Sex, Dating and Personals

Weblog entries dealing with sex, dating and personals.

Jennifer Job offers her personal take on "Lust and the City" and takes us on a guided tour of the Bad Date Hall of Fame. "I kept up a one sided conversation while Hank shoveled food in his mouth like an anteater hoovering ants."
Skirt

Salon and Nerve are teaming up to create a new online personals site. I don't get the appeal of online personals myself. People looking for relationships usually want to meet people who live nearby, so local services (eg, the personal ads in weekly alternative newspapers) make far more sense than Internet-based services that connect you with people who may live thousands of miles away. Right? Nerve has a personals section active, but I don't see any mention of Salon's partnership just yet.
Write News

Michelle Goodman investigates the phenomenon of Speed Dating, "the latest Jewish dating phenomenon, in which singles meet at coffeehouses for collective blind dates -- or more specifically, to go on seven seven-minute blind dates in one evening."
Salon

Oliver August looks at instant dating services via mobile phone in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul. One such service declares, "If Romeo and Juliet had used mobile phones, then Shakespeare's story would not be a tragedy." August notes that "Asia is far ahead of America when it comes to using mobile phones for romance, and, indeed, for viewing their phones as media tools."
Feed

Jeanne McDonald surveys the state of blind dating in Knoxville, reviews her own history of blind dates (all lousy), and gets hooked on the TV show Blind Date.
Metro Pulse

Kim McNamara recounts her disastrous foray into online personals. It sounds to me like McNamara set her expectations too high, or at least pretends she had high hopes so she could whine about it afterwards. "According to the majority of what you read about [online personals], the success stories of love far outweigh the failures." Really? Where did you read that? Why would anyone believe such a thing about any method of meeting people, much less anonymous encounters over the Internet?
Iron Minds

Frustrated by efforts to meet that special someone, Jonathan Rich checked out the Dates'R'Us service in his hometown. While getting the hard sell, he began to suspect "that Dates'R'Us was less about meeting Ms. Right and more about separating lonely and desperate people from their money."
Mountain Express

An Osaka cafe called YES has come up with an innovation in dating services, the Internet personals cafe. "Customers can still look for the object of their desires, and communicate entirely via e-mail. But the danger of meeting up with a wacko is eliminated because all e-mail is sent and received in the same room."
Wai Wai (Jul 2001)

Tamara Straus looks at online personals and dating services. "Is online dating a bleak reflection of an overworked, increasingly alienated, rootless and commodity-oriented society? Or is it the greatest technological love panacea ever created -- a way to use the greatest invention of the late 20th century to cut through the b.s. of bar talk and find what you are looking for, be it a man who will spank you, a woman who enjoys Derrida drunk or a long-term relationship that will lead to a loving, nuclear family? The answer seems to be both."
Alternet (Jan 2002)

Hae Won Choi explores "booking clubs" in South Korea, a strange approach to singles clubs in a society which "discourages young people from interacting with the opposite sex."
Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC) (Jan 2002)

Katie Shimer ventures into online dating to break up a dry spell.

When you're hitched, it feels like missed opportunities are piling up. Everywhere, there are fountains spewing adorable men: men with sultry accents, men who seductively massage your neck at the salon, men who tell you how smart and sexy you are while your boyfriend bitches about how you never clean the kitty litter. And then you're single, and suddenly? Everyone is hideous, married, a hippie, or illiterate. All the people you were dying to screw have suddenly evaporated or conveniently discovered they have no further interest.

Portland Mercury (May 2002)

Heather Havrilesky explores the competitive world of online dating and modern trends in personal ad rhetoric.

A change has certainly come upon us. Browse the personals on Bust.com or Nerve.com and you'll see for yourself: Gone are the candlelit dinners and the long walks on the beach. Cooking and travel and nights by the fire sound as old and lame as that "Like a Rock" theme song that Chevy can't seem to leave behind.

We've entered a new era of self-branding, featuring tasty professional photographs and sales pitches feistier than those dreamt up by a skilled copywriter. Today's online love-seeker isn't looking for someone who's "sexy and sophisticated and fit," he's looking for "[S]someone to end my hedonistic ways -- or someone to take me headlong deeper into them." You can almost hear Britney singing that bump-and-grind Pepsi theme song in the background: "The rrrride! Just enjoy the rrrrride! Don't need a reason why!"

