On mating strategies of southern Europeans.

The other weekend I was out for drinks with a library coworker who's doing a Ph.D. in Comp Lit.

He was telling me that a girl he once dated had once told him that Southern European grad student men have a few mating strategies.

One is most often employed by Italians, and it's to be volubly sophisticated and bombastic; they talk a lot and domineer conversations, and know a bit of everything about everything, often in a very joke-y way.

The other is most often employed  by the French, and it's to be silent and broody in the hopes that people confuse that for profundity.

"Like [first name of a French grad student known to us both]," my one coworker was like.

"Really?", I was like.

"Oh yeah," he was like.  "He's really a simple person and not very intellectual at all, he just poses that way."

In any case, the really funny part is that I had just finished a pop science book on the biology of animal mating, and it was funny to think of this Romance Languages Dept. ecology of adaptive behaviors all going on.