You’ve got love
Hope and hookups on match.com
When “Cynthia’s” husband died last year, the 51-year-old mother of five grown children felt lonely, but terrified to reenter the dating scene.
“It was like I had to get a whole new life,” says Cynthia, who asked not to be identified by her real name. “And they say it’s so hard to meet people in Charlottesville. When you’re past the half-century mark, the odds are definitely not in the female’s favor. Guys start dropping like flies.”
Suddenly single after decades of marriage, Cynthia says she didn’t have any single girlfriends to spend time with. A conservative country girl from Northern Virginia, she wasn’t about to start cruising the bar scene. So Cynthia joined the more than 3,000 people in the Charlottesville area who use match.com, one of the most popular Internet dating sites.
“My mom and my sister started screaming when I told them,” says Cynthia. “They didn’t want me going out to meet strangers.”
Match.com evolved when a group of San Francisco techies started an online classifieds business in 1995. The exploding personals section soon became the sole focus of the new business. In its first 10 months, match.com registered 60,000 new subscribers, says Kathleen Roldan, the company’s director of dating. These days, Roldan says the site registers 60,000 new members every three days. Match.com boasts 12 million active users around the world, with 27 international sites using the local language and currency. In 2003, match.com raked in about $185 million for its parent company, InterActiveCorp—a giant e-commerce company that owns Ticketmaster, Expedia, Lending Tree and Hotels.com.—the company’s website states.
The rise of match.com can also be charted by observing the demise of newspaper personal ads. In 2000, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies lamented a nationwide decline in newspaper personals that began in the mid-1990s.
C-VILLE introduced an expanded “Personals” section in April 1995, the year match.com launched. One month later, in May 1995, there were 58 personal ads in C-VILLE. The ads were punchy, jam-packed with acronyms and humor. For example: “SWF ISO SWM who aren’t gay, married or hung up on their mothers. No wimps. Able to hike Humpback in less than 17 minutes.”
By the May 30, 2000, issue, the number of personals was at 36. Two years later, that number was 31.
The statistics are troubling for us newspaper folk, but even we have to concede match.com has distinct advantages over print personals—the most obvious being that on the Internet you can see pictures.
A 42-year-old gay man who asked to be identified as “Bob” says via e-mail that personals are “too difficult to manage.” He says he uses Internet dating because as a gay male, Charlottesville “has limitations for dating in my 40something category.” His profile on match.com yields about one meeting per month. “I’ve met some nice people. Not THE one yet,” Bob writes. “It’s kinda like being a door-to-door salesman. You keep knocking on doors and never let them get you down. You believe in your goods and make the best presentation possible.”
Cynthia says she likes match.com because she has unlimited space to write as much as she wants about herself and the type of man she’s looking for. Users adopt pseudonyms and set up match.com e-mail accounts that allow people to send anonymous messages to each other.
“I’m very careful about giving out my name and phone number,” says Cynthia. “At my age, most of the guys have been around the block. It’s hard to find somebody who’s a decent person, not a kink.”
Good news, men—match.com’s male/ female ratio for Charlottesville is 55:45, while the overall average is closer to 60:40, says Roldan.
For insights on modern courtship and for sheer entertainment value, it’s hard to beat the profiles on match.com. The site functions like newspaper personals—it’s free to post a profile (and a photo) and free to browse the site. But if you find someone you like, the site charges $25 per month (with discounts for three- and six-month memberships) before you can start wooing the object of your affection with e-mails or voicemails.
Locally, 18- to 35-year-olds make up the majority of match.com users. Their profiles tend to be shorter, full of humor and irony, with liberal use of the abbreviations (“u” instead of “you,” or “LOL” for “laugh out loud” after a joke) that have come to mark e-mail discourse.
Until recently, Internet dating sites were viewed as a refuge for the socially inept. But as match.com’s popularity has surged, more attractive, straight young people like Eric Wang, a UVA law student, are shopping the match.com marketplace to supplement their normal social rituals. Still, there’s a stigma about Internet dating—Wang is the only person I interviewed who agreed to give his real name.
“I signed up for the first time recently because I was tired of the bar scene,” Wang says via e-mail. “I’m comfortable with the idea of Internet dating because I do almost everything else on the Internet too, from banking to shopping to research.”
