There Are No Cougars: Study

(NEWSER) - Rebecca Traister is fed up with the concept of the “cougar,” she writes for Salon. She doesn’t “hate the solitary wildcat who feasts on deer,” or “women who have sex with younger men. What I hate is the never-ending cutesy-pie conflation of the two.” The premier tonight of The Cougar, a dating show that matches a 40-year-old woman with men under 30, illustrates how profoundly unprogressive the stereotype is. More»

Meet someone else who hated 'The Da Vinci Code'

(NEWSER) - Tired of meeting up with a girl from Match.com only to discover—horrors!—she’s into Nicholas Sparks ? Sign up for Alikewise , a dating site that matches you based on your taste in literature. It’s the latest in a string of niche dating sites like Cupidtino for Mac lovers , and was started by two friends—one of whom wanted to meet someone who’d read The Black Swan, Mashable reports . More»

In Japan, belief in blood group personality types colors dating

(NEWSER) - If you're looking for a decisive, confident partner, try dating someone with type O blood. Type As are dependable worrywarts, ABs are balanced but high-maintenance, and if you've been burned by a selfish ex, blame their type B blood. That's the conventional wisdom in Japan, where people believe blood group determines personality—a belief that plays out in dating, the workplace and even politics. More»

Who wants to date a Twitter-using, pizza-obsessed 20something anyway?

(NEWSER) - The cougar phenomenon is spreading—in the UK, one 39-year-old woman runs a camp teaching aspiring cougars how to attract younger men. “Who cares, you may cry. Women should be fighting back over an ageist, youth-obsessed society,” writes Helen Croydon in the Independent. True as that may be, “a workshop teaching women to force their pheromones on to the younger male seems predatory”—imagine if the sexes in that situation were flipped. More»

(NEWSER) - Women may be more “selective” daters, but that distinction could well be based not on innate personality but on social norms and the simple prospect of which gender is doing the pursuing. A new study had subjects participate in a few rounds of speed dating. When the males approached the females, the men reported more enthusiasm about their partners—i.e., they were less selective. But when the guys sat down and the women made the rounds, the opposite was true, reports LiveScience. More»