I, TOO, HAVE SPOKEN TO A GIRL.

Geeze, no need to shout!

What does being young or female have to do with it?

Perhaps the person in question was young and female. :) Does the above comment offend you? It was a story, not a generalization, from what I can tell. (It seems to me that people are too easily offended sometimes.)

but why those attributes and not race or height or credit score. not to make too big a deal of it but it's interesting to note which attributes are considered notable/identifying.

The examples you've provided cannot be immediately distinguished just from talking to a person.

Additionally, these are two traits that are very identifiable - they're broad definitions that only separate people into two groups. Young implies younger than the OP (the other option being old), female is one of two groups the vast majority of the population fits into.

When I go to the beach and don sunglasses to mask my otherwise creepy leering behavior, the two adjectives that most precisely describe the people I ogle are "young" and "female".

And I most certainly do not prefer to stare at Powerpoint/Keynote/Impress slideshows as someone drones on about goals and metrics.

While the preferences that govern attraction are a bit more varied, the propensity for men to enjoy the company of women who are obviously of reproductive age is literally the sole foundation for huge swaths of the advertising industry. It cannot be overridden by political correctness or gender-equality progressiveness. This is such a deeply entrenched fact of human interaction, that one can make jokes about it in the right situation, without any prior setup.

And when someone does, it is acceptable to laugh, rather than to question the premise.

They were flirting.

> What does being young or female have to do with it?

I'd like to explain, but I have a meeting to get to.

This is the nerdyist comment on HackerNews, congratulations sir.