Sara (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} azbukivedi_engl) wrote,@ 2009-02-05 15:32:00 |
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Sex, Lies, and Internet. Part III.
I found it much easier to deal with swinging couples than with “single” men. Couples often look for bisexual women to please both partners, so I could always say I tried it with a woman just the other day and realized bisexuality was not my cup of tea. These couples are sexually satisfied people at peace with themselves and the world around them, so they let you go without a hitch. Moreover, they gladly remain your friends and continue to divulge the secrets of the “trade.”
One of those secrets is private sex sites like altplayground.net. As an outsider, all you get is a “guided tour” that doesn’t reveal much. You have to pay up before you see any actual member profiles, and many of those sites are far from cheap. The insiders, however, claim the sites are worth it. People there are serious—no silly virtual jokers or spam loaders. Everybody knows almost everybody else (locally, of course), and most people have met at one sex party or another. Half of the participants have already had sex with the other half.
When I mentioned altplayground.net to one of my newfound friends, he unexpectedly offered to let me explore the site from his account and provided the username and password. I expressed genuine surprise at such generosity, but he said a single male like him didn’t get many hits anyway, and he was reasonably sure I wouldn’t hit on other people from his account. It was just a “window” into the site—how much harm could I possibly do? I already knew all about him from “that angle.”
Altplayground.net is a wilder version of the “free” sites. The users provide much more detailed and revealing information and pornography abounds—most swingers post photographs of themselves having intercourse with members of the same and/or opposite sex in every conceivable position. At a bare minimum, a profile is accompanied by a nude picture that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Since the site is closed to outsiders, members feel relaxed and unencumbered—they don't even black out the faces on the photographs.
How many people do you think are hanging out on paid, private swinger sites? Thousands upon thousands--most local chapters (we are talking about major cities of course) have hundreds of members. If you simply browse the membership pages, you’ll see a couple of new ones (pages, not members) every day. That means 20-30 singles or couples have joined since the last time you logged in. The site is filled with ads for swinger parties of various degrees of “involvement,” and private clubs are numerous.
When my new acquaintance had sex with 12 black men (see Part II), those weren’t some dudes from the street—the owner of a private club hand-picked them and even checked the references (I would love to see those references). The guys also had to bring a recent doctor’s note stating they were free of venereal diseases. Such niche enterprises are not hard to find—you want a gangbang, we’ll arrange you a gangbang. Safe and clean; satisfaction guaranteed! San Francisco alone has 22 swing clubs (data as of 2002), each welcoming around 200 people on “event nights.”
Swingers even have their own, closed, private resorts in places like Florida and Jamaica and hold twice-a-year conferences, each attended by more than four thousand people. They have contests, chat rooms, galleries, seminars, online stores… anything your heart desires. The sheer magnitude of the movement astounded me.
On most adult dating sites you can filter the members by their education levels. I tried looking for those with post-graduate degrees—Master’s or PhD—and found hundreds. One of the guys who wrote to me was a CEO of a sizable company with a PhD in molecular biology. We discussed the early diagnostics of cancer, international monetary policy, the price of the annual subscription to The Economist, and many other non-trivial topics. Another correspondent, a doctor from Virginia, specialized in a rather unique and difficult area of pediatrics. He spends one month out of each year working in various orphanages in Latin America (for free, of course) and speaks fluent Spanish.
These men are all married, mostly happily, and live in expensive enclaves of suburbia. They have interesting hobbies, give time and money to good causes, and are considered pillars of their communities. What they don’t have is a satisfying sex life and are suffocating without it. They were so genuinely happy to find an intelligent person on the other side of the screen—not another scam artist, prostitute, or an empty-head bimbo looking for a sugar daddy—that I almost felt bad disappointing them in the end.
***
I have only encountered a couple of single female swingers (“single” in this contest means swinging alone—about half of them are married). The bisexual women primarily look for couples, but some ladies simply want to find a decent sexual partner or two, without any major commitment. Such women are few and far between, one for every 100 or so male swingers, at the most. Because of that they are worth their weight in gold and rarely respond to "blind" online inquiries. They find their partners by recommendations, through clubs or private sites.
