Ladies, I understand your suffering

Not so long ago I wrote about how I love, and hate, blogs.

I found a new one thanks to an email response I received to a previous Broken Arrow Saloon column. In that response Leah pointed me toward one of her blog entries from earlier this year, a public service announcement for guys trolling for women via online personal ads. (Not every guy is trolling, I know, but some certainly are, as Leah points out.) http://lmz87.blogspot.com/2011/03/friendly-psa-to-guys-that-are-dating.html

I think Leah’s comments are spot on, and one would think most, if not all of them, are fairly obvious, but just because a guy has $35 dollars for a monthly membership doesn’t mean he has any sense at all.

One of her recommendations reminded me of something I learned long ago. “Don't send a standard message to every single person but personalize it a little.”

Before dudes were sending their response to ads via “clumsy, short-attention-span qwerty express reply for Android,” I learned that reinventing the wheel was not the top priority for the competitive sportsman angling for a date. It was much simpler to send the same generic response day after day after day. And how did I know this?

I faked an online ad. I faked more than one ad back in the day. And I was good.

I’m not proud of this, and I never admit this to anyone, but I faked several ads over the years under the “women seeking men” banner. And guys,  I learned a lot about us.

Why did I do it? Curiosity, mostly. But it did provide market research I couldn’t get anywhere else.

Back in the glory days of Craig’s List personal ads I dabbled a bit. I looked for intriguing ads from women seeking men, picked the ads I found most appealing and sent a personal reply to the writers. Perhaps I was sending my response to men who had beaten me to the market-research punch. Or perhaps I just wasn’t as charming and fascinating as I thought I was, because I quickly found that watching paint dry would have been a far more productive use of my time.

One day my warped sense of humor was in overdrive. I decided that if I was banging my head against the wall – a wall badly in need of a fresh coat of paint – why not at least amuse myself by receiving responses to a personal ad for a fictional woman? There were always five times as many ads posted by men as there were by women, so it stood to reason that I’d get at least a few responses to a decent ad by a fictitious woman, right?

Let’s just say I underestimated my drawing power.

I set up a new email account exclusively for the ad, then proceeded to paint a nice picture via a Craig’s List ad. I wanted my fake ads to sound appealing without sounding like my gal was blessed by the grace of Hef. I did a good job. I had more than 100 responses flood my inbox during the first 24 hours of the first fake ad I posted. I pulled the ad, I had a large enough sample size.

Lest you think I had all the scientific data I needed, guess again, Mojombo. Yep, I did it again. And again. And again.

I ran more than a handful of fake ads over the years. A few times I was emboldened enough to grab a picture off a website and upload it with the fake ad. Yeah, that was pretty crappy of me. I grabbed older pictures of people not in the Minneapolis area, figuring nobody would bust me for misappropriating their image.

I learned a lot from those experiences and came to understand what women go through when placing an online ad. This list isn’t all encompassing, it’s just a list of the first things that come to mind, in no particular order. For the sake of this list we’ll refer to the fictitious girls from all of my ads as Jenni.

1. Boundaries don’t mean much to numerous men perusing the ads. In every case I gave age parameters of the potential mate Jenni was looking for. If Jenni was 24, she wasn’t interested in a guy in his mid-30s, and she said so. Yet there was always at least one guy who was 41 that claimed he didn’t look his age, and therefore was the perfect catch for a 24-year-old woman trying to find her way in the post-collegiate world.

If Jenni didn’t want to get involved with a guy who has children, that didn’t matter, either. Jenni was always a non-smoker, and the smokers of the world didn't seem to push the issue, for the most part. That or they weren’t honest.

2. Many men can barely form a complete sentence. Leah noted in her PSA that simple grammar is a challenge for many in society. Jenni learned that, too. Many guys didn’t take the time to send more than one quick sentence looking for any kind of response. In the old days guys sent a link to their MySpace page. In recent years guys were more willing to send their mobile numbers, so Jenni can start sending them text messages instead of an email response.

3. A picture is worth 1,000 words. Plenty of guys were willing to send at least one photo with their response, even when Jenni didn’t have a profile picture. Jenni received just about every picture you can think of: the self-portrait in the bathroom mirror, the “look at my fancy car/motorcycle” pose, the Glamour Shot, the friend/relative/ex-girlfriend tandem and, of course, the “check out my manhood” special. Why that last approach made sense to any guy responding to a normal, well-rounded, down-to-earth girl such as Jenni I’ll never understand.

4. Not everybody is an idiot. There were a few guys who asked for additional pictures of Jenni. Perhaps that request was simply made in hope of receiving something more salacious to drool over. But perhaps the request was made to prove that there was a legitimate woman on the receiving end of the email.

A few guys provided simple replies, explaining that they didn’t want to go into a lot of detail without knowing the ad they were responding to was legitimate. It has long been known by Craig’s List users that many ads are set up in order to send some sort of spam in return, or collect email address for mass spamming purposes. Some guys wanted to know that there was somebody – hopefully a woman – with a pulse on the receiving end of their response. Thanks to jerks like me, they had a right to be skeptical.

5. Volume, volume, volume! As Leah noted, some guys send canned responses to every ad that is slightly appealing.

I don’t know how many fake ads I have written over the years. It has been a few years since the last time I bothered, but I’ll bet I’ve done 10 or 12 over the years.

Sometimes I would post one fake ad, peruse the responses and move on with my life. Other times I’d run two or three consecutive ads for two or three different fictitious women, just because I was bitter and angry, and that was my passive-aggressive way of dealing with it.

What did I learn from posting successive ads? Yep, some guys have a canned response they copy and paste on a daily basis, hoping they get a nibble.

Every so often I’d fool myself into believing that I could beat the online personals numbers game and set out to meet a woman through a free dating website, yet I’d quickly sour on the idea. Somehow souring on the idea led to my despicable fascination with finding out who my competition was. Perhaps that was supposed to make me feel better about being the diamond in the rough that could never shine because I was being overshadowed by the masses.

I never replied to any of the responses I received. I’m a jerk, but not that big of a jerk. I had no intention of misleading a guy for weeks on end, then disappearing, or worse yet, mocking him for being duped. I simply read the responses as they filtered in, got bored and quickly abandoned the email account, leaving dozens of guys wondering why they didn’t hear back from Jenni.

The late Andy Kaufman allegedly enjoyed portraying the character Tony Clifton. As I recall from the movie “Man on the Moon,” (which is worth renting – or streaming online – if you’ve never seen it,) it was mentioned to Kaufman that at some point you need to let the audience in on the gag, otherwise it’s like telling a joke without delivering the punch line. The gag was Tony Clifton. Kaufman would never let on that Clifton was a fictitious character he was portraying.

Why perpetrate a gag or hoax if you never let the audience in on the joke? Sometimes you need to do things for your own amusement, entertainment or enlightenment, and nobody else’s.

It wasn’t exactly performance art, but that’s what I was doing all those years ago, providing my own amusement, entertainment and enlightenment. Today I’m letting the audience in on my hoax. If you weren’t amused or entertained, I hope you were at least enlightened. 

Have an online ad horror story of your own?