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Internet Dating…For Hipsters?

stupid-personals.jpgI am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does

In part 4 of the “Deck” series, we explored the impact of the hipster culture on Black America. Now we explore a topic that is near and dear to hipsters everywhere: the dating game. Online, in the bar, it’s all the same- only the contest has gotten cheaper, financially and otherwise, with sometimes humorous results.

Since time immemorial, men and woman have gone to extraordinary lengths in order to woo each other. Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, starting off the Peloponnesian war. Cleopatra had herself rolled up in a carpet and delivered- literally- to her lover Mark Antony. Not to mention the countless millions who have sent missives, email and otherwise, to the objects of their affection, hoping they would be received as warmly as they were composed.

Thanks in part to Craigslist and countless dating sites, that job has gotten easier. No longer do lonely hearts have to search in vain for a special someone who to light up their days and spice up their nights. With just a touch and a click, love and lust are easily attainable in a truly revolutionary way, thanks to people at CERN and countless web entrepreneurs over the past decade and a half.

Hipsters are just the latest group to embrace the digital age in search of love. Yet it is just as much an exercise in ridicule as it is a genuine quest for love and understanding.

Stupid Personal Ads thrives on that. Based out of San Francisco, the snarky blog takes aim at all who comb the deluge of internet sites in search of their one true love. From an ad that proclaims a person’s fear of “showering alone without a martini” to a female who describes herself and her prospective mates in graph form, nobody is immune from their irony-laden scrutiny.

For the individual at the helm of the keyboard, skewering hipster personals is all part of a day’s work.

“On our blog, we make fun of everyone,” the editor and founder, known only as “Solo Jax” said in an email interview. “The way that individuals go about finding that person can be a bit wacky. We hope to capture the funnier moments and of course make fun of the entire process.”

Since the blog got started in 2005, hipsters have been in their crosshairs regularly. The targets have included the “Nazi of Personal Ads” who claimed to be into indie movies and film, a guy proposing to swap records with his would be soul mate (a female), and a satirical ad from a hipster seeking an intimate relationship with the Fox News anchors.

Yet hipster personals themselves have their own saucy history, dating back to the early part of this decade. In 2002, entrepreneur and self described “internet rock star” Ben Brown and friend Adam Mathes capitalized on the newly emerging trend, creating a personal ads space for their magazine Uber.

Designed as a hipster equivalent of the back pages of the Village Voice, the website, personals.uber.nu, was one of the most comprehensive- and bohemian- internet dating sites of the early 2000s, featuring a battery of somewhat irreverent questionnaires with questions ranging from “Why did your last relationship fail?” to “Why are you such a putz?”

consumating-logo.gifThus Consumating.com or rather, the zygote that became the fetus that became Consumating.com, was born. From the moment Consumating got off the ground, the site became a safe haven for cool people from all walks of life, from hipsters to theater groupies to run of the mill twentysomethings looking for escape from the dreary seriousness of sites such as eHarmony.com and Match.com.

Brown and Mathes sold the site to CNET.com in 2007. As of press time, it has already become a relic of internet history, one of the first internet sites to fall victim to the global economic recession.

Racket Magazine attempted to contact Mr. Brown; however he did not return our requests for an interview.

Despite the failure of Uber, several websites have popped up in its stead- in particular, OK Cupid. Promising the same irreverent, snarky attitude that made Consumating so popular during its brief run, the site attracts thousands of unique visitors, from 18 year old geeks to 35 year-old shut- ins.

As a result, it has netted over 420,000 unique visitors as of 2007, placing it in the 1500 range in demography site Alexa.com’s own rankings.

According to relationship and sex expert Susan Crain Bakos, the torrent of sites such as Consumating and OK Cupid are yet another sign of the iPod Generation’s putting their own spin on an age-old ritual. Yet despite Millennials’ instinctual embrace of the Internet, the notion of intimacy is less about dating and more about “The Hook Up” as early Gen Y’s call it.

“Sex and courtship are not as closely linked as they were for Gen X and certainly for the Boomers,” the author of The Sex Bible for Women and founder of the SexyPrime blog at sexyprime.typepad.com, said in an email interview. “There’s less ‘dating,’ as in the guy asks the girl out and pays for dinner before expecting sex. Now it’s sex first, dating later.”

A point she adds with a smiley, by the way.