The vast difference between supply and demand (for free sex with reasonably decent women; we are not talking about prostitutes) leads to an interesting phenomena: tens of thousands of men are wandering around the world-wide web with big, red, virtual target marks on their backs and foreheads. A multitude of sites have cropped up, the likes of amateurmatch.com or iwantu.com, that boast of hundreds of female members—hot single chicks or equally hot bored housewives. Apparently, all these women just can’t wait for the right guy to snap them up.
My dear men, if you are browsing the Internet for the purpose of finding a lover (let it be our dirty, little secret) and have a Yahoo! ID, check this out:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AdultDati
This group was created for the sole purpose of exposing all kinds of fraud and creative money-making schemes aimed at people looking for “adult dates” on the web. I met the group’s founder, Steve, who told me same old story: hitting on women at work is out of the question, bars are useless, and mainstream dating sites are filled with women who want serious relationships. He is not ready for anything serious and does not want any heavy-duty romantic involvement. Like most men out there, he is looking for “friendships with benefits.” In the world of adult dating it’s called NSAR, a No Strings Attached Relationship.
Steve repeated what I already knew: the adult dating sites first entice men with free browsing (these sites are filled with pictures and profiles of beautiful women), then ask for a payment before they can access their e-mail accounts. And the moment their “free trial” is about to expire, the number of e-mails in their inbox usually triples, miraculously filling up with multiple letters from pretty, readily available women dying to meet them.
Our “target” obviously wants to read the messages—what if THE woman is indeed there, waiting for him? He pays and receives a small truckload of junk mail from spam robots, virtual fakes, prostitutes, porn site hosts, and so on. Man after man told me almost nobody ever receives letters from “real” women. Once they pay, the women disappear one by one. But they keep on paying.
There’s no such thing as free cheese.
Steve did recommend three sites:
1) craigslist.com is truly a free site. You don’t have to pay anything, ever. Most responses from women are as bogus as the ones on paid sites, but you can post your ads there for as long as you like—for years if you want. It doesn’t take much work and eventually something may materialize. (I do know a few craigslist success stories, so I heartily endorse this one.)
2) swinglifestyle.com is a paid site that offers a decent amount of free features. It is virtually spamless, so you are not likely to encounter ads from porn site hosts.
3) plentyoffish.com is another free—and spam-free—site. It is not branded as “adult”, but discussions there are engaging and lively, people communicate on all levels, and a guy who can string a sentence or two together has plenty of fishing opportunities in that pond.
Also, some swinger clubs advertise “single-men-welcome” nights, but those are nothing but another scam. Twenty or thirty guys show up, pay the entrance fee, and, at best, watch a cheap strip show. Swinging couples rarely, if ever, come to such events. At the end of the evening the organizers say something like, “Sorry, dudes, you are out of luck tonight—no swingers or single women showed up. They usually do but today… alas.”
***
Now let me try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: where are the women? There are lots of sexually frustrated women out there, both married and single, right?
90-95% of men want sex on a regular basis. And by “sex” I don’t mean the tender, lovey-dovey lovemaking in three or four basic positions. Most of the sites I perused ask the members to list their sexual fantasies and preferences. It was a fascinating, if not eye-opening, read: role play, food games, S&M, anal sex, threesomes…. At least one of the above was present on almost everybody’s list. And no profile went without mentioning mutual oral sex.
What do we know about women? At least 30% are indifferent to sex, enjoying only the emotional side of it, and their number increases with age, which is to say among the pre- and post- menopausal women the proportion of those who could “do without” approaches two-thirds. Men, on the other hand, lust after women just as much, if not more, in their 50's as they did in their 30's.
For men, the age distribution on the adult dating sites is fairly even; sometimes it seems married 45-50-year-olds are the majority. As for “single” (playing alone) women over 40, they are virtually non-existent. The disparity in numbers is scary, not to mention sad.
