In the olden days, attempting to date via classified ad was a tedious process of pretending to enjoy eating dinners in crappy lighting and trudging along a shoreline, all in order to convince someone that you were worthy of sex. But thanks to the influence of social networking, now it’s just a matter of selecting the right combination of pop culture signifiers to advertise yourself. And what works of other people's art are most men and women using to define themselves in order to snare a mate? If the New York-based users of dating site OKCupid can be used to stand in for the rest of America—and let’s face it, they probably can—the majority of them are telling everyone that they like 30 Rock, the one reference that appears most often in the profiles of either gender according to a recent internal study.


Yessir, nothing moistens up a room like self-referential meta humor and inside jokes about NBC, or brings together the many women who view themselves as cute, smart, yet slightly neurotic (just like Liz Lemon!) with all the men who pride themselves on being attracted to smart, slightly neurotic girls (so long as they look as good as Liz Lemon!). Meanwhile, the runner-up pop-culture symbols for men include mentioning Bob Dylan (“I take music really seriously”), Arrested Development (“I’m smarter than most people”), and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (“I’m smarter than most people, but I don’t want to come off like a pussy”), while women are also most likely to say they’re into Jay-Z (“I’m not stuck up”) and True Blood (“I’m horny”). Civilization practically has this courtship thing down to a science. [via Gawker]