F Boy Island

Isn’t that all places where Men congregate in which to get laid? I finally resumed watching that hilarious show now moved to the CW from Max which is their loss frankly, but ours as well as the budget has eliminated the shack the rejected F boys were sent to versus the Mansion the “nice guys” were sent to post eviction. If you have not watched this series you are missing out on one of the finer parodies of Dating shows that define reality TV. I find most of my time trying to figure how what job/profession they have other than “Entrepreneur”. Which now brings me to my synopsis of the other dating show, the Golden Bachelor that is still cooking up its stew of pain and rejection. I d o find it odd that despite the fact that given the ages of the individuals involved you would think they would have changed the equation somewhat; however, it may explain why they did only three hometown dates and cut it to only two “fantasy” ones, there is only so much a 72 year old man can handle.

I expected better from Grown ups, I would be wrong. I read this take on the show (below) from the New York Times and with that I agree with much of what is expressed by the Writers. The reality is that “reality” is all but avoided in these shows. The social isolation which we know from Covid is not healthy for one’s mental well being and I watched several women have clear issues over not being picked for a date, jealousy and of course distress over the concept of their “beloved” and hitting the “I am falling in love” mark right off the bat. Watching a 72 year old man navigate that with “You’re my girl” to finally saying it to one final contestant was to say the least weird. None of them should be even discussing that and should be realistic when even the Children expressed concern over how the distance would work in regards to courtship and longevity you could see them trying to be supportive but at one point when the cameras were off thinking or even saying, WHAT THE FUCK!” There Mothers/Sisters/Grandmother is going to sell her home, change her life and move to Indiana for a man she met on a TV show? Really, she is? But given what I saw the level of co-dependence and emotional instability that the final three demonstrated over a piece of ass was enough for me to think they would. Or not if a family member actually intervened.

When I watched the dates I recall the arrival of the Women and all were to say the least very attention seeking. One arrived on a Motorcycle, another came out of the limo with an old lady outfit and walker and stripped down to show a fit gorgeous woman in a slinky gown (she was the the one Prince fucked back in the day and that seems to be her entry ticket and free dinner invite) and the last was a Grandmother who arrived in a Bathrobe and said it was her Birthday and she wanted to arrive in her birthday suit and took off her bathrobe to reveal skin tight SKIM dress. Yes this woman is 71 years old. And all of them fit the “type” that clearly appealed to Gary, dyed long brown hair, thin and to say the least doe eyed and needy. The more interesting women were quickly dispatched and two self evicted wisely for family emergencies another for an injury sustained during Pickleball. Yes, bonding over trauma and physical disabilities is a theme here on the Golden Bachelor.

I am unclear why anyone would participate in this show, the dates seemingly were arranged to either invite terror or injury including flying in a helicopter when a Woman admitted being afraid of flying and heights. Another on an ATV vehicle that neither should be on and of course the rousing game of Pickleball, romance novel cover photo shoots and the ending which always is in hot tubs. Less about sexy and more about soothing frankly after the exhausting flash mob dancing and carnival riding adventure you need a good soak. Seriously, who thinks of this shit?

The family meetups are of course a process but as I have not watched the Bachelor in years, I know that the family is just that, the nuclear one and not extended one and certainly no Single Parents are included as that avoids sticky ex situations and well meeting one’s children. So to meet Grandchildren and involve them once again hit the icky mark and I did not find it cute. Shocking, I know. Not really.

Do people not go to therapy anymore and with that I knew instantly that too much revelation after weeks of avoidance is not a great way to meet and greet. The Woman from Benton City who lives on a farm is not a top choice. She has a lot of baggage emotionally and frankly riding a horse to the Tavern is not something I see happening in this man’s future. And in real life they would never meet and this would not be even a possibility. Then we the former sexy dancer (in case you have not heard that yet) in Minneapolis with the dead Dad at 16, and a forgotten mention that she has been married twice, and the real kicker – she is Jewish. I had not noticed the Star of David she wears and then I realized she knots it up with her other necklace at the Mansion but at home has it proudly displayed in her cleavage. Yeah, I don’t see WASP Gerry bringing that home to the family. But okay. This is why you discuss these issues of Religion, Race, Culture, Sex and Sexuality (as I suspect one of the Contestants son is also Gay) and the big one – Politics. Yeah, at 60 you are pretty vested in that one especially in today’s culture. Not having these discussions is deceptive and absurd. Again I did laugh when the Sexy Dancer (Leslie is her name) threw herself up into Gerry’s arms upon seeing him, and he immediately set her down. Yeah, that Hot Tub is looking good about now.

