Unfettered Blather

I want to draw attention to this image that has been appearing in my Yahoo mail account recently. I’m sure it’s no secret that I am male and as someone of my gender I do have a predeliction towards certain things. I once heard a great analogy that boobs are to men what shoes are to women. No matter how many pairs you’ve seen you’re still going to look. Having gotten that out of the way, I still can’t help but find this ad for an on-line dating service extremely annoying. Oh, yes, it has also been edited because I am not about to give away free advertising to a service I don’t endorse.

Let’s break this down. First there is the picture of the young lady herself. What in the hell is she wearing? A cleavage exposing hoodie? I suppose with the wide diversity in fashion such a thing does exist, but this has got to be a first for me. She was definitely selected because of certain assets that she can convey in a visual sense, if you know what I mean. Yes, I’m feeling about as subtle as a crowbar to the testicles about now. I really can’t say too much about the picture itself because it really is worth a thousand words and I don’t have the attention span to write them.

So I really like how on the right hand side there is an option for “photos only”. That’s somewhat disingenuous since this really is just an image and clicking on it anywhere takes you somewhere else. Regardless, I’m sure you can find that “someone special” by only looking at their photo. I guess it helps people with certain priorities expedite their search. “I want someone smart, funny, and optimistic, but if she doesn’t look like a cheerleader then I don’t care”.

Moving on to the “profile” underneath the picture we find out that she’s 30 years old and works as a Barista. I love this, because it is so transparent that some marketing troll came up with this information. I’m not even going to touch the username. Ok, the girl in the picture is obviously not 30. Yeah, I’ve seen some pretty hot 30 year olds and I actually happen to be married to someone who still looks like she’s 18. At 30 you can look young but there is something about that age that is unquantifiable that conveys the sense they are older. I might mistake someone for being younger than 30, but if you told me upfront they were 30 I’d believe you. Tell me someone is 30 that is really 25 and I won’t believe you. I can’t even tell you why. If this girl is 30 then apparently I am 6 years older than I claim. I also love the job description because it’s so non-threatening. She doesn’t work some low paying retail job, she’s not a cashier at JC Penney’s, she doesn’t work fast food, but she’s not a model either, or a lawyer for that matter. She works the kind of job where you might actually have some brains and people would still believe someone that physically attractive would be at.

Nevermind that I seriously doubt that is her real job. She’s got professional model written all over her.

My favorite is at the bottom though. “photos in this ad may not be of actual [dating service name withheld] users”

I can’t say it’s false advertising in a legal sense because the laws around false advertising are so vague and obtuse that actually making them apply is an extremely complex process. I will say that I consider it false advertising from an ethical sense because what they are not so slightly implying is that you can meet this woman using their service.

Look, I don’t have anything against on-line dating. I’m not sure there is a wrong way, outside of meeting people in jail or prison, to find a date. People get lonely and I’ve been married for so long that I have no idea how dating even works anymore. I don’t even want to know. So you get lonely and you turn to the Internet for help. Why not? I turn to the Internet all the time. I can barely remember life without Google or Wikipedia even though they were not my first search engine and digital encyclopedia. I just think an ad like this is exploitive. I don’t see ads targetted to women this way. Either you’ve got the “Sexy vixen” like this picture or the “Happy Couple” and there is no inbetween. Is this a dating service or are you trying to get some guy’s hopes up that he can achieve an easy one-night stand?

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