males for the purpose of mating is part of nature's grandiose design. In the animal kingdom, females attract males by hooting, crowing, scratching, stomping, hopping, darting, wiggling, and a myriad of other sex signals. Human women do the same. Nature embedded sex signals in all females to propagate the species.

Take rats, for instance, and we've all known a few of those. But let's talk about the hairy four-legged ones that you find under that sink you haven't cleaned in a couple of years. The same researcher who conducted the famous studies that elevated the status of "the pickup" to thesis-worthy material, Dr. Timothy Perper, spied on a rat's pad to document their hanky panky.

First, the female rat sniffs the male rat, and, if she likes his, um, cologne, she faces him and gazes into his baby blacks for a few extra seconds. Then she stiffens her legs and does what is called a "hop and dart." Naturally, she stops just long enough for the male, who is now chasing her, to catch and mount her. Then the games begin. She shakes the rat off and does another "hop and dart." This goes on for as long as she decides until he is finally permitted "penile intromission," but no ejaculation. However, if the rat-stud has done well in playing the "hop and dart" game, she does eventually permit ejaculation as well.⁴⁷ (Are you beginning to see why I'm telling you this?)

Now, all of this chasing, mounting, shaking, stopping, hopping, and darting may look the same to the untrained observer. But the discriminating eagle-eyed Dr. Perper saw tremendous differences in his rats. Sometimes, the total series took only two minutes. At other times, it took 10 attempts for the dude rat to score. Sometimes, the happy couple would stay together afterward and copulate again. At other times, the male would race outta there like a rat out of hell. But the bottom line is this: The cool male rat that knew how to play the hop and dart game got laid the most. (Now, for sure, you see the parallel.)

That brings us to the subject at hand. Dr. Perper, having gotten the hang of watching horny mammals while conducting such experiments, decided to graduate to horny homo sapiens. He wanted to see if there was a pattern to pickups, both successful and unsuccessful. So, peering over a newspaper while at a singles bar, he spied on couples getting to know each other. He took careful note of who cast the initial glance and how. He recorded who made the initial move and how, who lost interest and why, and who left together and why.

Night after night, the good doctor stayed tirelessly in his smoke-filled laboratory, scribbling notations, devising charts, and hypothesizing formulas, as men and women picked each other up. Repeatedly, he saw the same pattern of success and the same pattern of failure. Then, in the finest scientific tradition, he broke the body-language pattern of couples who succeeded in getting to know each other into very specific steps.

Often, Dr. Perper observed, the woman would cast a signal but the male would not respond appropriately. And she would thus lose interest and start her courtship game with another male.

The steps you must follow after the woman gives you a U.S.S. are as clear and as carefully choreographed as a simple fox trot. But if you slip on any of them, your relationship will veer off the runway, crash, and burn before it ever achieves altitude. If you memorize the following steps, you'll always take off with the lady.

Unfortunately, for being so "evolved," many male humans didn't turn out to be even as smart as rats in picking up on a female's sex signals. So here's "The Pickup Polka," step-by-step.