From Science of Nightclub Bouncing Studied:
While bouncers might not be traditional subjects for scientific study, they provided Salter with vivid examples of the kind of dominance hierarchies among humans that Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz studied among barnyard fowl and Jane Goodall observed among chimpanzees. Salter decided to study bouncers when a friend told him, ‘Hey, you want dominance, go to nightclubs.’After an initial survey of bars in Brisbane, Australia, Salter moved to Germany. With Karl Grammer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology in Vienna, he videotaped 60 hours of confrontations between doormen and potential customers at the famous Nacht-Caf?.
Salter found that men and women use different strategies when confronted by doormen assessing whether they are worthy of entry to the Munich hotspot. As men turned the corner and began the long walk up to the wall of doormen, they accelerated, compressed their body speed, and looked straight ahead trying to avoid eye contact with the doormen until absolutely necessary.
Women, in contrast, looked at the doormen, slowed down, and began flirting. The more skin they were showing (Salter diligently measured this off his videotapes), the more they flirted.
The doormen looked at prospective customers’ wealth, attractiveness, and youth. To judge how much money a supplicant had to throw around inside, they were particularly concerned with his shoes.
Beautiful women were always welcome, unless they appeared from their excessively skimpy dress, heavy makeup, extremely high heels and slack posture to be prostitutes.
A man in his 60s could get in if he had a lovely young woman on each arm. Women of that age seldom even tried to get past the doormen.
This sounds plausible:
Managers of tough Australian bars, Salter discovered, labeled rum and coke as “the fighting drink.” The “Cuba Libre’s” alcohol loosens inhibitions and saps judgment, while the sugar and caffeine rev up the drinkers. Beer is safer for bar owners worried about getting their furniture smashed up because it takes beer drinkers longer to get drunk.
(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com.)