Scrolling and clicking through the Men Seeking Women section of Craig’s List (and come to think of it, any section of Craig’s List) is a lot like sifting through the ten-cent item bin at your neighbor’s garage sale: most of the things you see are things you could get for free or threw out yourself last summer, and most of the things you end up buying you purchase in order to justify all that wasted time or because hell, this can opener is just a little less rusty than the one you have right now or that old GI Joe action figure with the missing arm reminds you of an old childhood toy. In short, it’s all the crap that you don’t really need and don’t really want, but because it’s the ten-cent item bin and because it’s the Men Seeking Women section, you will still click on that “Lonely 50-Year-Old Man on Rebound Seeking One-Night Stand” ad just as you pause to look at that slightly stained medical bedpan, and you will still linger at the “Fun, Adventurous, Good-Looking, and Every Other Meaningless Adjective SWM” ad just as you linger at that ab stretcher thingie because you guess maybe you could use it to get in shape one day and it’s the only thing in the bin that isn’t crusty, rusty, or otherwise needs to be sanitized before using.
But once in awhile, when your juju’s good and your neighbor’s not careful, you will find the stuff of garage sale legend: an iron in good working order, a kitschy-looking picture frame, or god even knows, a priceless old baseball card. And once in awhile, when your juju’s good and you’re not so liquored up that you’ve already given into the guy seeking sweet lovin’ spankin’ fun 2nite, you will come upon an ad whose words string together with wit, genuine humor, originality, thoughtfulness, and not a single three-letter acronym, ethnicity requirement, or the word “married” in it. Those ads are far and few in between, but they’re there, sparkling like little html jewels of hope for women who’ve grown tired of the banal and the horny. One of those ads is my boyfriend’s.
I’ve never realized this before, but there is something that all women should value in plain ol’ sleazy men and their simple man-seeking-sex ads: they’re honest. You may not be interested in dressing up like Martha Stewart and having a dirty old stranger pinch your ass all night, but at least you know that’s all it comes to – you know exactly what to bring, what to do, and what to expect. There is some kind of integrity, if not dignity in these ads and the men who place them. What disgusts me now is not that fifty-year-old Stan wants a one-night fuck with a barely legal Asian schoolgirl, it’s that my twenty-something-year-old boyfriend can feign sincerity, charm, and sensitivity so deceptively well that I’m impressed as much as I am infuriated. It’s that women out there peering through their computers believe in his ad simply because he’s a better writer than he is a perv. It’s that if I hadn’t recognized the voice and the hobbies and the physical description, I would’ve believed in his ad, too.
Moral of the story: the next time you find that fancy used espresso machine in seemingly perfect condition or that personals ad written by a seemingly perfect man, check to make sure that the functions all work and check to make sure that the wedding ring or the girlfriend’s panties aren’t tucked away in a pocket. Because a pretty machine that can’t whip your espresso is still a piece of crap and a cheating, lying bastard is a still a cheating, lying bastard, even if he took extra writing classes in college.