I knew The Onion website had personals, but didn't know about Bust. Daze Reader is so behind the curve sometimes.
Salon (May 2002)

Michelle Chihara defends Internet personals. "For some reason, the inevitable pitfalls of dating are magnified into revolting new developments as soon as they are associated with anything intentional, like the personals. When the new-fangled online personals first arrived, the favored bogeyman was that one might find a geeky computer programmer on the other end of all those snappy emails. Then geeks got chic (and rich), and that didn't seem so bad anymore. The scare tactics became more nuanced. Now, they play on fear of the medium, or fear of our fallen consumerist times."
Alternet (May 2002)

Frank Sanello explores the "Heaven and Hell of Internet Dating" for gay men, starting from his own experience. "About six years ago, I subscribed to AOL, with its virtual supermarket of sexual chat rooms, and I've had the wildest, most varied sex that surpassed any of my fantasies. I had never had sex with a famous porn star until I went online. Courtesy of AOL, Gay.com, PlanetOut and a few other gay Web sites, I've met and mated with buffed hunks who had been avoiding making eye contact with me for the past two decades. . . . But amid this garden of erotic delights and pro bono computer support, I gradually began to notice something that first perplexed me, then depressed me: I couldn't find a boyfriend to save my (love) life." (Link snagged from Banana Guide.) (Jul 2002)

Internet dating services have become one of the few highly profitable dot-com business niches. This AP feature story looks at both the business models of sites like Match.com and Lavalife, and the experiences of singles using these sites. (Jul 2002)

Brittany Schaeffer and David Walker try out "speed dating" in Portland. (Jul 2002)

John Sutherland looks at the evolution of the London Review of Books personal column, which the highbrow literary journal introduced four years ago. "Doubtless its editors thought that readers would use the classifieds to advertise first editions of Jacques Derrida, slightly foxed.... The LRB personals became, amazingly, an outlet for the country's most intelligent sexual maniacs.... Over the years, the ads have become cleverer and more outrageous. They are half Hustler, half Times crossword puzzle and very un-LRB." (Sep 2002)

MSNBC exposes the latest sleazy ploy used by porn spammers — placing fake ads in online personals, then steering respondents to porn sites or phone sex.

Her online personal ad said she liked the outdoors, camping, hiking, biking, blading, and “yes, even fishing.” Don was online looking for love, like millions of other men, and thought “Amyloov” was sexy, so he dropped her a note through Yahoo.com’s personals. But finding out if Amyloov was “the one” came with a price tag — $4 a minute, in fact. Amyloov turned out to be just a cleverly disguised advertisement for a pay-per-minute sex line.

This is actually the third article in an MSNBC series on online dating and personals. The first article looked at the business of online personals services; the second article, entitled "a generation of unabashed flirts," looked at some people who use online personals. (Sep 2002)

MSNBC's series on online dating continues. Jane Weaver looks at how new technologies will change online dating. "Over the next few years digital daters will be able to connect almost instantly to a potential partner through cell phones or other wireless gadgets, watch video clips or listen to someone describe his hobbies." And Mike Brunker looks at "adult" or "alternative" personals sites, where the focus on setting up sexual encounters or finding people with similar sexual tastes is more upfront. (Sep 2002)

Dawn Olsen launches her own blog dating service. (Oct 2002)

Edie at A Mating Call in the Concrete Jungle has launched an experiment on the Nerve personals: "I created a fictional Nerve ad with a gorgeous woman and dumb answers and updated mine, which offers neither of those things." Their respective answers to the "Last great book you read" question:

ME - "I can't remember the last 'great' book I read. I can tell you that on my nightstand now are, The American Sphinx a biography of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis and Crime Classics, an interesting compilation of short mystery stories."

MODEL: "I don't read that much. Although I do read Cosmo and Marie Claire every month. I like some Danielle Steele, too, I guess."

Scroll up (ie, toward the more recent entries) for running commentary on the results. (Oct 2002)

MSNBC reported recently on sleazy porn spammers placing fake personal ads in online dating services, then steering male respondents to porn paysites. In some cases, the spammers use photos snagged from real women's dating service profiles. One woman to whom this happened has been fighting back, urging the dating services to crack down more seriously and tracking down the con artist who stole her photo.

Laura provided MSNBC.com with a 3-inch thick pile of paper, documenting dozens of personals ads using her photo. In one, she was “Firecracker_heaven007” a 22 year old from Woodsville, N.H. In another, “lil_spank_spank,” a 23 year old from Denver who expected “breakfast in bed” after the first date. In still another, she was “Chocolate_Starfish_0,” who promised to “bring you the danger that firecrackers have” and invited men to “send me your e-mail and a pic of yourself. Who knows, maybe I’ll make you explode.” In fact, many of the fake ads played on the firecracker theme, Laura said, making them relatively easy to find.

This is just plain low. (Nov 2002) ~~

Sex, Dating and Personals

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