Craigslist Personals – eBay for Hedonists - Free Shipping Included

Although sex is solicited online in many places — legally and otherwise — the Casual Encounters listings on Craigslist are a major hub, offering to do for casual sex what the rest of the site does for apartment sharing, temporary jobs and old golf clubs.

Like the old-time gay bathhouses and sex clubs (remember Plato’s Retreat in NYC), the Casual Encounters section caters to the erotic underbelly of society, where courtship gives way to expediency and anonymity is a virtue. The section was introduced in late 2000 and is available in all cities served by Craigslist, for users gay and straight, male and female, swingers, purveyors of used underwear and even propositions for renting out animals trained for the purpose. Word out to the Humane Society! The ads range from prim and playful to gross and raunchy; a good number of people include photographs of precisely what they have to offer. Though the site has a policy against posting pornographic pictures, it does not seem to be enforced.

Ads in the Casual Encounters section account for 2 percent of all Craigslist postings, according to the company. It also says that traffic to all the Craigslist personals sites — which include more innocuous sections for old-school romance and platonic relationships is higher than for any other online personals site, including Match.com, eHarmony and Yahoo personals. That’s a lot of people searching for love through the smog of the Internet.

When I was growing up in New York, boys who came of age all hopped into a car and drove to Times Square. This was the time before Times Square became a G-Rated theme-park for Midwestern tourists in khaki shorts with black socks. There was storefront after storefront with glowing neon signs advertising the hard sell of electric sex; peep shows, sex toys, massage palors, video tapes, movie houses and lines of prostitutes on the street corners by the Port Authority bus depot selling sex for about the price you would pay for a Starbucks Venti Latte (non-fat milk, no foam, please).

Our first experience was with the peep shows where you would go into a store that had closed booths in a back room. You would drop a quarter in the slot and a shutter would rise to provide a short glimpse of a naked woman gyrating on a circular platform that looked like something out Tim Burton's vision of a twisted nightmare from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. It was enough of a disgusting experience to have you wishing you were back in your suburban neighborhood with Mary Lou watching reruns of Leave It Beaver sitting on the couch eating popcorn while she was babysitting the neighbor’s kids. No sex, no way; yet no diseases, no corruption. When you awoke from this nightmare, you were just hoping that your feet weren’t actually sticking to the floor of the booth. Then again, you thought to yourself - Should I put another quarter in the slot? If you did, that is why you currently like going to Vegas; if not, that is why you avoid the place like the plague.

I imagine that the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist Personals is the virtual, on-line equivalent of the old Times Square. We all have voyeuristic tendencies and it is secret fun to gawk at the freak show from a safe distance. As for the actual participants, some psychologists have postulated that many of the people trolling the site have a narcissistic, sociopathic side and don’t have a lot of empathy for other people. It sounds like they are describing my local congressman. Oh, I believe he is on-line now in the newly established friends of Eliot Spitzer link. Sorry, that’s on Facebook, wrong social networking site.

As a researcher schooled in the rigors of experimental methodology, I decided to perform an informal social science experiment. I created two fictitious ads, one for a woman seeking a man and one for a man seeking a woman. These were just text-based ads and I did not post a picture (I understand from other’s experiences that more responses are generated from ads with pictures attached).

The response rate and some observations:

• Straight woman looking for a Casual Relationship with a man: 185 responses
• Straight man looking for a Casual Relationship with a women: 0 responses, 21 spam responses for solicitation by a sex website
  

1. For the Orange County postings, where I pretended to be a straight female looking for a male, I received dozens of emails a few minutes after posting. The rate of emails slowed down as the day went on when the post got pushed further and further down on the page.
2. I was overwhelmed with how many straight males simply included pictures of their genitals and nothing else. Were they really expecting that a woman would see a picture of their penis and exclaim “My, what a wonderful personality this guy has. That has to be the man for me!”? 
3. Some men wrote really short, one-lined notes, while others gave entire biographies of themselves, where they worked, lived, pictures, phone numbers, etc. 
4. Several men admitted that they were married and were looking to cheat on their significant others.
5. As for the male looking for a female post, it got spammed by what amounts to either pay-for-play or links to dating websites and young girl webcam sites (I assume they get naked while you pay and watch - I am sure it costs a lot more than a quarter to open that voyeuristic shutter).
   

