In a city filled with millions of men and hundreds of attractive women, a guy will inevitably face overwhelming competition, and if you lack certain attractive/superficial qualities (e.g. money), then you're pretty much f***ed (figuratively speaking, not literally). To face such challenges, women invented magazines like Cosmo as well as Seventeen, which is mainly used to teach prepubescent girls what men want them to look like by displaying endless pages of advertisements featuring models who look so unbelievably beautiful that I swear they're computer generated. Sorry, I digress. Nowadays, men find themselves in a cultural revolution of shiny men's magazines, all offering more than they can promise. With so many tips and advice bombarding the average male, one can get quite confused and utterly lost. What's a boy to do?

That is the exact question that inspired me to log in at Stern Lab and start typing. In the tradition of the critically acclaimed Sex and the City, I bring you Hex and the City, the definitive dating column that asks the hard questions and gets the real answers. By now you must be asking yourself why someone should read this instead of the other, more legitimate and reputable magazines. Simple: because this is free. You're also probably asking why there is a dating column in an Asian cultural interest magazine. The answer is again simple: because Asian guys need some luvin' too. See how this works? Ask a question, get an answer. The question for this issue is: How does a guy survive the competition and win in the dating game?

Before we go on, I would like to warn readers that this column involves mature subject matter and that if you're not at the age of consent, then it's illegal for you to have sex. If you follow the doctrine "If there is grass on the field, play ball," then I strongly suggest you stop hanging out at the local schools to check out eleventeen-year-olds unless you want to go to jail, which would require a completely different set of dating rules. Let's continue with the question at hand.

The first thing you must figure out is what a girl wants, and who better to tell us what girls really, really want other than the ambassadors of estrogen, the Spice Girls? In their own words, girls "really, really, really wanna zig-a-zig, ah." What exactly does that mean? It means that girls will never be too clear about what they want; hence, you'll be convicted for assault long before you realize that Britney Spears wants you to hit her with a sign and not your fist. It's as if they're speaking a completely different language. I guess it's true what they say: Women are from Venus and Men are from Uranus.

Even if you can't figure out what the hell they're jabbering about, the important thing is not what they have to say, but what you have to say. What you need is the right hook, and while pick-up lines may be funny and/or witty (i.e. "I wanna put my thingy in your thingy" or "Girl, if I were a fly, I'd be all over you, because you're the s**t"), saying the wrong thing may warrant a slap in the face or a knee to the groin. Speaking from personal experience, you never want to kill a conversation by saying the wrong thing. So, no matter how great the urge, if you ever meet a sexy Italian filmmaker who directed a five-minute portrayal of Ken and Barbie having sex to a techno soundtrack for the Playboy Short Film Festival, don't ever tell her that you're a Politics Major and that your favorite film is Dead Poets Society. But that's just one of the more specific cases…

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