How to meet women.

One of the most persistent whines you hear from straight men on the internet is "how do I meet a woman?"  Men come up with various theories elaborate and stupid about why they can't meet that special someone.  No, it's not because you're a nice guy.  I promise.  In my experience there are two main reasons men can't find a woman.

The first is that they're being wildly unrealistic.  Brooklyn Decker is not going to go out with you.  Back when I was a kid, the advice from older, more experienced men was that "real women don't have staples in their belly buttons, son."  Of course nowadays Playboy doesn't have staples holding it together and plenty of real women have metal rings in their navels.  But the point stands, dammit!  More importantly, that's not the subject of today's blog entry.

The second problem is both more pervasive and more easily remedied.  Too many men don't go where women are.  Some of the biggest whiners are in the tech industry, which is so sexist it makes Wall Street look like the pinnacle of equality.  The one woman in your sausage-factory cube farm probably loathes you and your whole department even if you yourself don't deserve it because you're part of an overall culture of poison.  Time to seek companionship elsewhere.  The comic book store, the Con, the bar, these are all places where technically women go but are outnumbered 10-1.  On the other hand, you can't exactly stand in a bridal shop hitting on the bridesmaids, can you?  The number one rule of life generally but meeting women specifically is don't be creepy. 

So if you're a single straight guy wondering where you can go to meet women without being inherently creepy just by your presence (not being creepy after that is up to you), here's the answer.

Volunteer.




Yep, that's it.  Volunteer.  Volunteer for just about anything and you'll find that among the volunteers women outnumber men.  For every man who volunteers, more than 1.3 women do (really!).  It's nearly 1.4 to one among volunteers over the age of 25.  As a special bonus, if you're honest and volunteer with a cause or organization which you actually support you'll be working with a women with whom you have at least one thing in common and you'll have something to talk about. 

If those odds aren't good enough for you, there are certain categories of volunteerism where your odds are better still.  Health care, animal care, environmental charities and religious pursuits are areas where female volunteers outnumber men even more than they do generally. If your interests run to sports things get more difficult -- men outnumber women but at least the women you do meet will be people with similar interests. On the other hand, if your volunteering interest runs to public safety, you're pretty much back in the sausage factory, but now with gun fetishists. 

Still not skewed enough?  Are you the kind of person who thinks that there has to be 5 or 10 women per one man for you to have a chance?  My first piece of advice would be to address that.  But OK, the reason isn't that you're a sociopath or something, you're just really, really shy.   You should volunteer at a cat shelter.  I realized this today when I saw the livestream from a cat adoption event on the lower east side.   Check out the Livestream below.  That place has more estrogen than a birth control pill factory.


So there you go.  If you want to meet women, do something good for your community.  If you want to meet women and women and women and women, do something good for cats.