It gets worse. Women are much more emotional by nature, and even those who love sex for the pure animalistic pleasure it bestows tend to prefer doing it with someone they care about. I am not talking about people who chose monogamy for religious or other ethical reasons—we are not even considering the moral aspect here. The majority of highly tolerant women who would not judge others based on their sexual behavior would never consider looking for casual sex over the Internet for themselves. No, not because it’s “bad” or ‘dirty”—they simply don’t have it in them. They’d rather walk around unsatisfied or buy a vibrator.
I discussed this matter with a couple of very socially and sexually liberal girlfriends who suffer from temporary sexual droughts in their lives. The prospect horrified them. The convention dating sites are okay—one can find someone civilized and interesting there. But the “adult” sites? Those men are scum!
I tried telling them about the results of my amateur research, explaining that adult dating sites are swarming with intelligent, educated, and even decent men searching for long-term lovers, not one-night stands--but they wouldn’t hear of it. Adult dating sites are so stigmatized, even sexually unfulfilled women who don’t have anything against them and don't crave long-term relationships (by the way, women who satisfy all these criteria are very few and far between) would not consider visiting one.
The problem doesn’t end here. Most male correspondents warned me right off the bat they weren’t looking for anything serious and/or did not need a “wife replacement.” Overly emotional and irrational ladies need not reply. At first these words of caution surprised me—we met on a sex site, after all; wasn’t it obvious? Later, these men told me numerous stories about guys who finally, after a long online search, found a lover, only to watch her grow attached and demand more and more from the relationship after only a few dates. Even in those rare cases when a woman claims to “just want sex,” she’s secretly hoping it will lead to more. Consciously or subconsciously, these women believe the relationships can miraculously “take off”, grow, and deepen.
Men and women are different; cats and dogs are not friends; Mars and Venus don’t get along; two times two is four.
Yet, according to the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, the driving force behind the swinging movement is women, not men. For thousands and thousands of swinging couples out there the “emotional” problem is somehow solved—women in those families embrace and enjoy casual sex with semi-familiar or unfamiliar men. Why?
I will answer this question in the next installment.
I found it much easier to deal with swinging couples than with “single” men. Couples often look for bisexual women to please both partners, so I could always say I tried it with a woman just the other day and realized bisexuality was not my cup of tea. These couples are sexually satisfied people at peace with themselves and the world around them, so they let you go without a hitch. Moreover, they gladly remain your friends and continue to divulge the secrets of the “trade.”
One of those secrets is private sex sites like altplayground.net. As an outsider, all you get is a “guided tour” that doesn’t reveal much. You have to pay up before you see any actual member profiles, and many of those sites are far from cheap. The insiders, however, claim the sites are worth it. People there are serious—no silly virtual jokers or spam loaders. Everybody knows almost everybody else (locally, of course), and most people have met at one sex party or another. Half of the participants have already had sex with the other half.
When I mentioned altplayground.net to one of my newfound friends, he unexpectedly offered to let me explore the site from his account and provided the username and password. I expressed genuine surprise at such generosity, but he said a single male like him didn’t get many hits anyway, and he was reasonably sure I wouldn’t hit on other people from his account. It was just a “window” into the site—how much harm could I possibly do? I already knew all about him from “that angle.”
Altplayground.net is a wilder version of the “free” sites. The users provide much more detailed and revealing information and pornography abounds—most swingers post photographs of themselves having intercourse with members of the same and/or opposite sex in every conceivable position. At a bare minimum, a profile is accompanied by a nude picture that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Since the site is closed to outsiders, members feel relaxed and unencumbered—they don't even black out the faces on the photographs.
How many people do you think are hanging out on paid, private swinger sites? Thousands upon thousands--most local chapters (we are talking about major cities of course) have hundreds of members. If you simply browse the membership pages, you’ll see a couple of new ones (pages, not members) every day. That means 20-30 singles or couples have joined since the last time you logged in. The site is filled with ads for swinger parties of various degrees of “involvement,” and private clubs are numerous.
