This is getting ridiculous. I think it’s high time we all agreed on some common standards for use of the M4W and W4M postings. I propose voluntary adherence with strict communal shunning of anyone who refuses to stick with these guidelines:
1. It is the right of individual who posted the ad (regardless of gender) to request a picture before sending one. People who don’t like to send their pictures first must post their own ads.
2. Sending a picture of yourself that doesn’t show anything about how you look (such as you, from fifteen feet away, in puffy ski gear, hat, and goggles) shall be considered a sign of either total boneheadedness or willful noncompliance with the request for a picture.
3. When posting an ad, anyone who requests a specific look (SAF, BBW, tall dark and handsome, etc) must in turn give some idea of his or her own physical characteristics.
4. It shall be universally understood that if Party A responds to an ad placed by Party B, and Party B does not respond within one week, Party B is not interested. We will all agree that the actual probability that Party B somehow never received Party A’s email is negligible, and therefore a non-response is sufficient indication of Party B’s lack of interest. This is especially true in regards to ads in the W4M section, which receive too many responses for it to be practical to write a personalized response to each and every responder. However, any earnest souls who choose to respond to everyone anyway will receive karmic bonus points.
5. Sending a picture with any of the following deceptive properties:
a. More than three years old
b. Showing a different, more flattering hairstyle, or a time before hairline began receding
c. Showing a body more than ten pounds lighter or heavier than is currently the case
d. Masking some potentially important feature, such as a hat covering a bald head, or blurry focus that hides a major skin disorder
e. Closed lips hiding missing front teeth
… will be considered a malicious act, and will be just grounds for the injured party to end the date immediately upon discovering the deception. If the injured party decides to stay anyway, the deceiving party must offer to pay for the entire date including cab fare home by way of recompense.
6. No poster or responder may refer to him/herself using subjective terms such as “attractive” or “witty” unless said individual has been told that recently by a party other than a salesperson or family member.
7. Appropriate use of other relative terms such as “tall” or “well-read” should be judged by whether the author believes that most normal people on the street would concur with this description. Any poster or responder who has a unique definition of these or other terms should give an example to avoid confusion (e.g.: “Tall, assuming you are comparing me to most elementary school students” or “Well-read – I subscribe to Playboy, Penthouse -and- Hustler…for the articles”). Furthermore, on the body type issue, the following chart should be considered the objective standard for terms referring to body type, should there be any debate:
http://www.healthchecksystems.com/heightweightchart.htm
People on the lower end of the weight range for their height may in good conscience refer to themselves as “slender.” People on the higher end but still within the healthy weight range for their height may say “healthy,” “average,” or “height-weight proportionate”. People above these weights must describe themselves using some word that means overweight unless the reason for the extra pounds is that they are body builders and have quite a lot of muscle.
8. Those of us who have thought about it have realized that most attractive women do not need to place ads on the Internet to get no-strings-attached sex. Women are rarely hampered by “strings” when it comes to getting sex. Most attractive women who want NSA sex go to bars and clubs to pick men up, or summon their favorite booty call. Therefore, men responding to such ads should know that:
a. Though some of these posters may indeed be what the claim to be, a man chooses to trust such a woman’s word at his own risk. No guarantees will be made of her actual gender, disease status, attractiveness, profession, or intentions.
b. Women who do not request NSA encounters probably aren’t looking for them and should not be solicited for them or sent pictures of your genitals or anyone else’s.
9. As a community, we will allow people to be as misguided in their preferences as they choose to be. We will all agree that each of us has some features we find more attractive than others in the opposite sex, and that it is unproductive to admonish others for preferring, for instance, tall men or “fit” women, or any other arbitrary type. We will agree that it’s easier if people say what their type is frankly so we don’t waste time writing them only to be rejected anyway. We will furthermore agree that writing to someone and criticizing him or her for ruling out someone of your appearance simply makes you sound pathetic and bitter, which is not helping the recipient of your ire look past the fact that you are also short or fat.
10. We concur that never in the history of human evolution has it been in anyway normal for people to choose their mates without regard to physical attraction. We acknowledge that in this great age of ours, there is a Kinko’s on every corner and all of us are perfectly capable of having a picture of ourselves scanned at any time. Therefore, it is asinine to expect anyone who is not completely desperate to be interested in dating you without seeing a picture of you first. It is also asinine to treat that person as somehow abnormal for not wishing to date you if he or she discovers after seeing your picture or meeting you that he/she is not sexually attracted to you.
11. If a poster has posted the same obnoxious or creepy ad (“loving breast massage” guy take note) once or more per day for the past week and not received a sufficient number of the desired type of responses, the poster should assume that the Craig’s List readership does not find his/her proposition compelling and for the love of God, quit spamming.