Grace, 5 feet 9 and 130 pounds, is a gorgeous girl, so if anyone is going to be doing the turning down, it's her. Still, despite her warnings, a number of men replied to Grace's ad, maybe because they were enticed by the shots she included from her occasional modeling jobs, or maybe because they thought to themselves, "Sure, she's seeking a woman, but wait till she sees this JPEG of my fabulous schlong!" Or — most likely — they're simply replying without reading, embodying some perfect, dated Cathy Guisewite stereotype of the hearing-impaired boor.
After wading through a small stack of e-mails and meeting up with one woman whom she didn't find attractive, Grace moved her ad from Casual Encounters to Women Seeking Women, Craigslist's more traditional dating section. It was only then that she became the only one of our test subjects to lay some rubber on the road.
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After a few IMs and text messages, Grace invited one woman to her apartment to meet in person, and soon after found her long legs tangled in a new friend's hair. "It went great! She's gorgeous and sweet. Had a good connection and she spent the night. We didn't sleep much. Good sex."
Things only became unclear afterward, when the woman wanted to hit it again and Grace demurred.
"She called and said, 'Do you want to come over tonight?' but I said I needed to get some work done. If it's a onetime thing, that's fine, but I don't connect emotionally if I have sex right away. Even though she's hot, she's pretty, and she's cute, I was just a little bit disconnected. So I think I'd rather see her again as more than just a booty call and make sure I knew how I was feeling about it."
Clearly the antithesis of the "U-Haul lesbian," Grace has another potential date from Casual Encounters still pending. "She's a musician, I saw her YouTube video, she's clearly hot, and we're going to meet up when she gets back into town next week."
The anonymity the online world offers is two-faced. Its beautiful face is the one that lets you shed your inhibitions and finally proclaim to the world that your ultimate fulfillment would consist of being tied up with rubber hoses while wearing pink satin panties. On the ugly side, anonymity emboldens cyberbullies, angry at you, perhaps because you have dared to voice their own repressed desires right out loud. The flake factor is overwhelming. There are the dreaded "endless e-mails," the looky-loos, the photo collectors and the perverts — a label that typically describes anyone not into the same things that you are.
Craigslist may seem to magically put scores of potential fuck buddies at your fingertips, but it doesn't magically get you over your self-esteem issues, your time crunch, your weight problem, your fear of STDs or those pesky ethics.
In reality, the chasm between the moment when, as you sit comfortably in front of your computer, your idle thoughts stray to "Boy, some head would sure be nice right about now" and actually procuring said head is always far vaster and more difficult to traverse than we like to imagine.
Do people get laid through Craigslist? Sure. But after wading through the dregs, it quickly becomes obvious that your odds are scarcely better there than they are anywhere else.
