With the first weekend of school recently past, I find myself in the aftermath of what few parties I could be dragged to, analyzing the information I gathered from them. While adrift in our beloved deluge of drunks, I attempted to socialize or attract potential mates. All around me people made similar efforts. As I watched people stumble home with men or women or both hanging off their limbs, my mind turned to what it was that made some successful and some less so.

Obviously, the techniques applied by men and women are many, but from my time in I.V., I have narrowed the number of strategies down. For the purposes of this article, I will be heteronormalizing my assessment to cover the strategies applied by “masculine” men and “feminine” women, but it would be poor science if I left out that these strategies can be inverted in certain cases.

There are a number of types of males in this world, but from my observations the four most common techniques applied by the XYs can be described as the following: Annoying Douchebag, Quiet Creeper, Prince Charming and Gigglebunny. The Annoying Douchebag is perhaps the most common; they are the males that are constantly drinking beer and greeting women (or men, as the case may be) as they walk in the door. They appear to be immune to the dirty looks of women and men alike and oblivious to how overbearing they can come across as. However, due to their ‘cast a wide enough net’ strategy and the fact that — to the intoxicated — they are highly charismatic, they often enjoy the most sexual success. I believe their charisma comes from what is fundamentally their predictability. The Annoying Douchebag is loud, gregarious and simple. He is, in short, safe to be around because it is hard to feel threatened by someone who seems so basic. Simplicity is, for many, attractive. As Isla Vistans, we should thank our various deities for the Annoying Douchebag, for he is the glue that holds our parties together.

On the opposite end of this spectrum is the Quiet Creeper. This male tends to lurk toward the sides of parties, speaks sparingly and comes across to many as vaguely sociopathic. If the Annoying Douchebag is the machete of social interaction, the Quiet Creeper is the scalpel. And it is in their precision that they find hookup success. What many misunderstand about the QC is that he is just some introvert who has been thrust into a very extroverted situation, and his social strategy will reflect this. He will analyze the situation, find people who he thinks look interesting, and speak to them. If he can’t find anyone, he will just lurk until someone approaches him (usually an Annoying Douchebag or their female counterpart). His charisma is that of mystery, and he attracts accordingly. The QC is also typically more cerebral than the rest, and so appeals to those who have become bored with the party, and seek a different sort of entertainment. While a bizarre strategy, Quiet Creeping has proven reasonably successful for both myself and others, thus I list it here.

Next is Prince Charming. A close relative of the Annoying Douchebag, Prince Charming picks out one attractive female (or male, as the case may be) and promptly devotes his entire night to trying to impress her (or him). He’ll ask her to dance, tell the Annoying Douchebags who approach her to fuck off, and generally appoints himself as her personal bodyguard. While it may seem like Prince Charming is the type to really want relationships, it’s common that after he has bedded the girl (or boy), he’ll move on to charm someone else the next Saturday night. Charming’s charisma is that of persistence. He’s there the entire night, so you might as well have him there the entire night.

And finally, at the end of our list, we have the Gigglebunny. The Gigglebunny is the guy who is either so drunk or so stupid that all he appears capable of doing is laughing at literally everything anyone says. Research is uncertain as to whether the Gigglebunny is actually cognizant of what they are laughing at, or if they simply wire a sort of reflexive giggle response anytime their brain processes human speech. To be perfectly honest, the charisma of the Gigglebunny eludes my classification. It may simply be that humans find laughter attractive. Gigglebunnies will seem to play every drinking game and participate in every conversation, but are in fact just the drugged-up embodiment of a sitcom laugh track. While the Gigglebunny exists in both male and female circles, the male Gigglebunny differs subtly from the female Gigglebunny in that the male has a penis. Gigglebunnies don’t have enough personality for there to be any other difference. Gigglebunnies frighten and confuse me because I can’t actually determine what they are doing, and yet somehow they are still taking people home at the end of the night. Perhaps Gigglebunnies are just ingeniously disguised wizards.

So those are the four most common (masculine) strategies for trying to bed someone in I.V. There are, of course, more, but most of those are just some combination of these primary colors of seduction. In my next article I shall endeavor to classify the stratagems employed by the more feminine denizens of Isla Vista.

Anonymous will grant a sexual favor of his or her choice to anyone able to explain to him the troubling Gigglebunny enigma.

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