WUnderground WashU's Premier (only) Satirical Newspaper Est. 2004
December brings a lot of things— gifts, finals, and of course, cuffing season. With the cold seems to come the contagious desire for a boyfriend—and hey, we get it! Who doesn’t want someone to hold hands with in Whispers or hard launch on your Instagram story, earning you a whopping 32 shares? But as the love spreads around WashU, one group in particular is feeling a little left out: conventionally attractive men.
“It’s just, like, we’re invisible to the girls here,” says junior basketball player Chad Haughtee. “They only seem to want guys who are studying CompSci, weigh 72 pounds, do improv, and spend all day on Letterboxd.”
Certainly this couldn’t be true, I thought—why would WashU girls be attracted to these kinds of guys? But the more I talked to the WashU hunks, the more I realized there was some truth to what they were saying.
“My last girlfriend left me for a guy on the B league frisbee team,” says Josh Chandsum, a sophomore KSig brother with brilliant white teeth, perfectly tousled hair, and chiseled arms. “I mean, this guy is 5’6″. He has transition lenses. I heard he has a hermit crab in his room he named Mommy to keep him company when he gets homesick.”
I tracked down Josh’s ex-girlfriend, Sarah Nurdluver, to get her side of things. I found her in Hillman with her new man (used loosely), where she was cutting up pieces of empanada to feed him as he worked feverishly on his Matlab project.
“Josh didn’t understand me the way Rodney does,” Sarah said. “I don’t care that Josh had a ‘nice physique,’ or an ‘objectively attractive face,’ or ‘knew how to talk to girls.’ He’s not nearly as smart as my Rodney!” Hearing this, Rodney blushed and peed himself.
After some brief research, I realized Sarah wasn’t the only girl feeling this way. As reported in the StudLife February issue, 78% of straight female students at WashU said that the kind of guys they were attracted to changed drastically upon coming to college, shifting from “hot guys” to “awkward dweebs.” What could be driving this, I wondered?
Biology professor Lou Singhmai-Maind, who teamed up with a team of exotic plant researchers from the Missouri Botanical Garden, may have found an unexpected explanation:
“My research actually shows that the poopy smell on the walkway to the Loop may have something to do with why all of the girls here seem to like weird nerds,” Singhmai-Maind explained. “The smell is secreted from a rare species of plant known as Phugleemenicus Onleecus, which has been shown to suppress the body’s natural response to pheromones and other traditional indicators of attractiveness. In many cases, repeated exposure to the plant’s scent has been shown to temporarily invert female perception of a potential mate’s attractiveness, causing them to pursue men who they would otherwise be repulsed by. This temporary state of deluded attraction lasts around four years: the length of the undergraduate experience.”
So, if you’re one of the poor, minoritized WashU Hunks, don’t worry. WashU women will snap out of their obsession with these weirdos eventually, even if it is after college. But if you can’t wait that long, consider becoming a little uglier and/or stranger: grow a rattail, get a snake, get really into LARPing, etc. Cheers hotties!
