The three criteria that Nasty Gal chose for judging a state's quality of a "girls' night out" are: cost, fun and safety.
Guess where Texas seriously failed.
Yeah, a woman's safety.
To get into the details: In tabulating the money a gal is likely to spend for a bit of fun and socializing after dark, Nasty Gal used cost of living data to find the average price for a cocktail, a cab (5 mile journey), a fast food meal, a bottle of wine and something called "a high street party dress."
Let us ponder for a moment what Nasty Gal considers a fun night out. A bottle of chablis and a cab ride to get a burger.
The term "high street," by the way, betrays the foreign origins of Nasty Gal's experts: "High street" is British for a town's main street, essentially its retail and commercial center.
In American, it's like saying "a downtown party dress." Which no American actually says. What we'd say, of course, is a cocktail party dress.
Also, seriously, a cab? Brits don't use Uber or Lyft? And who goes to party at a McDonald's — wearing an evening dress and carrying a bottle of wine?
Well, OK, that sounds exactly like something that a Nasty Gal customer might do for fun.
In any case, nowhere does Nasty Gal explain what "fun" is or how it was tabulated except, perhaps, in the number of bars and nightclubs in a particular state — per one thousand people.
Among the 50 states, for example, when it comes to women looking for a memorable night out, Wisconsin is #1. Factors that put America's Dairyland on top include the comparatively low cost of a cocktail ($7.30), the number of gin joints ranked "five star" (according to the opinions on Tripadvisor) — and just the sheer number of bars and nightclubs, period.
Who knew the Midwest was so exciting? Or possibly so desperate for a drink? Among the top 10 states, six are in the Midwest: North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and that hotbed of partytime hooplah — Iowa.
None of this is to be taken seriously, of course. It's all a bit of attention-getting fun designed to increase traffic to a retail site I had personally never heard of. But then, I haven't been looking for a pair of black "faux leather buckle knee high platform boots" lately.
Nothing against such a fashion choice — especially if they come with serious orthopedic arches. I need those arches.
The one truly serious area in all of this, of course, is safety — the personal safety of our party-going women. And it's a pity that, like "fun," Nasty Gal never defines the term. Frequency of shade being thrown? It says only that the figures come from "world population review." One can only presume it has something to do with factors like reported assaults.
And it's here that Texas fails. We're mostly middling when it comes to the price of food and bevs (the wine, the cocktail, the burger and fries) and towards the high end for the dress and cab fare.
But what really drags down the state's average is the fact that only Mississippi and Louisiana rank lower than Texas in a woman's safety when she's on the town.
On the other hand, if you need another reason to wonder about the data, Texas is also pretty miserable when it comes to the number of five star saloons per one thousand people (0.01). It's a figure, remember, that Nasty Gal says it got from the ratings on Tripadvisor.
But that's not the number that might cause head scratching. It's that New York — yes, home of the Big Apple — gets a score of 0.00 in the same category. Zero estimable taverns per one thousand people. Connecticut, New Jersey, Arkansas and Pennsylvania get the same flat bottom ranking.
Which means Tripadvisor's contributors found so few top shelf watering holes from the western edge of Pennsylvania, all across New Jersey and New York to the eastern border of Connecticut that, collectively, all four states don't manage even a 0.01.
That's a distance of 500 miles and some 45 million people.
