"Hot Crazy Matrix: A Man's Guide to Women" is flawed science

One of the current viral hits on the internet is Dana McLendon's ”Universal Hot Crazy Matrix: A Man's Guide to Women.”  It's popular with guys.  My sister-in-law sent a link to me, thinking I'd find it funny.  It was mildly funny, especially if you saw it in the 60s.  He sells t-shirts with his graph printed on it, the wearing of which is an effective form of birth control as no woman would let a man wearing it anywhere near her.

His presentation, though pithy, is a poor substitute for science or statistics for a number of reasons:

• it's based upon McLendon's 40-something years in Tennessee, not very exhaustive research.  I spent several years in the state, where I found not a lot of hot but lots of crazy, so his sample size is restricted and distorted.

• it includes unicorns on the graph, and despite their appearances in Harry Potter novels and tacky gift shops, they have no basis in fact.

• it includes trannies on a graph of women, indicating a fundamental lack of skill of determining gender (there are some easy ways of determining the gender of trannies, even for men from Tennessee).

• the theory that trannies with hotness of 8-plus are saner than all women has very little possibility of proof.

• it's vertical axis begins at 4, rather than zero, indicating poor numeracy and lazy graphing skills.

His presentation coupling misogyny with a lack of scientific rigor perhaps explains his appearance as a featured expert on Fox News:

Dana McLendon on Fox News (I hope the ticker is referring to the vessel, not the document)

In addition to his lazy science described above, his conclusions are fundamentally flawed.

Based not merely upon my own experience but the experience of countless other men, every woman's relative hotness and craziness represent points on a curve comparing hotness and craziness, not a scatter plot. The dependent relationship is uncertain.  Are women hotter because they are crazy, or crazier because they are hot?  Though fodder for playwrights, novelists, and Seinfeld for hundreds of years, thousands of years of data have not determined which depends on the other, partially because the research has been performed by men whose objectivity is compromised by hotness.

The two possibilities are graphed below.  If crazy depends on hot, the curve would resemble the letter J (upward parabola), with rather unhot being somewhat crazy, average attractiveness being barely crazy at all, and flaming hot extremely crazy.  If hot depends on crazy, it would resemble an inverted U (downward parabola).

                          Crazy depends on Hot

C = the square of (H - a) + b

H = hotness

C = craziness

a = hotness of the least crazy women (or woman)

b = craziness of the least crazy women (or woman)

d = craziness of the least attractive women (or woman)

e = hotness of women as with same craziness (d) as the least attractive women but appreciably hotter.

The former math teacher in me worked out the algebra for the craziness of the least attractive women, which turns out to be the square of the hotness of the least crazy plus the craziness of the least crazy.  We can call it the Law of Steve (see Tao of Steve).

In truth most women would be on the left side of the graph, with hotness from zero to Point e, with the right side of the graph dominated by models and aspiring actresses in Los Angeles and New York.  Men are preoccupied with women on the right side of the graph, yet find themselves with women on the left side of the graph, with the exception of movie producers and investment bankers who prefer the women on the right for their second, third, fourth, and fifth wives.  Most of the internet which does not feature cat videos is dominated with photos of women found on the right side of the graph.

Looking at the graph, it's apparent that men with women of hotness from 0 to Point a are with women as crazy as the men with women from Point a to Point e, but a fraction of their hotness.  As men are obsessed by women's attractiveness and tend to seek the most attractive woman that will possibly have sex with them, the men in the first group are either saints, ugly/unemployed, or visually impaired by either a lack of eye glasses or an abundance of beer glasses.

The reverse relationship between the two qualities is graphed below.

                        Hot depends on Crazy

The graph shifts a little to the right, as women have to be a little crazy to be hot at all.  Point a is the beginning of the escalating craziness which becomes undeniably attractive to men.  Point b is the point where the craziness overwhelms all possible hotness, basically destroying any attractive features.

Research by men has not determined which relationship best models the qualities of crazy and hot and women.  Men rarely focus any attention on women who are not hot, so there is not much data on the unattractive women.  In addition, crazy and hot are difficult to measure, generally subjective, and not totally independent of the men involved.  So clarifying the definitive relationship between the two qualities will likely take a few more thousand years.

Note:  I did not include links to McLendon's video or his Fox News interview for fear of increasing their marginal income from youtube.  Trust me, they, unlike me, are not worth your time.