First Date: To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Mary Hodder's written a very interesting post about guessing the gender of a person using IM (instant messaging).

She was given only 5 minutes to do so, and she writes about what her strategy was, compared to another woman's strategy. She decided to use the acid test to separate the boys from the girls -- do you sleep with someone on the first date? Check it out:

I was telling a couple of people the other night about my experience playing the Gender Guessing Game. They had played as well, and we compared notes. Anita Wilhelm and I both guessed correctly in our two tests, but we managed to do this in very different ways.

Since the test only gave 5 minutes to figure it out, and two IM's had to be conducted at the same time, in order to guess the male and the female IMers, we each used very different strategies.

Anita decided to just make general conversation, with the idea that girls are more tentative in the nature of their answers to questions but they explain a lot more. She said that the boys don't give any extra information and were more definite. She said it was obvious, using this criteria, who were boys and who were girls.

Since I felt under pressure to get answers quickly, and to start the test right when they gave me the IM's, I decided at the last second to ask them a series of questions about going out on a date, to see how they would manage the situation.

I asked what they would do if they went out on a first date with someone they thought was really hot, and they wanted to sleep with them, and the opportunity was there, would they.

In each case, the girls said no, they would want to go out more, but the boys said that no they wouldn't, but with caveats. The caveat was that if they knew they didn't want to see the date again, and could do it without any problem, they would sleep with the date. Based on that it was easy to figure it out, though the 5 minutes did fly by trying to get the answers.