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…