Sex, Lies, and Internet. Part I.
I was looking for a new a living room sofa and decided to check out craigslist.com. I am sure most of you are familiar with this site—it’s a helpful, well thought out, virtual bulletin board. Among other things, it has hundreds upon hundreds of sofas and couches, and those are only the ones listed in your area in the last 24 hours. Unlike eBay, craigslist does not display even tiny thumbnail pictures next to the listings on the main page, so in order to see the photographs you have to click on the link. Most sofas turned out to be ugly or simply not the kind I needed, and after two hours of “clicking on sofas,” I was ready to kill somebody.

To take my mind off furniture, I resolved to peruse other parts of the site and ended up in the “personals” section. Men like comedy clubs and barbeque, women prefer tall guys with a sense of humor, and romantics of both genders haven’t lost the hope of finding that special someone. Blah. Growing bored again, I clicked the Back button, and then saw it: Casual Encounters. You have to be 18 to enter. Okay, that might be mildly entertaining.

My hot wet mouth is ready for your…
Looking for a passionate plump Filipino girl to…
I am alone in bed this morning. Cum to my place and…
I love to watch – a handsome young man is looking for a couple to…

Yuck. I was just about to leave this page when I noticed a peculiar ad. It looked like an answer to something else:

The guys from “A Very Attractive Couple” ad should fuck the mirror.

It piqued my interest. What attractive couple? I went looking for the original ad and found it on the third page. It read something like this:

A very good-looking couple is searching for another couple to have some fun times together. She: a blindingly beautiful brunette with green eyes who turns heads and stops cars. Height: (average); weight: (quite low). He: also very handsome, although barely worthy of his gorgeous mate. Height: (rather tall); weight: (perfect). He is slim but muscular, and well-endowed.
We take very good care of ourselves and expect the same. We are looking for the attractive couples. If you are beginning to lose your hair or noticing a pouch on your belly, don’t bother replying — we won’t match. Because we’re so attractive ourselves, we are only seeking slender, beautiful couples.


We are gorgeous. Striking! Didn’t you get it? For the slow folks out there: WE ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL. Whoever wrote that joke about the mirror, he had a point….

While searching for the “Very Attractive Couple” ad, I perused several pages of these works of art. Most of the ads from women were obviously written by prostitutes—something along the lines of “an opulent lady with generous tits will give you oceans of pleasure” or “a slender 18-year-old girl is looking for her sugar daddy.” The ads from men, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. Hot young stallions looking for immediate gratification competed for my attention with middle-aged men seeking discrete fun on the side; a bunch of hard-hat workers were wondering if, by any chance, a stray nymphomaniac was willing to come to their construction site right that minute and satisfy every single one of them (and no, I am not making this up); multiple clones of Don Juan wanted women, race, height, weight, and age unimportant, just provide two legs with a hole between them (give me some pills to alleviate greediness — more, more, MORE!); male specimens of all ages desired to join a couple or an orgy; finally, a variety of sexually dissatisfied guys hoped to find a woman (or women) with whom they could actually have a reasonably intelligent conversation—after having sex, of course.

I was peeking into a keyhole of a door that led to a vast, intriguing, previously unknown world. Who answers these ads? Does anyone answer them at all? Where are women, aside from prostitutes? Are there any other virtual places for these activities (after all, craigslist is a relatively tame site)?

I rolled up the sleeves and decided to play an investigative reporter. Wondering, for example, how many swingers walk the streets around us, I wanted to conduct some research on any relevant demographic patterns. I didn’t care about prostitution or serious dating; my goal was to explore casual encounters—voluntary, free sex that leads nowhere and exists for the sole purpose of physical and, indirectly, psychological satisfaction of the participants.

I confided my newfound interest to a few friends and every one of them invariably wondered why I wanted to get my hands dirty by digging into this…this filth. Well, I did. I wanted to learn something about this unfamiliar world.

I am not promoting casual sex here—or monogamy for that matter. This is by no means some salacious exploration of Internet smut. Hundreds of scientists with PhDs study human sexual behavior and write serious articles about it, including studies of swingers. Sexuality plays a central role in our lives; it’s a timeless topic, and one that interests millions. I yearned to explore its boundaries.

***

I tried answering a few ads, hoping to dig up some interesting information. It didn’t work out; everybody immediately asked for my photo and phone number. I panicked and cut off all correspondence. Then I changed my tactics. If a candidate made a good impression and strung a few coherent words together, I wrote back suggesting we spend some time communicating via e-mails first. I said I wasn’t quite ready to give them personal information—too many psychos out there.

