A few days ago, on Twitter, Rob Heeney put out a distress call. He was set to record his excellent Doubling Up podcast (check it out on iTunes), but his pod-partner, Nick Doody, was off gigging and skiing somewhere fancy. He asked if any North London comedians were around the next day. There weren’t any. So I let Rob know that I was, indeed, free. These days I have the life of a Victorian lady: a lot of writing, walks and tea. I’m considering throwing in a bit of fainting, just to spice it up. Wanting to get a few plugs in for the London Comedy Improv show at the Pigalle on Monday wherever I can (that was one there), I asked Rob if he’d feel like having a lady chat to him about comedy stuff for an hour. He was stuck. He told me where he lived. That is how I ended up feeling very tiny, attempting to fill in for the comic might that is Doody.
Rob was extremely welcoming and offered me caffeine immediately. Not sure this was wise. I was already over-excited at being behind the scenes of a podcast that I listen to and realising that Rob and I the same chest of drawers. Who wouldn’t be? Now I was revved up, too. We started recording. We chatted, and I explained for the baffled, Doody-deprived listeners a bit about who I was and what I do , but I knew what we were really warming up to. Earlier this year, Rob and I had got chatting about internet dating (he’d put his own experiences into his Edinburgh show). I told him that, frustrated at meeting many very sweet but way too shy guys on the regular sites, I’d briefly swung by a famous adult site. I reasoned that people there weren’t looking for wives (I wasn’t looking for a wife myself at the time) and might be a bit more confident and direct. Direct, dear reader, isn’t the word. But the site had the word “Adult” in the title and I was tired of dealing with little boys, so direct was how it was going to have to be.
It wasn’t something I did covertly (in fact, I blogged about it on Myspace at the time). At the end of the day, you have the experience you want out of any of those sites, it certainly wasn’t something to feel ashamed about and I told most of my close friends that I’d put a profile up. Oh, how they laughed. My profile was the Victorian lady of them all: no picture, no physical description beyond height and hair-colour, and a very curt message regarding no married people and no sharing. I’m pretty selfish like that.
My friends’ first question was always, “Isn’t that only for swingers?” and it’s true, a lot of couples seem to use it. Despite my upfront statement of no-sharing intent, I still got inundated with requests for photos, and even sight-unseen offers. The whole cloak of mystery was working for me, big time. Except it really wasn’t; while there were (as I hoped) a few genuine blokes on it (many the same as from the less “adult” sites, interestingly enough), mostly they were married guys or escorts. The opening salvo (or attempt at a shot across my bough, if you will) was often a poorly-spelled dirty text. Yawn. Worst of all – so many were accompanied by shots of their fully-erect “little men” that I had to amend my profile to state that anyone who did that wouldn’t get a response. Why would I want that? Detached from a person, those bits of someone make no sense: put enough of those photos end to end and it just looks like s weird mushroom farm. This type of photo ban increased the flow of traffic past my page. It had made me even more mysterious, probably seeming more likely to give them a spanking (what is up with the spanking?) and it was the last straw. I left the site.
I did end up meeting one or two guys from it: guys who had normal photos of themselves as human beings and not close-ups of their favourite bit of themselves. Or guys who didn’t have photos at all, but made me laugh: “You can spell. I think we’d get on.” When people hear you’re using that kind of site, they imagine endless Eyes Wide Shut parties and bootie calls. If that’s your thing, there’s plenty of it available. But as with any other site you still call the shots on what you want from an actual meeting. You still email, chat on the phone and then go for a coffee. Like any other site. Unless you want to dress in cloaks and masks and listen to other people, squelching away all around you. It just doesn’t sound like fun to me.
I told Rob all of this again yesterday for the podcast. I’m not sure how much of it he’ll use, because there wasn’t any dirt to relate: I used a non-conventional dating site in much the same way as I’d used the more conventional ones, with maybe one or two curiosity meets, where I wasn’t sure we’d have any chance of dating regularly but there might be a spark if we met. It was fun. They were cool people. I dated one guy for months and he met my Mum.
I have no idea if he went back to that site after we split up. The only thing I came away from the experience with is the certain knowledge that, somewhere in England, right now, someone is taking a picture of their favourite bit of themselves and sending it to someone who hasn’t asked for it.
