Personals meme

[liv]

Via megamole, a cute meme: the game is to write a personals ad for yourself which is as unappealing as possible, without lying or making it obvious that you're trying to put people off.

An attachment that makes us freer?
Intelligent, full-figured 30-ish spinster seeks independent-minded companion for intellectual as well as physical stimulation. You should be sympathetic to, or preferably engaged in, a religiously committed yet non-traditional Jewish lifestyle; prepared to move abroad to pursue the relationship; and above all, childfree. This is an equal opportunities ad and does not discriminate on grounds of sex or gender, nationality or ethnic background.

In this actual reality, I'm not looking (and it's probably a good thing, considering the requirements I enumerated), but composing a joke personals ad is more fun than the review I'm supposed to be working on. Writing it did make me realize that it's really hard to write bi personals ads; generally they have to go in the "women seeking women" or "women seeking men" section, and even if you can get round that it's hard to avoid presenting as a HBB selling herself as a fetish object.

Comments

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

The world is full of personals slang I am blissfully unaware of! What's HBB?

Does not sound unattactive I'm afraid, but a statistically improbably combination of attributes, yes.

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

Hot Bi Babe (not that I knew, either).

HBB is in <abbr> tags; see the way the HBB is underlined in a dotted line? If you move your mouse over that it should show a popup explaining it.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

aha, so there is!

[liv]

I know, I can't always decipher personals, mainly because I don't read them all that often. HBB is hot bi babe. The term refers to a probably mythical bi woman who is interested in having threesomes with a het couple, who in turn hope that she'll be so overcome with lust for them that she will willingly do all their housework for the rest of time in exchange for more sex. Oh, and she's supposed to be ravishingly gorgeous, as well.

You get a lot of people in the LGB or poly scenes who complain of being pestered by "HBB hunters", predatory and annoying men who don't really get queer politics but have stupid fantasies about bisexual women. Simply putting "bi" in an advert would make it appealing to that segment of the population, not people I'd particularly want to attract but I was trying to do unappealing.

Statistically improbable is about right. I'm amazed I've had any love-life at all, given my very picky requirements in a partner. And I don't think my chances of finding someone for the long term are all that great. Thank you for saying my ad wasn't unattractive; I at least hope the content is ok because I don't actually think I am a horrible and repulsive person, but the wording chosen is pretty bad.