The real insidious issue at hand is that most of the people gave away a good deal of personal information to an anonymous person on the Internet. They didn’t know who I was and I could have used this information for God knows what type of mischief. The moral being that you guys should use the brain located in its primary location and not the one located in your other head.

Blinded by science! Not exactly as this little social science experiment just examined the response rate to an ad with no actual follow-through, not a good research design. Sorry Profeesor, I promise not to smoke pot before coming to your lecture next time. I know, I know, short term memory loss. I did remember that good research practice for conducting a psycho-social experiment requires all pictures and personal information be destroyed at the end of the one week experiment, as was done for this ad hoc study.

“Casual Encounters was created in response to user demand for a section that allowed for a wide range of personal meeting and relationship options,” Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist as quoted from a recent New York Times article. “In that sense, it’s probably an accurate inside look at how people like to connect these days. Our users like the ability to be both candid and, initially, anonymous. The users see this as a valuable service for the local community.”

If Craigslist is a “community” like it claims to be, then I propose that we do what all in a community would do; have a block party to clean all the crap off the street and deposit it properly in the trash. I am afraid that if this is not done, sooner or later the ever growing pile of sludge will eventually envelop one of us who use the site, or one of those unsuspecting victims in whom we love…

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Further Lessons in Diverstiy Training

Here is a story pulled off the wire about addressing the need for proper communication as it affects performance during adversity….

During a recent intense conflict, a GI was running and dodging exploding shells, making every effort to survive the onslaught. Seeing an open foxhole, our brave GI jumped into it and to his surprise he found a Native American dressed in tribal warfare garb sitting staunchly, arms crossed, gazed fixed and straight ahead. Having paid the brave soldier no attention whatsoever, the soldier frantically tried to communicate with this Indian about what was going on and where he was from. Since his efforts were to no avail, our soldier had an idea that maybe he can communicate with this fellow through so kind of improvised sign language. After all, we all remember what we were taught about how Indians are especially adept at the use of such a form of communication.

The soldier thought to himself, maybe I should find out what division this Indian was assigned to, that way I will know more about what he is doing here. In his attempt to communicate with the Indian, the following dialogue was relayed to us via translation after the fact:

In trying to determine the unit this Indian was from, the soldier first established the fact that since the Indian was so far behind enemy lines, he must have come here from the esteemed 101st Airborne Division. Extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI rose his right hand high over his left arm and made a slowly descending action, fluttering his fingers up and down quickly (like simulating rain) until the downward action stopped at the top of his outstretched arm. He repeated this action a few times, all the while the GI was asking “Are you with the 101st Airborne Division? You know the paratroopers…”

The Indian just sat there expressionless and motionless, seemingly ignoring the GI. Since the GI noticed this lack of acknowledgment, he decided to continue his line of presentation until he received some form of recognition from the Indian.

Again, extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI used his right hand to make his fingers walk up his arm from wrist to elbow. He repeated this action a few times to make sure it was noticed. This time he repeatedly asked the Indian, “Are with the Infantry, maybe the Big Red One?”

Again the Indian sat motionless, unflinching…

Desperately, our GI now used his logic to determine that maybe this Indian was part a failed armored division incursion. Once again, extending his left arm outward with clenched fist and palm facing down, the GI used his right hand and aggressively grabbed and released the wrist of the clenched fist arm to help convey the message... “Are with the Armored Division, old Ironside or the like?”

Once again no reaction and our GI was now getting frantic, but a flash come to him, almost a revelation. As a last gesture of sign language, our GI made two circles by touching his thumb to his index finger and raised these circles to his eyes rapidly moving these two circles toward his eyes and away from them quickly, like looking through imaginary binoculars. While doing so he asked our Indian friend, “Are you some kind of scout? A lookout for the Calvary division?”

With this last gesture, the mysterious Indian screamed and jumped straight up as if wrought with sheer terror. In one fell swoop he was out of the foxhole and began running blindly, almost running for the sake of his very life. As the bullets flew and the bombs burst, the Indian finally jumped into a different foxhole and, low and behold, these was the Chief of his tribe, in full regalia. Not wasting another moment of breath, our Indian proclaimed to his Chief in their native tongue…

“Greatest pardon for this interruption, my great chief, but you wouldn’t believe these barbarous White Men. One of them came into my foxhole and frantically signed to me…” “As the sun goes down and the people go away, I am going to f%&k you in your ass until your eyes bug out of your head.”

