internet dating = the antithesis of radical

When I get an idea in my head, I have to go research it. This explains why, when my mother asked me if I'd tried dating on the internet (I hadn't), I immediately went and checked out several different dating sites.

Want to know what I learned?

They suck.

The mainstream sites like those Match.com & eHarmony places actually won't let you use the word 'fat'. I'm not kidding. It's a forbidden word. Because $DEITY knows no one would ever want to claim to be fat! Let alone *eek!* want to meet any of those horrible fat people (except to make fun of them, of course - and we must protect the fatties!)! Egads!

Yeah. So, my first act of internet dating was to sign up for both sites (they have a free version) in order to send them each strongly worded comments about how ridiculously stupid banning the word 'fat' is. Particularly when you're totally cool with words like 'overweight' and 'big & beautiful': can you say disgusting hypocrites, kids? Yeah, you can be 'big & beautiful', but for $DEITY's sake, don't talk about your fatness! Euphemize it! Hide it! Diet it away!

The other way in which dating sites appear to suck is that many of them assume you have one gender preference in your seeking: you are either a man or a woman, and you are looking for one, not both or either. I realize that there are certain programmatic limitations in the common dating engines, but couldn't everyone just add a 'gender is a continuum' or 'either' option to their stupid databases?

Yeah, maybe not the folks who bring you those over-the-top Middle America "look, I found my husband on the internets & I'm completely normal, I swear" teevee ads... but it wouldn't be that hard for the peeps on the more liberal/young/cool sites (I'm thinking that OKCupid place that everyone gets the tests from, or the Nerve/Salon/Bust personals) to take gender out of the equation, or at least make it a more complex variable.

Hmmph.

On the other hand, they've given me opportunities to proselytise: a random guy sent me an email wherein he called me "girl", and I sent back something like "dude, you're cute, but I'm a grrrl not a girl - or did you miss the Big Hairy Feminist subtext in my hastily written profile?" - so it wasn't a total waste of time.

virginia question?

( For Virginians re: car tax - Is my mother on crack, or did I miss something significant? )

learning to strip, yes or no?

One of y'all sent me a thing about a stripping (burlesque style, I think) workshop that made me contemplate the place of burlesque and stripping in pop culture. It seems to have become a kitsch thing, like knitting but 'sexy'.

I don't really have strong opinions about it other than that I've enjoyed the burlesque performances I saw - though only in a mildly sexual way; it was much more of a 'hey, that's kinda cute & don't we all feel a little rowdy now' thing for the most part. But is this stuff actually harmless, or am I ignoring issues with it? Not sure.

So, what do you kids think?

[Poll #642339]

I lumped stripping and burlesque together despite my (and I suspect others') different experiences of each. I've only seen burlesque with feministy compatriots, and felt pretty good about it. It was like mostly naked bellydance, really - sensual, a little 'sexy' (undoubtedly an edge of looking at pretty girls, which makes them objects, though they were objects of vastly different shapes/types/sizes), but mostly just fun. Live strippers - well, I have limited experience of them, and what little I had didn't upset me (unlike a lot of porn, actual women stripping tends to make me think 'hey, an ordinary woman getting naked for money, okay', but it didn't spark much of a reaction other than that.