Match.com is fun for young, straight users, but for people outside Charlottesville’s dating mainstream, such as gays or people over 50, match.com represents a vital window into potential mates who are otherwise difficult to meet.
“It’s very good for those with special needs,” says Amy Alkon, who writes the syndicated Advice Goddess column published in C-VILLE. “If you’re a transsexual, you can’t walk into a bar and meet somebody. You have to seek out somebody who’s looking for you.”
Alkon says people should take common sense precautions when using Internet dating. It’s important to set and stick to standards about who you want to meet, she says. Don’t be so desperate that you overlook bad qualities. Post a picture, and be honest about things like age and body type. And don’t go on the Internet looking for The One.
“I hate that term,” says Alkon. “I think it’s healthier if you’re just going out and trying to meet someone new.”
Because users are meeting people without context—no common activities or mutual friends—it’s easy for people to stretch the truth in their profiles, to exaggerate their good qualities or outright lie.
Alkon says it’s important to be skeptical about match.com profiles, and she says that carrying on long “pen pal” relationships over e-mail can lead to disappointments.
“What happens is you start to invent the other person in your head, and convince yourself they’re something they’re not,” says Alkon. “Talk to people on the phone, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. The only way you can tell if someone is telling the truth is time.”
Deception ruined Cynthia’s first match.com date. A man from Maryland spun an elaborate tale about how he was coming to Charlottesville to buy some dogs in Keswick, so Cynthia made plans to meet him at a restaurant. He never showed.
“It turns out he set up a double-header that night,” Cynthia says. “The first woman told him she had two lovers, and wanted a third. He couldn’t get home fast enough. It felt like I’d been slapped in the face, but I was tickled. That SOB got what he deserved. After that, it got a lot smoother.”
Cynthia says her best date so far was with a man from Virginia Beach. The two attended a New Year’s Eve party in Charlottesville, but afterward, she says, he told her, “’If you’re ever in Virginia Beach, give me a call.’ Well, I’m not going to go chase a man.”
While many of the younger users post snarky, funny profiles on match.com, older users tend to be more sincere. Cynthia quotes liberally from song lyrics (“Sometimes I’m an angel, sometimes I’m cruel/ but when it comes to love I’m just another fool”), movies like Bridget Jones’ Diary and from the many self-help books she’s pulled from the shelves of the “Relationships” section at Barnes and Noble.
Cynthia says she’s started calling the site match.comic, because many of the men who contact her are recently divorced (or sometimes still married) and looking for a kinky hookup or a nursemaid.
“There’s a lot of unhappy men looking for a woman to bring them happiness,” she says. “I can’t be that. They need psychotherapy or something.”
But Cynthia says she’ll stick with match.com, and she updates her profile every few days. For her, the rise of Internet dating has given her something she might not have had in the pre-cyber era—hope. Cynthia recently had a glamour shot taken at a photography studio, and posted the picture on her match.com page.
“It’s a good thing to keep an old gal going,” she says.—John Borgmeyer
TONGUES! Heinies!
Unmarried couples!
Virginia’s crime of passion
The following is a fictional criminal account:
On the night of February 14, a 25-year-old male and a 24-year-old female were seen leaving a Charlottesville restaurant. Witnesses saw the two alleged perpetrators, who are unmarried, leaving the restaurant and entering their shared apartment. The couple’s behavior was described as “affectionate.” Acting on a tip from a witness, police raided the apartment later that night and caught the two suspects engaged in an illegal activity. Specifically, the male suspect was apprehended while performing oral sex on the female. A soiled prophylactic was also discovered at the scene, leading investigators to believe that the couple had engaged in sexual intercourse earlier in the evening.
The couple was arrested and both were subsequently charged with misdemeanors for fornication, misdemeanors for lewd and lascivious cohabitation and felonies for sodomy. If convicted, both alleged perpetrators face up to five years in prison and fines of up to $3,250.
This hypothetical police blotter entry may seem farfetched, but the laws cited are indeed real. Though the police are hardly knocking down doors to arrest fornicators, sexually active Virginians beware—only married couples who avoid oral or anal sex can safely assume they are obeying the law in their bedroom.
However, the days of rampant lawless sex in Virginia may be numbered, as the Virginia General Assembly is set to consider several changes to the Commonwealth’s sex laws. Among the proposed changes is a repeal of the fornication law.
