Are Events For Girls?

Harry and Randa talk the differences in boy and girl planning techniques

HK

Randa, I’ve been gestating on a take recently that boils down to “the hottest girl you know is looking in her email for her Eventbrite confirmation code.”

Beautiful people seem to have a hard time finding each other. Or perhaps the tier of people directly below obscenely beautiful people – normal beautiful people– have trouble finding each other. The obscenely beautiful seem to have no trouble at all finding each other….

Anyway, I’ve figured out why. All the hot guys are waiting in line at fucked up bars and all the hot girls are at literary events, or events where you read an excerpt of a play, or where you look at 16 photos that are “in conversation” with each other.

Events, that is to say, open-invite paywalled parties, are Vaguely Girl Coded. They are not For Girls. Plenty of guys go to events. My take though, is that at the margins, events lean feminine….lol. I don’t want this to be true, i don’t know why its true…im just calling it like i see it.

Obviously, some events are guy-coded and I'm joking about the gender essentialism. Still…if you take an event that is totally gender-neutral and throw it on Eventbrite or Partiful or whatever and charge 15 bucks and have a start time…that neutrality goes from 50/50 to like 65/45 Girl-Guy. It becomes VGC. 

What do you think Randa? Am I right? Is this a problem? What do we do? 

RS

speaking of gender essentialism … classic guy taking a girls idea and packaging it as his own. by my search of imessage i was in fact the first one to introduce this idea in december of 2021.

i was throwing the second hot singles party and as the guest list swelled i couldn’t help but notice that the names were all like “madison” “amy” and not “christopher” or “geoff.” my working theory for this is that most guys don’t like taking social risks. so they’ll rsvp/buy tix to a standard event like a basketball game or a DJ set but if it’s like “experimental reading club” or “hot singles party” then you’re in ratio trouble…

basically the only way you can get guys to show up to something they don’t already understand is via social proof. they need a friend to invite them. so most of the normal guys who went to hot singles parties were guys i already knew and their friends and friends of friends.

HK

It is funny like, the reason a guy won't go to an event is because of a sort of subtle but pervasive indescribable fear of failing and the reason a girl might decide not to go to an event is because she gets a day-of tummy ache. Signs and wonders….

So what to do about social proof? 

My freshman year of high school I was hanging out with 3 new friends in one of the rare cookie-cutter housing developments in San Francisco. I remember one of them telling me he had one of his first kisses in a hookah smoke train circle. He told me one person would inhale the hookah and pass it around the circle by blowing the smoke into the mouth of the person sitting next to them. I remember the three of us discussing does a lip-to-lip smoke transfer count as a kiss? These people are insane…i remember thinking. 

It was a Friday night and we were chatting with some girls in our grade. Suddenly, one of the guys I was with told the girls that we were having  a kickback. He shushed us as our eyes bulged. There were no plans of a kickback! He told them a lot of people were coming. He went on to list the names of 3-4 people who were almost certainly not coming.

I remember being shocked by all of this. You can’t tell girls there is a kickback if there isn’t a kickback. Even at 14, i knew this to be true. But it was a calculated risk. My new and slightly dishonest friend then went to the guys he had just said were coming to the party, and told them that the girls he just spoke to were coming to the Kickback. This guy I'm talking about, obviously, is now in venture capital (jk). This story is an extreme one, and i do still believe you can’t tell girls there is going to be a kickback if there isn’t a kickback, but I do think a more diffuse version of social proof ponzi scheming is required for a successful event. 

The exact right way to execute that…would take years to explain… 

RS

Ok but also it seems like “there’s gonna be girls there” isn’t enough these days… maybe it’s bc guys aren’t rizzing out loud anymore. Maybe it’s obviously the phones (s/o

Magdalene J. Taylor

)… MAYBE just MAYBE, guys are not leaving their homes to meet girls, rather, they only go to “events” to chill with the fellas…

HK

She Event on my Bright till i RSVP? She rsvp to my parti til it’s ful? I must be an event the way my girl a ten?

RS

let’s see…