The act of convincing someone to have sex with you has been mythologized to such an extent that there's an entire industry to teach you how to do it. Where I live, you can actually take classes in talking people into boning you, where a guy in what I imagine to be just the best goddamn haircut imaginable will patiently explain the art of bonery. But that's just normal behavior taken to a logical capitalist extreme: When a guy has a lot of sex, other guys will often ask him what his "secret" is, as if women are a particularly challenging video game level and Billy Bones-A-Lot is the only guy in town who managed to buy the strategy guide. If men employ this "secret," women will flock to them vagina-first, flapping their arms wildly for propulsion and screaming in erotic anticipation.

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But according to science, that's not true at all: Women are people, with thinking brains and big, soft, wet lungs, and they often choose to have sex for the same reasons men do -- physical attraction, emotional connection, boredom, or even three more other things. Sorry for not linking to a study proving that women are people with thoughts and feelings -- I tried Googling it, but my laptop just told me to go outside and then started weeping openly.

In a study designed to determine the effectiveness of different kinds of pick-up lines, a bunch of scientists who are either the saddest or the suavest motherfuckers on the planet first divided the attempts into three categories: direct gambits ("Hello. Would you like to engage in some hu-man interactions?"), innocuous gambits ("Hey, what's that drink you're drinking? Is it delicious?"), and flippant gambits ("Are you an angel? Because I wanna rip off all your clothes and fuck you in my bathtub. I don't know anything about theology, which should be evident by my total willingness to engage in casual sex, an act decried by most organized religions").