And this is why I love F Boy Island as despite that it possesses all the same principals and concepts, the Men are hilarious. They actually fight, establish Bro-mances and have no problem expressing their overall disdain for the Women when evicted. One just said, “I find you a Golddigger and btw I am a Nice Guy” Okay then! One whose Brother arrived as a part of the late entry clause where former contestants return, immediately said he was 40% into another Girl and stepped away from the sole Black woman to let his Brother have at it… having that his Brother was on last years show and won but needed I guess to come back to have another check cut. Yes that is the catch on FBoy. If the Woman picks the “nice guy” she gets 100K to decide to keep or share with her nice boy. If she picks an “F Boy” he decides the outcome. I love this show it is utterly without duplicity. Its about money folks, love no. Now that is one Golden Bachelor I would be totally vested in.

I have printed below the most recent discussion from the NY Times and with that I am glad this finally comes to an end soon, with the final two revealed and the Women Tell All (which may actually be revealing and honest). And then finally the fantasy dates, although I am switching to hard liquor as the fucking part is not something I care to see at all. Do you want a Blue pill or a Red one Gerry. Pick that Blue one Gerry you are going to need it.

Engaging and Aging on ‘The Golden Bachelor’

Two members of The New York Times’s Culture section discuss how a twist on a decades-old reality series has become must-watch television.

On the first episode of “The Golden Bachelor,” viewers were introduced to 22 women vying for the attention of Gerry Turner, 72, a widowed retiree who lost his wife in 2017.Credit…John Fleenor/ABC

By Sarah Bahr | Nov. 2, 2023 | The New York Times

In August, Julia Jacobs visited a Mediterranean-style mansion in Agoura Hills, Calif., the backdrop of “The Golden Bachelor.” The show is a spinoff of the popular “Bachelor” reality TV franchise, with a surprising twist: Participants are at least 60 years old.

“The show is coming at a time when there are expanding sensibilities around who is fit to fall in love on television,” said Jacobs, a Culture reporter for The New York Times who visited the set for an article about the reality dating series.

In the show’s premiere on Sept. 28, viewers met Gerry Turner (pronounced Gary), a 72-year-old widowed retiree from Indiana looking for romance, and nearly two dozen women hoping to court him on national television. Their relationships unfold on-air every Thursday.

Audiences seem to be loving it: The series premiere was the most watched debut for a “Bachelor” franchise season since 2021 and the most watched of any “Bachelor” premiere on the streaming platform Hulu.

But it isn’t all coming up roses: Amanda Hess, a critic at large for The Times, wrote in a recent column about how the show portrays older women. The contestants, she noted, engage in stunts like riding a motorcycle to set and performing a “ludicrous” striptease involving a walker.

“It celebrates older people, but only if they fit a very narrow image of youthful sexiness,” she said.

In a recent conversation, Jacobs and Hess discussed the series’s multigenerational appeal and the ways it differs from past “Bachelor” seasons. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Are you fans of “The Bachelor”?

AMANDA HESS I’ve watched many seasons, and I’ve been saying for years that they should do a “Bachelor” with widows and divorcées. So I was excited to see this version.

JULIA JACOBS I’m not a dedicated viewer, but I do really like writing about dating shows.

Some readers may ask: Why is The Times covering this reality TV show?

HESS It tells a story about how we see ourselves and how we see older people, how we see marriage and second marriage. It becomes an entry point for a conversation that I think our readers are interested in engaging with.

JACOBS It was a huge topic of interest on social media, and even at a senior center in New Jersey, where I went to watch the first episode. For some people, the “Bachelor” franchise feels like the same old show — season after season — and this twist was injecting something new and worth talking about.

Other than the age of the contestants, what sets this show apart from other versions of “The Bachelor”?

HESS The stakes are so high because many of the women have been married before. Many lost their spouses. They know what marriage is like. That, to me, makes the show both more compelling and harder to watch.

JACOBS There isn’t as much drama between the women. Typically you have a lot of women pulling each other out of dates like, “Can I grab him for a second?” But that doesn’t really happen here.

HESS The drama is happening within each person.

Why do you think this show is resonating with viewers across generations?

JACOBS The discussions between Gerry and the women he’s dating are more substantive. These women have already lived six or seven decades. They have careers and families. This show does not define their lives. And I think that has allowed them to be a bit more free in their dialogue.

HESS I’ve done several profiles of artists and celebrities who are in their 70s and 80s. People in their 20s are building their careers and their personas, but if you interview people who are older, they have already done that; they can tell you what they really think about how it all played out. And I think it’s similar for the women of “The Golden Bachelor.”

Julia, a statistic that jumped out at me from your article was that the median viewer age for ABC, the network that airs the show, is 64. Why has it taken so long for a network to tap into dating shows for this demographic?

JACOBS The producers said that this show had been in the works for 10 years. They didn’t have a clear answer as to why it had taken so long, but they said they felt as if it was coming at a time when they were seeing a lot of messaging about empowerment in aging. They mentioned Martha Stewart appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated and John Stamos posting a nude photo on Instagram for his 60th birthday.

HESS The baby boomers are such a culturally dominant generation.

