Vanessa Austin Locke: From monkey to hunky
After getting to grips with dating profiles and online male behaviour my next job was to take a little stroll through the various flavours of site on offer.
I’ve mentioned before that there are different sites for different tastes and I treated them a bit like bars. Below
I’ve profiled a handful of the most ‘entertaining’.
“I thought that was just a teen movie stereotype”
www.darwindating.com: About as awful as it is addictive. It’s online dating for (externally) beautiful people where you get to vote on the looks of would-be members on a scale of monkey to hunky. Hours of fun. I swanned around on there for a while among the beautiful people until I found a guy that hadn’t had his eyebrows threaded. We went on the dullest date of my life, during which he actually offered me his bicep to squeeze without irony. Other than being delighted that Johnny Bravo is alive and well and cruising dodgy dating sites I have little to add. Is it true? Are the majority of ‘good-looking’ people vacuous A-holes that trade on nothing but their looks? I thought that was just a teen movie stereotype… At the other end of the spectrum there’s www.theuglybugball.com “for the aesthetically average”.
www.sugardaddy.com: For girls that like a bit of money with their honey. Sublimely naive, it actually took me a while to realise that this site is essentially for courtesans who don’t want to wear the nametag. Although this is utterly deniable of course. There was no mention of numbers until one particularly bold (aka stupid) suitor offered me £5000 a month to be his exclusive mistress. Fascinatingly, the guy was a psychoanalyst. Go figure that Freud. Did I consider it? Even for a moment? No. Simply because I know I couldn’t hack it. But I did think about what it might require to be that woman, and the writer in me wanted to find out. I’ll go pretty far in the name of research, and while I’ve no problem with prostitution and actually think it should be legalised so the girls and guys unionise, I just don’t have a thick enough skin for it, however glam Billie Piper makes it look. So I closed down that particular account feeling like I was certainly doing things the hard way. There’s also www.misstravel.com for girls that are so pretty they don’t need to pay for holidays.
www.uniformdating.com: Hello sailor! And soldier. And fireman. And… you get the picture. Yes, I like a man in uniform. Who doesn’t? But this site wasn’t just for fetishists (although there were a fair few of us I can tell you). It’s actually a really practical find for any uniformed professional engaged in shift work. Here you can find someone who understands the demands and hours of uniformed jobs and eventually you can sync your schedules together. For the rest of us it’s just like having a huge dressing up box and Ken doll at your disposal. Most of them can pick you up and throw you about too. Unless of course, like me you met a Cavalry Officer (known in the military as The Chavalry) who have servants to do that for them.
It was at this point in my online dating travels that I began to lose heart.
My chick lit-style comedy venture certainly had all the material it needed, but when I went to write it, it just felt limp. Underneath all the comedic incidents there was something uneasy about the whole experience. I decided to stop being facetious and actually dig a little deeper…
What resulted was a lengthy paper called ‘Mind Change’ that was printed in the Time issue of 125 Magazine.
Essentially it was about how the internet is changing our neurology and psychology. I was lucky enough to interview several top neuroscientists from Oxford and Cambridge, and next week I will précis my findings for you, before leaving online dating where it belongs… which is offline.