When my new acquaintance had sex with 12 black men (see Part II), those weren’t some dudes from the street—the owner of a private club hand-picked them and even checked the references (I would love to see those references). The guys also had to bring a recent doctor’s note stating they were free of venereal diseases. Such niche enterprises are not hard to find—you want a gangbang, we’ll arrange you a gangbang. Safe and clean; satisfaction guaranteed! San Francisco alone has 22 swing clubs (data as of 2002), each welcoming around 200 people on “event nights.”
Swingers even have their own, closed, private resorts in places like Florida and Jamaica and hold twice-a-year conferences, each attended by more than four thousand people. They have contests, chat rooms, galleries, seminars, online stores… anything your heart desires. The sheer magnitude of the movement astounded me.
On most adult dating sites you can filter the members by their education levels. I tried looking for those with post-graduate degrees—Master’s or PhD—and found hundreds. One of the guys who wrote to me was a CEO of a sizable company with a PhD in molecular biology. We discussed the early diagnostics of cancer, international monetary policy, the price of the annual subscription to The Economist, and many other non-trivial topics. Another correspondent, a doctor from Virginia, specialized in a rather unique and difficult area of pediatrics. He spends one month out of each year working in various orphanages in Latin America (for free, of course) and speaks fluent Spanish.
These men are all married, mostly happily, and live in expensive enclaves of suburbia. They have interesting hobbies, give time and money to good causes, and are considered pillars of their communities. What they don’t have is a satisfying sex life and are suffocating without it. They were so genuinely happy to find an intelligent person on the other side of the screen—not another scam artist, prostitute, or an empty-head bimbo looking for a sugar daddy—that I almost felt bad disappointing them in the end.
***
I have only encountered a couple of single female swingers (“single” in this contest means swinging alone—about half of them are married). The bisexual women primarily look for couples, but some ladies simply want to find a decent sexual partner or two, without any major commitment. Such women are few and far between, one for every 100 or so male swingers, at the most. Because of that they are worth their weight in gold and rarely respond to "blind" online inquiries. They find their partners by recommendations, through clubs or private sites.
The vast difference between supply and demand (for free sex with reasonably decent women; we are not talking about prostitutes) leads to an interesting phenomena: tens of thousands of men are wandering around the world-wide web with big, red, virtual target marks on their backs and foreheads. A multitude of sites have cropped up, the likes of amateurmatch.com or iwantu.com, that boast of hundreds of female members—hot single chicks or equally hot bored housewives. Apparently, all these women just can’t wait for the right guy to snap them up.
My dear men, if you are browsing the Internet for the purpose of finding a lover (let it be our dirty, little secret) and have a Yahoo! ID, check this out:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AdultDati
This group was created for the sole purpose of exposing all kinds of fraud and creative money-making schemes aimed at people looking for “adult dates” on the web. I met the group’s founder, Steve, who told me same old story: hitting on women at work is out of the question, bars are useless, and mainstream dating sites are filled with women who want serious relationships. He is not ready for anything serious and does not want any heavy-duty romantic involvement. Like most men out there, he is looking for “friendships with benefits.” In the world of adult dating it’s called NSAR, a No Strings Attached Relationship.
Steve repeated what I already knew: the adult dating sites first entice men with free browsing (these sites are filled with pictures and profiles of beautiful women), then ask for a payment before they can access their e-mail accounts. And the moment their “free trial” is about to expire, the number of e-mails in their inbox usually triples, miraculously filling up with multiple letters from pretty, readily available women dying to meet them.
Our “target” obviously wants to read the messages—what if THE woman is indeed there, waiting for him? He pays and receives a small truckload of junk mail from spam robots, virtual fakes, prostitutes, porn site hosts, and so on. Man after man told me almost nobody ever receives letters from “real” women. Once they pay, the women disappear one by one. But they keep on paying.
There’s no such thing as free cheese.
Steve did recommend three sites:
1) craigslist.com is truly a free site. You don’t have to pay anything, ever. Most responses from women are as bogus as the ones on paid sites, but you can post your ads there for as long as you like—for years if you want. It doesn’t take much work and eventually something may materialize. (I do know a few craigslist success stories, so I heartily endorse this one.)
