I’ve got to say what surprises me the most about the LA Times story exposing Arnold Scwarzennegger as a pig is not that he hit on a lot of women in a disgusting manner. It’s that this stuff works. As all men know — or vaguely remember from their bachelor days — hitting on women is a numbers game. The guys who are good at it have a much higher success rate than those who are bad at it — or than those men who are uglier than a shaved horse head — but ultimately it’s all about odds. If you say, “man that dress would look great crumpled next to my bedside table” to enough women — 100, 1,000, 10,000 — the monkeys-banging-on-typewriters principle demands that eventually it will work. So presumably the incidents recounted in today’s story are merely examples of when his behavior yield the desired result — the statistical equivalent of him throwing snake eyes in craps. But one can assume that this behavior was rewarded enough times for him to keep doing it. My interest in the fact that these women exist is now — obviously — purely academic. Nevertheless, it is amazing when you think about it.