I have a really bad habit of making eye contact with people in public. Sometimes it's people I think are attractive, but other times it's because I decide it's a fun idea to take a "covert" picture of the terrifying man on the subway in full face paint on a day that is distinctly not Halloween. Either way, it usually doesn't end well.

Since I moved back to New York, I've become better at averting my eyes, simply because there have been too many times where I've had to deal with the consequences of accidentally looking interested in someone's existence. That's sort of sad to me, but it's a fact of life in New York, and I have mostly accepted it.

I have no willpower, usually, so in order to make myself do things, I call them "experiments." I do this so often that our Managing Editor Chris has started to call me "Edison," which is a far better nickname than "Gary Mancini," which it replaced. We don't need to go into that.

Last week I did an "experiment," based on a "hypothesis" I had created:

You dudes love it when women ignore you. It makes you want us more.

So, I have excellent peripheral vision. So good, in fact, that I once won 1st place in the annual Side-Seein' Contest at the Richmond, VA State Fair, after being scouted at the Whack-a-Mole station; my arms overflowing with tickets, my eyes wild with passion.

Right, so that never happened, but I do have pretty good peripheral vision, meaning that I can usually tell when someone is staring at me. For one week, I decided to test out my hypothesis, and not look back.

Guys, I think I am right, and I'm not psyched about it like I usually am when I am right. Over the course of the week, I kept a tally in my CPN (Crazy Person Notebook), and here, my friends, are the harrowing results:

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What's that? You have no idea what you're looking at, because I'm a lunatic? Riiight, OK. Let me break it down:

On Monday, I noticed someone looking at me, and I didn't look back. He struck up a conversation with me, and then eventually asked for my number. The little brown dots indicate the times where I accidentally looked, either because the person was attractive or because I forgot about my experiment. If you'll notice, none of those dudes ever talked to me.

Over the course of a work week's worth of Subway rides, nine men talked to me after I refused to make eye contact with them for a long enough period of time, and all nine of them eventually asked me for my number. I didn't give it to any of them because I'm not crazy. I especially did not give it to the guy who remarked "Yeah, you smile iz mad corny anyway," after I lied and said I had a boyfriend. The guys who I did accidentally look at were definitely throwin' eye-game at me, but never approached.

What other conclusion can I possibly come to, fellas, except that you LOVE being ignored? This all seems pretty silly. Maybe re-think this strategy. Maybe then we could like, kiss, or something. Maybe sex.

Yours in science experiments and stranger sex,

Jackie

Jackie Mancini is the associate editor of GuySpeed and an unabashed lover of large breasts, porno, foul mouths and loud music. Her childhood diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder is most likely responsible for her current position as the only female employee of a men’s website. Her column ‘The [Fairer Se]X Files’ appears every Wednesday. You can read more of her work here, and you can also follow her on Twitter.

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