"Yourself", v1.0

Following links from Hit Coffee (I forget which), I discovered Why Women Hate Men, where writer Weasel airs the excrescence of the man-seeking-woman personal ads and subjects them to his florid and caustic wit. Gird thyself for major-league nasty. And not in the good way.

While I am now largely beyond shock at revelations of female misbehavior, I have some difficulty imagining a large population of women scanning the personals in search of commitment-free sex. (Roissy claims to have found them, for what it's worth.) Yes, by all accounts there are women willing -- indeed, eager -- to be gamed into a casual hook-up. But my impression is that successful game requires social context: a bar, club, lounge . . . something. But a personal ad? Perhaps if it is written with sufficient poetry, an ad might capture a woman's imagination. But the space to poetically express the desire to bang a random woman has to be pretty narrow.

So why do men write these personals? It may be that, however small the market for the, um, services thus advertised, it remains yet underexploited. More likely, however, is that the writers are looking to rise above the vast plain of nice-guy C.V.s and have overestimated the appeal of this particular tack.

I can see myself in those ads. No, I never wrote ads like these. But I can imagine that they are the kind of ads that I might have written if: (1) I was sexually promiscuous; (2) I thought person ads were a good way of meeting people; and (3), I was even more bereft of class than I actually am.

But I can relate to this display of ignorance and incompetence in attracting women. A wise blogger once known as Bobvis wrote the following:

Be yourself. But not the version of yourself you are now.

But the devil, as it were, is in the details. I understand the importance of self-improvement, but once the big ticket items were squared away, I had no clue what it was I supposed to become, the internet didn't exist, and I didn't have the kind of relationships with anyone who knew the answer whereby that knowledge might have been transmitted. So, left to my own devices, I spent my early twenties desperately flailing about for a version of "self" that women would want to buy. And in that flailing were mistakes every bit deserving of the mockery with which Weasel regards his list of personals.