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That was my impression, at least, of this when I went to a booking club in LA's Koreatown last Friday night. In South Korea, there are countless nightclubs that do booking; but in Koreatown, there are only three clubs serving the city's massive Korean-American population. As a non-Korean whose Korean cultural literacy stops at knowing what kind of banchan I like, I found myself at the most mainstream booking nightclub, located in the heart of the three-mile-long neighborhood.
The night started off innocently enough.
Best speed dating near Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA. Sort:Recommended. All I've been on a few dates, but haven't found the right lady yet. However, it's a. Young people in the U.S. are choosing to marry later and later, many The result is a cross between a business pitch meeting, speed dating.
I showed up to the club and got in because one friend had made a reservation via Yelp. The ambiance inside the spacious nightclub was one that I'd come to expect at a place that offers bottle service. There were about 50 white booths but only a handful of them were filled at 11 PM. There were laser lights, a fog machine, a dance floor, and a DJ playing nothing but Drake and top dance hits from the last two decades.
We were seated in a corner booth in the colosseum-style space, and then things immediately started getting weird.
If your party is over five people, there is a two-bottle-minimum. On top of this, you are obligated to tip at least 30 percent. A woman who was about five-foot-three with short black hair and a short, black spandex skirt scooted over next to me.
Seven-hundred dollars and the most carefully sliced platter of ripe fruit later, our server told us that that we would be better off if half of our group went out for a smoke or hit the dance floor. That way, the first round of women would have somewhere to sit. Half of our group took one for the team and left the table, while I stayed behind with two of my friends. Sheena Iyengar and Raymond Fisman found, from having the participants fill out questionnaires, that what people said they wanted in an ideal mate did not match their subconscious preferences.
A study at the University of Bern showed that women appear to be attracted to the smell of men who have different MHC profiles from their own, and that oral contraceptives reversed this effect. The MHC is a region of the human genome involved with immune function. Because parents with more diverse MHC profiles would be expected to produce offspring with stronger immune systems , dissimilar MHC may play a role in sexual selection. A speed "date" lasting several minutes should be long enough for the MHC hypothesis to come into play, provided the participants are seated close enough together.
One of each set was wearing pheromones , and the ones wearing pheromones received more matches.
Studies of speed dating events generally show more selectivity among women than among men. This new study showed that when men were seated and the women rotated, the men were more selective. The popularity or charm of speed dating has led to at least one offspring: Speed Networking. A structured way of running business networking events with the goal of making meeting potential business contacts easier and more productive.
Speed networking has also been used in China as a way for business people to meet each other and to decide if they have similar business objectives and synergies. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Matchmaking event where people meet potential partners for a short period of time.
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The Jewish Journal, February , The Independent. January 19, Archived from the original on October 15, Findings column. It seems like your ordinary American nightclub at first: dark, an ear-splitting Amp Radio playlist, overpriced well drinks, and girls and boys in their early 20s crowding the spacious dance floor. But survey the club from the tiny bar in the back—or even just turn around on the dance floor—and you'll see waiters dragging the young women by the hand to a table full of guys.
The girl will sit with them for a few minutes, do a shot, and then get up, before another waiter grabs her elbow. Even though it was my first time at Feria, a booking club in Los Angeles's Koreatown neighborhood, I expected to see this. Still, when this actually happened before my eyes, I couldn't help but laugh in surprise.
Booking is a Korean dating practice, where waiters introduce male and female club-goers to each other by forcibly bringing women to men's tables. South Koreans have been booking since the s , according to Kai Ma's article on the experience in Hyphen Magazine. Booking mixes sexual experimentation with Korean culture's traditional reliance on matchmaking and arranged marriages. When a group of guys wants to book, they call up a waiter they know, reserve a table, and then pay for bottle service at the club. The waiter then brings girls to their table in order to earn good tips.
Girls usually get a promo table and bottle for free as an incentive to participate. For as long as people have been discussing the booking phenomenon stateside, they've decried it as a deeply patriarchal institution. For example, Anthony Bourdain's travel show The Layover features one girl describing booking in fairly grim terms: "It's kind of like speed dating, except, like, the girls have no agency," she says—an observation seemingly confirmed by all the dragging I saw going on.
When I first heard about booking, I thought, 'What woman would willingly participate in this? When I first heard about booking, I thought, "What woman would willingly participate in this? But then I thought more about booking in relation to my single life in the past few years, where I've had to deal with "ghosting" or making plans over text that went nowhere on a regular basis. Even worse, reading about other women's experience being bombarded with Tinder messages from a barrage of misogynistic men " with all the social grace of Steve fucking Urkel " had me cringing in recognition.
There's also the paradox of choice, an idea pioneered by psychologist Barry Schwartz that comedian Aziz Ansari discussed in his heavily researched book Modern Romance : Because online dating has opened up so many options to people, it becomes harder for us to actually settle on a choice, because we fear we didn't make the best choice possible. In comparison, booking almost seems like a throwback to simpler time, solving the paradox of choice in its own way. Perhaps this would mean more meaningful, less painful dating interactions. Perhaps this would even make booking a viable alternative to Tinder and OkCupid, or even just meeting a guy at a bar.
In her aforementioned Hyphen article, Kai Ma portrays the booking experience as an endless nightmare, replete with unpleasant experiences that range from holding hands with a female friend on the dance floor of one club to fend off the advance of "drunk, leering men" to being stalked by a waiter named Angel, who tells Ma that she didn't dress revealingly enough: " 'Your beauty is trying to burst from this jacket! It's bursting to be free. As for waiters dragging girls from table to table?