Craigslisted

I’ll admit that I use the Internet for a lot of things – shopping, banking, blogging, and love is no exception. I’m sure it will only add fuel to the fire of those people who think I’m an overweight troll, but I fucking love online personals. I’ve chatted up too many guys who physically were exactly my type – bookish, chunky, facial hair, glasses – only to discover they were lacking the special blend of wordy and dirty that it takes to get my panties off for free. The same thing can happen when a guy doesn’t live up to his Nerve.com profile in person, but at least with online dating you’re narrowing it down to guys you have something in common with. Imagine how it might change your night if every guy in the bar was wearing a T-shirt listing the last 5 books he read or that he prefers Asian women under 5’4.

Naturally, I also use the Internet for sex. To me, the most amazing inventions of the 20th century are DVR and Craiglist. These days most urban dwellers know Craigslist.com is more than just the site for apartments and racism, but to a girl from a small town with only a limited supply of available men (many of whom had a very limited supply of brain cells) it was a revelation in sexual specificity.

I’m sure it doesn’t work quite the same way for guys, but for a woman the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist.com is a real-life Matrix where you can plug into even the most narrowly defined sexual fetish with the click of a mouse, whether it’s men with chunky asses or Hispanic doms with goatees. If I wanted an older man to come over and spank me or a young stud to pretend to be my high school boyfriend, they were out there in the Internet ether. All I had to do was type in my requirements, hit publish, and start sifting through emails from hundreds of men available to come over and not only provide me with any sexual service I desired but pick up a six-pack on the way over.

College provides a lot of downtime, and for a brief while before I wandered into the Erotic Services section, I was a little obsessed with casually encountering half the metro area. The first time I met someone from Casual Encounters, my palms were sweaty from nerves when he called me to let me know he was outside. He wasn’t exactly what I had posted for (in the early days I lacked patience), but he was a young, cute guy who suffered only from being a bit generically attractive. I had to sign him into my dorm room, and my heart was racing in the elevator back up to the privacy of my bottom bunk. It wasn’t the most exciting sex of my life, but it was good sex and it came easy. After letting him out, I was stunned to realize that I had gotten laid without even having to put on shoes. It was the lazy woman’s dream – available sex 24/7 with practically zero effort.

These encounters became my private thrill, a way to fill the free time dreaming up fantasies and fulfilling them with ease. After a few months of it, I got over my initial addiction, but the whole thing got me thinking about the nature of sexuality. I was enjoying the casual sex, REALLY enjoying it, but it wasn’t necessarily my overwhelming attraction to the guys or the quality of the sex that made it exciting. It was the dirty jolt of excitement that comes from spontaneous, uninhibited sex with someone you barely know. If I was doing it for fun, why couldn’t I do it for money?

I packed my bags for Erotic Services and never went back.

These days I wonder who else is using Craigslist the way that I did. Conventional wisdom tells me only married ladies and fatties are using the ‘Net to get laid, and while there aint no shame in that that I can see, I wonder if they’re the only ones. Guys keep coming back to post for free casual sex day after day – is it the dogged persistence of the boner, or are they meeting with some success? Obviously those guys that post for a straight woman to come over, blow them, swallow their loads, and leave aren’t meeting partners (at least not the kind without a penis), but what about the handful of smart, sexy guys who can string a sentence together? Are they writing their way into the pants of attractive, sexually liberated women?

At least a few of them met me.