Currently, fornication counts as a Class 4 misdemeanor—the least serious category for a misdemeanor—and carries a maximum fine of $250. For those unfamiliar with the nature of the crime, the law defines the violation as, “Any person, not being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any other person, shall be guilty of fornication.”
In addition to debating the legality of fornication, Virginia’s legislators will decide whether cohabitation should be a criminal offense.
The law now states that, “If any persons, not married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together,” they are guilty of a misdemeanor and can be fined up to $500. However, roommates may no longer have to fear the long arm of the law whilst succumbing to lewd urges, because the proposed change would make such fraternizing illegal only when committed in public.
Though fornicators and cohabitating couples might soon enjoy newfound legal freedoms, those who dabble in oral or anal sex seem unlikely to catch any slack from Virginia’s legislators. The law that governs this felonious behavior resides deep within a chapter of the Virginia Code entitled Crimes Involving Morals and Decency. In this chapter, a short scroll below the rules for a legal duck race, is the “crimes against nature” law, which states: “If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony”
Loosely translated, this edict means anyone on either side of a round of fellatio or cunnilingus is committing a felony, and could face a penalty of between one and five years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500. The same goes for anyone who gives anal sex a whirl: felonies all around. In the above fictional crime account, both the man and woman could be charged with a felony for being caught with his head between her legs. Sure, they might talk about it on “Sex and the City” but this is Virginia, and hot oral sex is not just fun and games.
The controversial sodomy law has persisted in part because of its symbolic status as an anti-gay statute. Under this law, any form of serious sexual contact between two people of the same sex is a felony.
Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Texas anti-sodomy law, which was similar to Virginia’s law. Anticipating possible challenges to the constitutionality of the Virginia sodomy law, the State Crime Commission has recommended adding a new law to the books that would prohibit sodomy in public. The General Assembly would then be able to retain the proposed public sodomy law if the broader “crime against nature” law were to be struck down. But in the meantime, the old sodomy act will remain in effect.
The Virginia General Assembly will consider the package of sex law reforms in coming weeks. Until then, many diversions of the bedroom will remain decidedly prohibited in Virginia—perhaps adding an extra thrill for Virginians with a penchant for the taboo.—Paul Fain
boy toys
A consumer guide to online sex aids: pumps, handles, spreadersthe whole package
E-mail spam for sex toys and products has exploded in the past year, cramming inboxes with missives about herbal breast-growth pills, cheap Viagra and magic lubricant. Sick of it all—and more than a little curious about what’s so “magic” about magic lubricant—C-VILLE put their money a little lower than their mouth, ordered a few of the more interesting intimate items off the Internet, and gave them to intrepid reporter Ace Atkins. Who then gave them to moi.
See, my big brother Ace might have the tenacity to track down rampant City rumors and corner feisty Carmike kitties, but he’s a bit of a pill in the sack. I have applied the legendary Atkins tenacity toother areas. And so, armed with nearly a half-dozen sex toys, plenty of lube (magical and non-magical) and a willing and able assistant, I got the lowdown on what these online sex products are worth. And let’s just say there’s a reason they’re called spam.
After opening the unmarked, FedEx’d box, there was clearly only one place to start: The Fireman’s Pump. (Mmmmm, firemen!) With a mixture of intrigue and horror I examined the bright red, clear plastic apparatus that, according to the box, packed “super suction power” “for the man who wants that real fire hose.” Who doesn’t? But I was a little hesitant about sticking li’l Pierce into an enclosed, tight-fighting object with lots of suction. Well, a mechanical one, anyway.
Taking no chances, I actually read the instructions. (I may be a man, but these are my meat and two veg we’re talking about.) The pump manufacturers advise using lots of lubricant, and after taking a peek at the fairly tight rubber seal, I concurred. Appropriately greased up, I gave it a try. After a couple of squeezes there was a slight twinge of pressure and thenmy penis exploded! Kidding. I got nuthin’.
I’m quite happy with my fire hose as it is, but I thought the point of a pump was to get guys large and in charge. A little irritated, and slightly chaffed, I turned to the Internet for answers. I found them at www.goaskalice.columbia.edu. I have no idea who the hell Alice is, or why this chick knows so much about penis pumps, but girlfriend explains that they aren’t for adding inches. They’re for making erections firmer. And since I’ve never had a problem in that area, I gave the pump to Ace. On to the Nipple Suckers.
