No freaks, please.
Years ago I worked for a free weekly newspaper. I wrote about music, churned out features, and edited the entertainment section among other tasks. Occasionally I helped out with classified ads, since I used that system for some of my listings tasks and knew its quirks. Our paper had a tradition of weirdness in the classifieds, including a gang of people who posted in a special free classifieds section we had that was sort of a proto-Usenet. We also had a thriving personal section.
I was over-prepared for the Internet Dating Experience by this. When you’re the one taking down the personal ad, from the person, in person, it’s hard to ignore that “vivacious redhead SWF, 32, slender” does not describe the person in front of you.
One phenomenon was that the same men would send in the same photograph and letter to every woman who posted any personal ad, ever. We got to recognize the envelopes and addresses, and excess ones sent to old mailboxes ended up as a rogues’ gallery and art project on the back wall of the production room. Ten in a row of Shirtless Cowboy Hat Man in front of his Camaro, for example.
The finest moment of the classifieds, however, was the Fake Personals Contest. We periodically inserted personals for nonexistent people in as space filler when we couldn’t make a page fit. These were written by the production people and were usually fairly generic. They helped fill up the Wall of Losers, but weren’t inventive.
Our classifieds manager decided it was time to have fun. He announced a contest. The winner would be the one whose personal ad generated the most responses. Some 20 entries were received and run as ads.
The manager himself was the runner up with this:
Buxom blonde twins, 18, seek male for fun and games. Age, looks not important.
The winner, however, was a stroke of genius:
Affectionate 19-year-old male gymnast, shaved and tan, seeks father figure and mentor for long-term relationship. Hairy men a plus.
I really miss that job sometimes.
June 18th, 2003 at 4:35 am
When I was younger, I would read the Houston Press from cover to cover, leaving nothing out. Now I leaf through it, reading the occasional article that interests me, and use the strip club and sex ads as a marker for when it’s time to close the paper and put it aside.
As long as the personal ads were there, I always read them. I went through phases like the “what exactly do they think ‘height-weight proportionate’ really means?” phase and the “why are there so many desperate Jewish women in this city?” phase and the “this guy should just say he wants to be someone’s sugar daddy” phase. My single favorite ad ever, though, was the woman looking for marriage right out. She didn’t want a friend, she didn’t want to date, she didn’t want a long-term relationship. She wanted to get married, and she wanted “no freaks, please”.
Slowly, the personals disappeared. They’re not big moneymakers, I guess — not like the full-page strip club ads, at least. First they took out the Crossed Wires section. Then they whittled away at the non-heterosexual ones. Then they put the personals on their website (cross-indexed with all of them from The Onion and Salon and This and That) and replaced the entire section with a full-page ad showing some model and mentioning the web personals.
I don’t read the personal ads anymore.