2) swinglifestyle.com is a paid site that offers a decent amount of free features. It is virtually spamless, so you are not likely to encounter ads from porn site hosts.
3) plentyoffish.com is another free—and spam-free—site. It is not branded as “adult”, but discussions there are engaging and lively, people communicate on all levels, and a guy who can string a sentence or two together has plenty of fishing opportunities in that pond.
Also, some swinger clubs advertise “single-men-welcome” nights, but those are nothing but another scam. Twenty or thirty guys show up, pay the entrance fee, and, at best, watch a cheap strip show. Swinging couples rarely, if ever, come to such events. At the end of the evening the organizers say something like, “Sorry, dudes, you are out of luck tonight—no swingers or single women showed up. They usually do but today… alas.”
***
Now let me try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: where are the women? There are lots of sexually frustrated women out there, both married and single, right?
90-95% of men want sex on a regular basis. And by “sex” I don’t mean the tender, lovey-dovey lovemaking in three or four basic positions. Most of the sites I perused ask the members to list their sexual fantasies and preferences. It was a fascinating, if not eye-opening, read: role play, food games, S&M, anal sex, threesomes…. At least one of the above was present on almost everybody’s list. And no profile went without mentioning mutual oral sex.
What do we know about women? At least 30% are indifferent to sex, enjoying only the emotional side of it, and their number increases with age, which is to say among the pre- and post- menopausal women the proportion of those who could “do without” approaches two-thirds. Men, on the other hand, lust after women just as much, if not more, in their 50's as they did in their 30's.
For men, the age distribution on the adult dating sites is fairly even; sometimes it seems married 45-50-year-olds are the majority. As for “single” (playing alone) women over 40, they are virtually non-existent. The disparity in numbers is scary, not to mention sad.
It gets worse. Women are much more emotional by nature, and even those who love sex for the pure animalistic pleasure it bestows tend to prefer doing it with someone they care about. I am not talking about people who chose monogamy for religious or other ethical reasons—we are not even considering the moral aspect here. The majority of highly tolerant women who would not judge others based on their sexual behavior would never consider looking for casual sex over the Internet for themselves. No, not because it’s “bad” or ‘dirty”—they simply don’t have it in them. They’d rather walk around unsatisfied or buy a vibrator.
I discussed this matter with a couple of very socially and sexually liberal girlfriends who suffer from temporary sexual droughts in their lives. The prospect horrified them. The convention dating sites are okay—one can find someone civilized and interesting there. But the “adult” sites? Those men are scum!
I tried telling them about the results of my amateur research, explaining that adult dating sites are swarming with intelligent, educated, and even decent men searching for long-term lovers, not one-night stands--but they wouldn’t hear of it. Adult dating sites are so stigmatized, even sexually unfulfilled women who don’t have anything against them and don't crave long-term relationships (by the way, women who satisfy all these criteria are very few and far between) would not consider visiting one.
The problem doesn’t end here. Most male correspondents warned me right off the bat they weren’t looking for anything serious and/or did not need a “wife replacement.” Overly emotional and irrational ladies need not reply. At first these words of caution surprised me—we met on a sex site, after all; wasn’t it obvious? Later, these men told me numerous stories about guys who finally, after a long online search, found a lover, only to watch her grow attached and demand more and more from the relationship after only a few dates. Even in those rare cases when a woman claims to “just want sex,” she’s secretly hoping it will lead to more. Consciously or subconsciously, these women believe the relationships can miraculously “take off”, grow, and deepen.
Men and women are different; cats and dogs are not friends; Mars and Venus don’t get along; two times two is four.
Yet, according to the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, the driving force behind the swinging movement is women, not men. For thousands and thousands of swinging couples out there the “emotional” problem is somehow solved—women in those families embrace and enjoy casual sex with semi-familiar or unfamiliar men. Why?
I will answer this question in the next installment.