Yep, Nipple Suckers. Or, as I refer to them, the “shovel handles.” We’re talking three-inch-long, hollow black rubber tubes that you squeeze to create pressure over the nipple. Liking nipple play as much as the next open-minded guy, I gave them a shot and gotnuthin’. There was a little discomfort, but not a lot of sensation. Worried that maybe I was having an “off day” I called over my able assistant to see if the old-fashioned way still worked. It did, and the Nipple Suckers didn’t stand up to the Pepsi challenge. They just sucked.
But they didn’t suck as bad as the edible condoms, technically titled Le Sensuous Sheath. The “condoms” come in four flavors: cherry, strawberry, orange and lemon. We gave strawberry a try first, and, thinking there were two pieces joined together, ripped it in half before realizing that there’s only one of each flavor—you have to wrap the split piece around your piece and then create a condom-shaped product through saliva and heat.
This presented several problems. First, the “condom” tore easily. Second, it actually stuck to his skin like a paste, which could be lots of fun to clean off—if they tasted like anything remotely edible. Imagine a Fruit Roll-Up with the consistency of wax paper and even less flavor. Ultimately, my able assistant had to wash the remainder off since I was alternating between chugging water and gagging.
To its credit, the “magic lubricant” didn’t make me gag. But nor did it do any tricks. We ordered Feathre Luv Macho Magic lubricant in kiwi (it also comes in hazelnut. Hazelnut?). It didn’t taste anything like kiwi, just lightly sweet. And as for its other promises—that it’s a “stimulating” gel for “enhancement and increase of male performance” that “gently warms while you play”—not so much. It did the basic lube job just fine, but there was no abracadabra. And, after comparing the ingredients to plain ol’ KY jelly—surprise, surprise—they’re the same. But KY is much, much cheaper.
The final product was the only one that actually met any kind of expectations. The Ball Spreader (go ahead and giggle) is a kind of modified leather, adjustable cock ring with an added loop to go around your member. Now, here’s a little primer for the more vanilla of Pierce’s readers out there: A cock ring loops around the base of the penis and under the testicles, separating them from the body proper. The fit must be extremely tight so that blood flows into the penis, but not out as easily. This can lead to a slightly larger erection, or at least a more rigid one.
We got the latter. Mind you, it took two of us to get the gizmo onto my able assistant, but it worked—although not any better than a regular cock ring. The extra loop seems mostly for decoration. But what a stylish decoration it was.—Pierce Atkins
The SEX files
Does Charlottesville prefer hot monkey sex or something “real”? The truth is in here
At last, the secret is revealed. C-VILLE’s second annual sex survey provides the answer to the age-old question, How do you find that special someone? “Tell your best friend you need to get laid,” responded one 20something woman, “that’s how I met my future husband.”
Sex and love. We always knew they went together.
A couple of months ago, we polled readers to get their pulse on sex and relationships, figuring that Valentine’s Day would be an apt occasion to deliver the results of the survey. And it comes down to this: You’d rather be close than closely entwined, if forced to choose. Not that sex ranks low on your list of concerns. But it just doesn’t seem to mean as much without that trust and commitment. Or so you say.
In the words of one 50something respondent: “Like a meal, any course is only part of the overall experience. Sex is only part of a good relationship. You can leave off a course and still have a most satisfactory meal. Where if you have five courses of dessert, for instance, you don’t have as good an experience. So, I’d rather have a good, satisfying relationship, sex included, than a one-course sex-only life.”
The writer was a woman, as were two-thirds of respondents. Overwhelmingly, people between 20 and 34 took the most interest in this topic. Nine out of 10 who answered said they were in relationships and nearly everybody seemed to have had sex just hours before filling out the surveys.
We asked you if you’ve ever placed personals ads. Half of you hadn’t, but 80 percent of you figure the stigma is mostly erased from that activity (online dating sites still make a few people cringe). We asked you if you’d cheated. No, you mostly said (except the guy who answered, “One word: bridesmaids”). But with a collective dash of bravado, you said you’d tell your partner if you did.
You’re all over the map on the question of sharing details of your sexual history—as well as the particulars of your fantasies—with your partners. One 20something man adopts a simple guide: He keeps to himself “whatever might make me look like a pervert.”
