KEY POINTS:
Step into a crowded bar and you'll feel it; a wary tension, jungle-coiled, eyes flashing. Part of it is sexual, but there's something else. Anger. Hurt. Frustration. A misdirected chat-up, a misread signal, a clumsy grope could trigger a lethal knockback fuelled by a bitter backlog of disappointments and disillusionment.
Says Auckland film student Tom Atkins: "Some women act really hostile towards guys. My female friends say, 'Well, you don't know what we put up with'. One friend just wants an erudite, nice, successful guy and all she gets is gropes and looks. It makes everybody a bit angry and they can't help but take it out on each other."
(Atkins is gay, so this isn't sour grapes.)
And it's the same in internet dating forums echoing with castigations of heartless players and shameless sluts, snobby bitches and weirdo creeps.
If love is a battlefield, for many of us looking for love is a booze-sodden minefield of crosspurposes, misunderstandings, and halfconscious, muddled expectations. With the old, pre-1970s rules around dating and mating happily dismantled, Western women have more financial, social and sexual wherewithal than ever before and the ground is supposedly set for an equal, mutually-negotiated meeting of bodies and minds. Yet often both sexes are still fumbling about in the dark.
There's light on the horizon - or rather, glowing from computer screens across the land. Internet dating is a known stalking patch for casual sex. But now it's mainstream, it's also forcing us to relearn a kind of dating most of us only know through American TV.
"Date" is a loaded term in Kiwi vernacular. Says Auckland singleton Janelle Wills: "It's this pressure that this is going to be a relationship. Everything you say or do means so much more and that's really scary so you've got to drink to lessen that fear."
The more common scenario for the teenage to 30s age group goes something like: get drunk to still the nerves, fall into bed on the first or second night, wake up and start figuring out whether you're lying next to a one-night-stand, a fling, a new friend-plus-extra, a potential life-partner or something we don't yet have a word for.
"It's like emotional Russian roulette," says Wills, a 35-year-old artist and conservator. She's unusual in her circle for not jumping into bed at the drop of a wine glass. It galls her, but she's come to the conclusion that playing hard-to-get is still the modern woman's most powerful weapon.
"You've got to make men hunt. If a woman asks a man out, he'll never consider her a potential mate, but rather as a potential f**k. The way a woman gets the guy is to withhold and be intriguing and mysterious and look fabulous. It's an inert power."
Shortland Street actor Will Hall (who plays Kip Denton) agrees.
"Guys don't want to be messed around, but we don't necessarily want the girl to give in too easily."
Kiwi heterosexual women average 20 sexual partners, almost three time the global average of seven, according to the latest Durex Sexual Wellbeing survey. At 17, Kiwi blokes are above the global average of 13. Yet, more than a third of us describe ourselves as single.
Behind the numbers, a lot is going on. Genuine sexual empowerment and experimentation, binge drinking, the so-called raunch culture of female self-objectification that brought pole-dancing to the suburbs and the Playboy bunny to 12-year-olds' t-shirts.
Today, the same woman could be looking for Shane Warne one night and Mr Darcy the next. How is a guy to tell which it is tonight?
"Guys have it really hard," says Auckland single-mum Rachel Goodchild, author of Eighty-Eight Dates: The Perilous Joys of Internet Dating.
"I was amazed at how many guys have felt raped or assaulted by women. Because they feel confident, women are jumping on men and demanding sex the first time and the guys are going, 'well, I'm a guy so I shouldn't really say no', but they don't feel comfortable about it."
Goodchild, 37, left her marriage three years ago. In the past 18 months, she's met in person 50 men through internet dating. She has clear rules of engagement, which, she argues, could provide a template for the new dating culture evolving from the online world.
"If there's a spark online - which doesn't mean anything - I like
to meet them early on for coffee or just one drink. Otherwise, the conversation starts getting flirtatious and you move into a whole realm of stuff that you could regret when you meet them in person."
She'll "date" two or three men at a time (no sex), but once things get serious with one she'll drop the others.
Of course, there will be shockers. Goodchild's favourites include an awkward dinner with a political campaigner. When she mentioned she didn't have sex on the first date, he retorted "Well, what am I paying for dinner for then?"
Then there was the date who taught her two-year-old daughter to say "George Bush" when asked what her name was; and the man who pretended he was a doctor even after she checked. She even accidentally dated two brothers (the first still doesn't talk to her).
Thirty-eight out of the first 42 men she met asked her for sex on first meeting. She was interested in only two or three.
Dating more than one at a time has its risks. A 28-year-old professional woman and hardened dater recalls a tricky pile-up: "Once I was dating three guys - and they all turned up at the house at the same time. One kicked down the door; one started crying and left. The other said, 'well, shall we have a shag then?"'
Man drought? Phooey, says Goodchild. "I honestly think that
if you really want to not be single, you're not. I think women are secretly enjoying the single life. We've become good at knowing what we want and providing for it. Men are being pushed to the sidelines. Dating is difficult for women, but it's harder for men."
Women want the impossible, goes the male complaint: they claim to want the metrosexual, enlightened nice guy but really want the brutishly confident, butt-grabbing rugby forward.
Goodchild: 'Men want a maid in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom'. Women want a male version of that now. So really, we're just asking for the same thing men want."
A 31-year-old Auckland bachelor claims Kiwi girls can be charmless, graceless and plain mean. "The default way of relating with guys is to make yourself appear as smoking hot as possible and then wait for men to approach you for sex or a hookup and, for your own ego, to reject as many men as possible, and then cherry-pick the head chump, which is very off-putting."
Will Hall recalls one particularly bitchy knockback from his student days. "I'd finally had enough on my coffee card to get two free coffees, so I took this girl who I'd seen a few times to McDonald's. The coffee was crap and I said so. She said: 'You know what else is crap? This relationship. It's over.' And she got up and left."
But Janelle Wills maintains Kiwi men need to lift their game too. She's met too many liars, cheats, emotionally immature commitmentphobes.
"Women just want to be loved and treated with respect. I don't think it's that high an expectation."
An entire seduction industry has thrust up for the desperate and socially challenged straight male. Books such as actor Jim Belushi's Real Men Don't Apologise, websites such as www.fastseduction.com that explore the nuances of the primal dating "game" in an alphabet soup of acronyms (PUA for pick-up-artist; AFC for average frustrated chump).
US firm Real Social Dynamics runs seduction bootcamps for men
around the world; Australian 20-something Alex, who blogs luridly as
Alex Attitude, will run a bootcamp in Auckland this autumn.
"It's very much a rite of passage, a trial by fire," says Alex. Students
pay US$2000 ($3776) for a 25-hour "bootcamp" in real bars and cafes learning wooing tricks, authenticity and confidence.
Professional men and women may prefer to turn to dating coaches such as Denise Corlett, at www.datingadvice.co.nz. Common stumbling blocks she sees are scepticism, aloofness, low selfconfidence, defensiveness, women afraid of being feminine, baggage from past relationships, and unbending criteria.
Frustrated singletons need to learn how to date with awareness and intent, she says. "Take the attitude of, 'I'm at least 50 per cent responsible if I am not meeting, attracting or being in a relationship with someone'. Take steps to work out why, and then remedy it. It's not that there are just no decent men or women left."
Goodchild believes we need to lighten up about hooking up.
"Dating is not about finding a life-time partner," she says. "Change your perspective and go, 'let's use it to increase my friendship circle, enjoy myself, enjoy the company of someone of the opposite sex'. Taking off all that weight that this has to turn into a relationship actually opens up the door to a great new life of just enjoying yourself."