The disconnection of sex and dating- a subject that Bakos and hundreds of other ‘sexperts’ have researched over and over again since the first lovelorn Netizen posted the first cry out for intimacy in the form of USENET post or blog or website- is also the fuel that powers sites such as Craigslist, as desperate singles plea, sometimes in vain, for a little afternoon or evening delight to make them forget their troubles.

That self-same phenomenon is also why Stupid Personals has been able to thrive for so long. It just so happens that the targets of their keystrokes are, for the moment, people such as the hipster who wanted to bang Republicans.

“These days, hipsters are the poster children for counterculturalism,” Solo Jax said. “Furthermore, hipsters believe they are the cultural elite. They walk the fine line between being interesting and sincere to trying hard and cool to fit in.”

That, according to Jax, is the crux that explains why hipsters are so easily parodied. But for him, the successful tapping of the sub-cultural zeitgeist that has attracted many to Stupid Personals in the first place is just as much a stroke of luck as anything else.

“We collected ads from various sites all over the globe,” he said. “We just helped corner the Google search for hipster personal ads.”

To aid in the search for all things hipster personals, the team at Stupid Personals deploy an array of tools- from Flicker photo streams to odds and ends that make their way into their email inboxes. It’s not a hard job, just type a few words into a search bar and voila!

They aren’t the only ones doing it either. Another blog, whywomenhatemen.blogspot.com does the same thing, from a women’s point of view, and in a touch of irony- is written by a man (allegedly).

The attraction to mocking men and women who go out of their way, sometimes ridiculously so, to attractive a prospective mate is a curious phenomenon. But the key to the comedy can be seen in how the twentysomethings of today approach dating and ergo sex than their Xer and Boomer counterparts ten or thirty years ago.

In her book, The World According to Y, author and research director of the Australian branch of the Ipsos polling service Rebecca Huntley describes this attitude as a sort of “laid-back, go-with the flow attitude” that is at turns sex-positive, and also cautiously optimistic to the point of jadedness.

In her profiles of 18 to 26 year-olds- the same age cohort as many modern day hipsters- Huntley alludes to a complex understanding of sex and relationships that acknowledges the sweeping changes in how young men and women view sex and dating versus their Boomer parents. While none of her subjects hold out hopes for the kind of long-lasting monogamous relationships their grandparents enjoyed, many are pragmatic, acknowledging the biological imperative of sex at the same time nodding to the criticality of emotional bonding whether it is with people of the same or opposite sex.

Racket Magazine attempted to get in contact with Ms. Huntley, but due to technical delays, was not able to do so.

Judging from her analysis, media and popular culture have a lot to do with the Y mentality, especially the internet. Yet according to Bakos, Millennials aren’t merely passive consumers of media, dating sites included.

“People in their 20s seem less dependent on the internet for hook-ups than Xers and those single, aging Boomers,” she said. “They go out more. They plan ahead. The Xers are on JDate and match.com now, in part because they hang out less and in part because they are looking for a ‘relationship.’”

But even in the digital age, first impressions still matter, and sometimes, how you present yourself can mark you as a Don Juan- or a fool.

“I just think that ‘being yourself’ is a bold decision. However, the decision to declare ‘yourself’ can leave you vulnerable to criticism,” Jax said. “I feel like we’re all open to criticism and analysis from various perspectives. I just feel like in our world, ‘how you present yourself’ more than ever to everyone but you.”

That apparently, includes hipsters as well, a primarily urban, extremely educated elitist lot who have managed to inspire both admiration and ridicule for their devil-may care attitude and disdain for what society thinks of them.

For the staff at Stupid Personals, it’s all theater. But there is a different between camp and truly reaching out to someone on the other end of the computer screen.

And only one of those is real.

“It [the Internet] gives us tools to reach out to each other while providing perfect cover for lies that prevent us from knowing the person at the other end of the connection,” Bakos said.

While Solo Jax continues to skewer the dateless with relish, at the same time the founder of Stupid Personals manages to keep the work in perspective.

In response to the question “What do these ads tell us about us as a society?” he quotes a popular line from a New Wave song from the 1980s, as brief and cryptic as a troubadour.

“I am human and I need to be loved, just like anybody else does.”

–Jack Winn

Next time: We wrap up our study of hipsters, with an overview of the lifestyle—and its larger implications for society.