Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Other Half

I  picked up a Seven Days the other day because it was there on the way out the door and so that I could then huffily assure my detractors that yes, of course I read the papers.  And the price was right.
Then when I got home I put it on the counter to ripen for a few days and finally sat down with a cup of coffee to look it over.  Of course I started at the back where the funnies are, but even before I got to the funnies, there were the Personals.
Now I enjoy the peculiarities of my fellow creatures as much as the next creature, but for sheer overload you cannot beat the Personals, each one an astonishing little story.  This week's issue offered up 6 categories to satisfy most tastes:
Women Seeking Women
Women Seeking Men
Men Seeking Women
Women Seeking ?
Men Seeking ?
Other Seeking ?
Even just allowing the mind to strum these possibilities gets the imagination aware if not fully alive.  Why no Men Seeking Men? Are they all already paired off? Do we, like Iran, have no gay men?  Are they too timid to seek companionship in print media?  Then there are the Men/Women Seeking ? categories.  That ? opens whole worlds – the variety of needs, goals, desires they might be seeking could leave a person dizzy with possibilities: exotic pets, bicycles, depilatory cream, happiness, butter churns, riches, barnyard animals, depression glass, playwrights, wild, panting, sweaty, screaming sex in an elevator. All things considered, the last is most likely, but still...
And then finally there is Other Seeking ?  There are 7 items in this category which I will save for dessert.
But back to the beginning, of the 27 people seeking other human beings of the same or different gender, if you believe what the ads say, all are just looking for somebody to go to the movies with, except for one bold female who is “looking for a discreet girlfriend for fun times in and out of bed,” and a 44 year-old gent named bigboots looking for “...someone to play with...”  Pretty tame stuff. 
But next up we have women seeking ? and it finally becomes clear that ? means “sex,” and who'd have guessed there would be so many variants and acronyms. Several querents were looking for others interested in BDSM which apparently has to do with bondage, dominance, and sado-masochism.  Others were looking for “NSA summer fun.”  That would be “No Strings Attached,” and is being sought by a young thing who is turned on by tattoos, among others.
One ad explains that her husband is dull as ditchwater and she is looking around for “discreet encounters to leave us breathless and wet.” Another suggests a torrid threesome, adding “Taped for personal use only.” No details given as to what is considered personal use – training sessions for future threesomes? An amusing entertainment for the next Christmas party? A bit of light-hearted blackmail in case one of the participants runs for office?
The men seeking ? offer a wider spectrum of desiderata than the girls did. One message entitled WOODLAND CREATURE posted by a party named foodofthegods says, in its entirety, “A mole in the field of existence.” I guess this must be code for something, but I can't imagine what. At the other end of the spectrum we have  “I'm just an aspiring college freshman looking for a one-night stand.  That's all, nothing else.” No code there.
Apart from these, most of the rest of the men seeking ? are looking for slap and tickle of one sort or another especially pappahobbit, a 49 year old navy veteran, whose message, entitled LOVING SPANKING DADDY invites contact from a submissive female (no age range given) or “select male between 18 and 29 that needs or wants regular spankings.”
Finally I dipped into Other Seeking ? and was disappointed to learn that the members of this group were couples looking for some recreational swapping. Almost all demanded that applicants be clean and many insisted that they were. Most seemed to be looking for just a bit of vanilla swapping, although there were a couple of ads called HYPERSEXUAL COUPLE NEEDS THE SAME and INSATIABLE APPETITES FOR SEX!!! who seemed to be looking for variations on the theme including “toys,” whatever that implies. One of these even invited “those with ethnic background” which surely demonstrates their sophistication.
Reading through these little paragraphs gives me a glimpse into the lives and hopes of strangers I will probably never know. But the other half of the equation is the people who actually answer the ads.  I try to imagine them sitting there at their kitchen table with their sticky fingers following the lines of print and thinking what fun it would be to be spanked by pappahobbit, pushing their smudged glasses back on their nose and reaching for the phone. An exercise for another day.