an experiment
i have to say that i was intrigued by the debate i unwittingly sparked by my baby bjorn observations the other day. so, yes, as it happens i feel a bit like a giant nob every time i strap the kid onto my chest. i love my baby dearly but, man, it's not a cool look.
the ladies in the house begged to differ. there were many paeans to the hotness of baby-wearing dudes. women even sent me e-mails like this one, from someone who i will only identify as "crazy legs," which attempted to deconstruct the hotness of the bjorn thusly:
good looking guys carrying a baby are HOTTT!!!! [please note the use of triple T's and quadruple exclamation points, please. -- ed.] Unavailable hipster guy sweet enough to carry a baby, it ranks right up there with unavailable bad boy, too angry with the world to give the time of day.
well, then, "crazy legs," can you imagine how much i ought to be scoring by virtue of the fact that i am not only hot, but also both a baby-wearer and an emotionally unavailable asshole? so, mr nice guy decided to put this all to a test. yesterday while the wife was at work i fastened my impossibly adorable child to my ribcage and ventured forth into the strange world of weekday park slope -- a land teeming with nannies, stay-at-home moms, $800 strollers and, apparently, drunken public fornicators. not an ideal sample group for this particular experiment, perhaps, but there are definitely hormones in the air.
the question: exactly how many ladies would hit on mr nice guy during a 90-minute stroll with his baby? who would be able to resist this towering testament to touchy-feely testosterone?
the hypothesis, in the form of a rhetorical question: who could possibly resist?
the result: fucking everyone, that's who.
you know how it is when you see someone walking a large-eyed floppy-eared puppy down the street? people stop, they definitely do. but while they will spend upwards of 5 minutes petting the euphoric tail-wagging dog, cooing over it, speaking in high-pitched voices: "look at you, you baby puppy woo-woo-wooggum-shmoopsie-boopie-baby-bear," and basically wetting themselves over the puppy, they do so without saying a single word to the human being at the other end of the leash, except for, perhaps a perfunctory "she's very cute." ( i know this because i do it all the time.) so. yeah. that's exactly what happened when i took my daughter out for a walk in her baby bjorn. she was wearing a little pink plaid hat and her big almond eyes (which greatly resemble those of frere nice guy, but that is neither here nor there ... right, frere nice guy?) were all open in adorable wonderment. and then guess what happened: the most beautiful women in the world walked right up to me! many times over! and then they promptly bent right over and talked to my baby for what felt like hours without batting a single one of their luxuriously long eyelashes in the direction of my face (sideburned as it may be).
so. final tally:
- women who fell instantly in love with, sung to and generally fussed over my baby, the apotheosis of cuteness: 8.
- women who "hit on" me: -2 (a long story involving the last one-liter bottle of mandarin seltzer water at the bodega and liberal use of the word "schmuck").
and you know what the real pisser about all this is? mrs nice guy wasn't the least bit sympathetic.
posted by mr. nice guy at 8:02 PM
12 Comments:
LMAO! I could have told you the end result of that experiment before you bothered to do it. If they had been flirting with you via baby, you would have felt boobage on the arm from the "lean."
I loved to carry my son Daniel in the Bj?rn. Since I'm Swedish I just had to use it.....
Since my son is apparently cute and beautiful and has a smile that will melt ice it made me look good as well. I got to talk to all these gorgeous women and they were approaching me from all directions. And my son can flirt like no other, even more than my wife.
Makes me wonder, is it too late to carry a 25 lbs. 18 month old toddler in the Bj?rn.....?
H at www.AdventureDad.com
If you think it's bad being a MAN with a bjorn, trying being a woman. It's as if you are neutered. Men LOOK RIGHT THROUGH YOU--never mind don't hit on you.
I'm not convinced. Maybe it was the sidies?
Men holding baby...nice, sweet, kind...not attractive. Men with baby strapped to chest...Well, I sympathize with your previous entry.
It's because your sideburns haven't reached their proper glory.
When that happens, look out chics. Look. Out.
You were worrying at the top of the post about wearing the thing because "it's not a cool look". Worry no more!Wear that baby without fear, because the one thing your experiment proved beyond a shadow of a doubt is that your level of coolness doesn't matter in the slightest because NOBODY'S LOOKING AT YOU.
No silly, you don't go to the park where all the Moms are. You have to go to the Mall where are the single women who can still afford to shop are.
When my kids were babies, my husband's single friends would ask to push them around the mall in their strollers all the time. It took me awhile to realize they weren't actually there to help me carry my bags, but to use my kid as "chick bait."
Next time, try flinging the baby at these cooing women. Maybe that'll get them to notice your presence. Perhaps they'll think, 'Who is this mysterious man hurling a baby toward my head?'
Hey, this is a bit off-topic but it's almost Halloween and one can't help but wonder if you will be dressing the wee Nice Guy as a "tiny little hooker" as promised? That might garner some attention from passersby, Baby Bjorn or no.
I too have conducted walking around sans wife with the baby in the bjorn experiments. I think for me the problem is that the kind of chicks that I would want flirt with me would never go up to a dude with a baby and get all friendly. The ones who do can be very attractive women, but often they've got that baby-crazy look in their eyes that just makes me want to run for the hills. Those aren't the kind of chicks I want to notice me. It's the reserved hipster chicks on their way home from the record store with amazing coats and haircuts staring at the sidewalk thinking about listening to all those records from bands I've never heard of that I want to notice me. Those chicks don't care about babies at all, but the tourist girls from Topeka can spot the baby from a mile away, I swear.
for true hotttness, step away from that bjorn and get yourself some real babywearing gear. the ergo is so great i cannot praise it enough. (www.ergobabycarrier.com) but a moby wrap or better yet a ring sling are the hottest thing a man could wear. personally, i like wraps but could never get the hang of a ring sling. so in a way i hate them. but when i see a man wearing his baby/kid in a ring sling, i melt. maybe because i know he's cooler than i am?
a bjorn is sexier than a stroller, but compared to other options it's just so uncool. not to mention baby nice guy is dangling from her crotch (owie!) and it's bad for her spine.
get an ergo, a moby or a ring sling!
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