I quickly learned why people don’t like sending lengthy e-mails to potential dates without first seeing their faces and/or hearing their voices. These sites have few—make that very few—“real” women. Most ladies are either for sale or busy luring the guys to some expensive websites. Many live abroad or stay here illegally—they throw themselves at any American man and offer eternal love right off the bat. Various automatic bots send generic replies to men to keep them hooked. Additionally, numerous homosexuals roam these sites pretending to be women in hopes of netting a guy or two (I am not sure what they are thinking, to be honest with you, but they are a dime a dozen out there).

Within a couple of weeks a few pen pals were reasonably assured of my “realness”—after all, neither bots nor prostitutes could or would write like this. I even sent a couple of them my head shots—my pictures were all over the internet anyway (case in point: fanstory.com).

However, sooner or later I had to admit I wasn’t about to jump into anyone’s bed and resorted to a white lie: a few people interested me more than that particular correspondent, but I wasn’t in any rush and was willing to continue our spirited e-mail exchanges, at least for the time being. Who knows, maybe later….

Two men agreed to my rules of engagement. Not any two, but a couple of highly educated, interesting and good-looking gentlemen. I even befriended one and we had lunch together. Although not my type, he turned out to be a nice guy and an enjoyable conversationalist. Both men had been looking for women over the Internet for quite a while, more than two years each, and knew a few more “brothers in misfortune” with whom they exchanged notes. As a result, I received detailed and often surprising answers to my “innocent” questions.

Say we have a married man. He is far from old, somewhere between early 30’s and late 40’s, intelligent, successful, and decent-looking. His wife is indifferent to sex. No matter what he tries, she either doesn’t give it to him or gives it to him once every two to three weeks. His libido raging, our hero turns to World Wide Web for relief.

Maybe our guy is not married but spends most of his time at work where sexual harassment laws chain his overabundant sexuality to the nearest cubicle wall. He's too busy to wander around the bars looking for random hookups and has met all the friends of his buddies’ girlfriends by now; it didn’t work out. What’s a man to do?

Yes, Internet is a dubious choice, but if you think the online sex sites are solely the domain of losers, think again. My “research” enabled me to meet some amazing people. I reside in the country’s capital, surrounded by the government offices, military institutions and private companies living off the government’s largesse. For example, one local organization takes our tax money and spreads it around the globe, building infrastructure here, cleaning the water supply there, and promoting education elsewhere. One senior manager, responsible for distributing billions of dollars of our country’s humanitarian aid to large parts of Asia and Africa, was the man with whom I went to lunch. Several times over the course of our peculiar friendship he would tell me he was too busy to talk—had to focus on a 30-million-dollar deal on his desk. He traveled the world and told me incredible stories about various countries; he fluently spoke several languages, wrote some of the most eloquent e-mails I had ever seen, and was phenomenally well read.

The other man worked for the State Department, had a top security clearance, and couldn’t say much about his particular line of work. Instead, he relayed multiple anecdotes about Condoleezza Rice, her habits and quirks, as well as about many curious events happening at the department.

I’ve corresponded with PhD’s in biochemistry from NIH, vice presidents of Fortune 500 firms, colonels of the US Army, and owners of sizable companies.

These men don't advertise their places of employment; to the contrary, they try to talk about it as little as possible. Anonymity is paramount—I still don’t know a single last name or address. The favorite word on the adult dating sites (not to be confused with porno sites, by the way) is not sex—it’s discretion. Everyone is looking for people who have something to lose, preferably professionals with families and children. Plus, when you start exchanging e-mails, you quickly learn what kind of a person you are dealing with. You can tell a lot about someone by the form and content of their writings. A good close-up photograph often adds quite a bit to the overall perception. After spending some time on the “swinger” sites, reading hundreds of profiles, looking at dozens of photographs, and directly communicating with many people, I’ve learned to pick the cream of the crop out of the slush pile after two or three e-mails.

Let’s return to our hypothetical hero. He starts hanging out on well-known, popular sites such as craigslist (the Casual Encounters section, not the sofa-bed-selling one) and reading the ads. Sooner or later he realizes “normal” and “live” women are hard to come by, and the few out there do not respond to his inquiries. His next step is to post his own ad. He gets… nothing.

One of the men I talked to had posted on craigslist for over two years but thus far had seen no results. He advised me to conduct an experiment: post several different ads and see for myself. I was game.

To be continued