As for the lesson learned… Be sure to adopt proper, effective communication lest your words be offensive to others. That is, of course, unless it was your intention all along to violate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protocol.

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Friends and Technology

The march of technology provides us with a level of interpersonal connection that was unheard of even ten years ago. The cell phone, the Internet and the marriage of the two in smart phones, like the CrackBerry and iPhone, have rapidly increased our ability to stay in touch with an ever increasing universe of friends. Do we have the time for all these other people? Are we ignoring our true friends and loved ones in the process by being connected to the others?

I got a kick out of a few of my old college buddies chasing me down on FaceBook and reminding me of the old good times had via faded photographs and dusted off stories. Should I be using my time to chat with them when I could be spending more time with my family, or actually visiting with friends? I now have a means to remain in some sort of contact with old college roommates and buddies and I believe I will continue to use my FaceBook account. As for Twitter, Tweets and text messages, they just don't do it for me. One hundred and forty characters a message. Go ahead, use it for telling me to bring milk home after work. I can see the use in that, but I don't need to know that someone else is bringing home milk to their family after work. If I am to be so informed, maybe they can pick up an extra container and drop it off at my house so I do not have to do it.

After all, this technology allows us to keep in touch with more people and we get to see small glimpses via photos, videos and messages about what they are doing with their lives. We become welcomed voyeurs into the lives of these remote peoples for we will rarely interact with them online and may never speak or meet with them offline.

Technology makes it possible to disrupt real friendships with this voyeuristic stream of inanity. Have we come to a time when new social networking might make you inattentive to your first social network: your family? How many times have we witnessed the overextended parent, head down, tapping away on their iPhone oblivious to what’s going on while they are supposedly “watching” their child play? I wonder how many children are competing for time and attention with the tiny people living in that smart phone. I wonder how many times a child has raised his head to seek out the loving approval of his parent only to see the glow of the LCD reflected in their eyes? No love for you today Junior, can’t you see I am busy taking the "What Type of Parent Are You?" quiz.

If you believe in evolutionary psychology, the theory of anthropologist Robin Dunbar called Dunbar’s Number states that the maximum number of healthy social relationships a person can maintain at any one time is approximately 150. You might not think these on-line relationships belong to your social relationships but they are taking up social and emotional space. You are chunking information about a person into your memory. A person who you went to high school with - not really a friend then or now – who just got back from a trip to Oshkosh, WI, pictures, video and text narrative freshly posted ½ hour after his return home. You can’t just turn that information off as it has been tagged all over your FaceBook wall like some repressed graffiti spray painted in neon orange. As you take this information in, it’s probably parked right next to the other random facts of your childhood like song lyrics or television commercials or the indelibly etched vision of this 13 year old guy naked in the gym locker next to yours. A comedian named John Bowman does a bit about how much stuff we can pack into our 50+ year old brains and the consensus is that there is not much room left. Pack, pack, pack…

I was just trying to find a picture of some boys in a locker room on Google to go along with this article but all I could find was gay pornography. I had to paint the gym shorts on a few of these kids using Photoshop.  I have to go someplace else!

At some point, you’re only storing a very small amount of data on a slew of people, which makes those relationships tenuous as best. The issue here is that you’re threatening the strength of all your relationships as you expand your reach. So you make a conscious effort to store more about ‘good’ friends and family, but I’m not sure we’re wired that way.

There is a reason why you lose touch with friends. The turning point comes when they aren’t really your friends anymore. Maybe we have outgrown them or our experience and wisdom requires us to seek others to whom we can more readily relate to. Recent research by Gerald Mollenhorst suggests that we replace half of our friends every seven years. I looked it up on Google; that’s what the Internet is really useful for (besides pornography). I question whether technology is inhibiting the natural shedding of friends necessary for us to move on, to establish new friends and evolve as a person. Maybe I need to get rid of my oldest, dearest friends to pick up one of my new “old” friends that I used to admire so much for making farting noises with his hands.

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