A woman in the same age bracket tells but doesn’t really tell: “If I think something will hurt my partner, I don’t tell him. For example, I’ve always fantasized about having sex in the back seat of my old clunker, largely because of a really fun night I had with a boyfriend in high school in that same back seat. Though I’ve told my boyfriend about my desire to make love there, I’m not about to tell him why.”
Other keys to the limits of honesty include “Dr. Phil,” and “a man’s egoand how much he can handle.”
But if sharing fantasies turns you on some of the time, talking about your relationship almost never does. “It makes me mad,” said one 40ish fellow. Talking about sex, another subject of our survey, makes you hornier. And everyone professes to want to know the clinical points of their lover’s history: STDs and other health issues are must-shares.
Carrie Bradshaw may be a fashion trendsetter, but according to the C-VILLE Sex Survey, she’s not blazing a trail when it comes to sharing the details of one’s sex life over omelets and decaf double lattés. Those surveyed prefer to keep the details of their love lives between the sheets.
Said one young woman, “Cardinal Rule: Don’t kiss and tell.”
But another will bend that rule for the important woman in her life: “I rarely talk about our sex life with anyone except my mom. I can tell her those thingsbut I would never tell him that my mom knows. NEVER!”
Yes, that’s the plan. Stick to it.
So if relationships are the gold medal, how do you go about winning one? As noted, some just blab about their libido to their friends and the next thing they know, they’re married! Others take different routes. A 19-year-old man threatens to “cruise 29 with the top down and Culture Club on the deck.” One older woman takes a more cerebral approach. She formed what she calls an “intellectual group” with other women. “As a group, we specifically advertise for males to join us to balance discussions at our meetings.
“Resulting from this,” she continues, “I met my partner.”
Some are keen for personals ads and online dating sites—about half of those who responded. But the presumed view of those who use the hookup aids is pretty checkered. “Psycho and weird,” said one woman. “Desperate,” said another.
“I think personals ads intervene with fate,” one 20something philosopher opined. “Plus, why is everyone so hell-bent on relationships?”
But another romantic soul allowed for how “some people benefit from them.” She’d recommend personals, she said, because “my dad met his current wife in the C-VILLE Personals.” Aww, shucks.
A handful of respondents found their own partners, for better or worse, through anonymous listings. One mid-40s respondent replied that yes, she did develop a long-term relationship with someone through a personals ad. “I ended up marrying the ass who answered mine!” she declared.
She’s been divorced five years.
Even among those who say they’d reveal the facts of an extra-curricular tryst to their honey, they don’t take that to mean that all facts on their own dating profiles have to be, er, factual. One woman allowed that, yes, indeed she had lied on a dating profile. About what? “My sense of humor.” LOL!
Others confess that weight and eye color have been interpreted. For others, the lie has concerned employment status.
Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The lying doesn’t have to be ill intended. It can be born of courtesy. “I usually describe my package as being smaller than it is to not scare off women,” said one thoughtful gent in his mid-30s.
Could anything ever cause you to call off the quest for partnership, we asked? Sure, you said. Marriage, for one thing. Death, for another. Or maybe, old age.
A 19-year-old lass says she’d hang it up if she were “60 years old and still single.” By definition, she says, that means she’d be done with sex, too, because “I’d be 60 years old. Ew!” To which we say, isn’t that supremely cute! Get thee to Something’s Gotta Give.
Taking a more mystical approach, a 35ish man says he’d call off the search for love in the name of “spiritual enlightenment.”
Another cited “demographic reality.”
There were more emotional reasons to consider the single life, too. The knowledge she’s “better off” without a relationship would motivate one midlife woman. “Relationships tend to bring out the neediness in me. I am not a woman ‘who loves life.’ I am more of an existentialistI get the feeling that men are looking for a woman who is constantly stable with her emotions (I’m not sure that one really exists).”
Yet, though they are messy and leave our hearts open to breaking, most people would seem to prefer a lifelong relationship, even an abstinent one, over a lifetime of sex. We said most people. There is the guy who just wants “hot monkey sex” now and forever. And another guy who just can’t be bothered with “all that talking.”
But mostly the heart wants what it wants. Or, in the immortal words of a gender-unidentified survey respondent: “I’d choose a lifelong relationship because my vibrator or hand may be at my deathbed, but it just wouldn’t mean as much.”—Cathy Harding