JACOBS They’re certainly dominant in terms of cable viewership.

We’ve talked a lot about the show’s successes, but what about it doesn’t work for you?

HESS I don’t enjoy seeing women at any age having to justify the way they look to men. If you’ve never watched “The Bachelor,” the first episode of “The Golden Bachelor” will seem like the most sexist, ageist thing you’ve ever seen; one of the women did this age-play striptease involving an “old” wig and dress, as if to say, Don’t worry, I’m not like those other old people!

JACOBS I want to see more unfiltered interactions. You often hear Gerry and the women talk about their connection, but you don’t often see it in action. I’m interested in the mundane conversations about who they are, where they grew up and what their families are like.

Anything else you want to add?

HESS I’m curious if there’s going to be a “Golden Bachelorette.” I would love to see a group of older men.

JACOBS That’s something we’ll definitely watch out for. Maybe that’s our next story.

Footloose and Fancy… at Sixty

I watched the first two years of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette for the same reasons anyone watches Reality TV – curiosity, hate watching, boredom or just as it something new and/or different. I bailed on it as I have over the years with almost all Reality franchises for now the singular reason – the players change the stories never change. There are always prototypes, archetypes and stereotypes and the one consistent factor as someone mentioned to me, was that the person who is the most cringe-worthy/annoying/painful to watch is the one person being themselves. I call this the Ramona factor based on Ramona Singer from the Real Housewives of New York City. She is perhaps of all the Women in all the varying cities the most authentic and with that she is also the one we love to hate-watch. And is that not really the primary reason we listen to many podcasts or watch a show?

I have returned to Survivor and Big Brother during the pandemic and while I find Big Brother still idiotic they are upping the ages and races on the show and with that we have two Women of Color well over 50 still in the game. One a reality “star” who has been on two Survivors and in fact my favorite show, which she one, Traitors, is not surprising as she got what we can say “game.” He son sadly the apple who fell from the tree and was booted and with that I can say happily, Bye Bye. He was a Mama’s Boy and a bore. Crazy people trapped in a house for months on end forced to do challenges to win prizes is in fact idiotic but that is Survivor and many other Reality shows, the Bachelor is just a well dressed one. I loathe the show as I have said that it is human trafficking combined with legal Prostitution to whore out women and men but really still a woman to varying men hot to put a ring on it.. or not.

So when the Golden Bachelor was announced I tuned in and wow I am turned off. I am not sure what I suspected or believed I would see but I while I have seen some variations of a theme, it is still pretty horrendous. What is shows is how sad and lonely Women are, despite having family and work, they are tied to the dress. That dress being a Wedding one with one woman bursting into tears over wearing one for one of the “competitions.” That the Women are all over 60 does little to change the dynamic other than further demeaning and demoralizing them. Not a discussion is witnessed or explored about issues that are not about grief or some type of disability. We have had two or three self evictions, one early on for a family crisis, barely mentioned in passing; Another for physical injury sustained during Pickleball so she called it quits. Another for a family issue over her daughter who had just given birth, and one who was sick during the “Rose Ceremony” aka dumped by a post-it equivalent, so she was given a pass to return. Otherwise I doubt she would have remained. Her illness was likely sustained during an ice cream version of “Never have I ever.” She was lactose intolerant and with that had also missed her own Daughters wedding to be a contestant on a dating show for seniors, and that too may make anyone feel sick from shame or guilt. That she is also the last Woman of Color is another hurdle that well bad news here… Gerry ain’t taking back a Black woman to his family home in Indiana anytime soon. I also knew that one Woman was definitely going to be given the post it note as during the Ice Cream game she admitted she swallowed. Okay not that graphic, but during the game her sexual history was to say the least more “experienced” than the varying Widows and Divorcees left which definitely puts the Scarlett Letter “W” on her. And that too is another issue about how Women who have had a “past” are viewed. Gerry wants a Woman just like the Woman he had before, a Virgin, touched for the very first time. Gerry married his high school sweetheart and had been with her for over 45 years, so his experience is to say the least not unlike a Mormon Missionary. Emphasis on the latter. So with that let’s share our grief and physical ailments as nothing bonds one more and makes a “connection” better than pain.

I have not shed a single tear here. I have heard a few comments of truth in discussing being thought of as invisible and that is what aging does, and some admissions of failures in past relationships and wanting to find a companion to join you in still living life and yet those Widows seemingly have not faced a serious long term illness, caregiving again if they had to with a new partner. Little about their children or grandchildren who ostensibly means they are NOT alone so that is statement that veers on what I believe untrue if not unkind. And of course NOTHING about issues of import with regards to Politics, Religion, Climate Change, or even Sex. They never discuss that which I find very odd given the show, the issues about sex and aging but then they do not discuss anything critical about anything. They are either the most positive women in the world (well other than the grief and disability part) or utterly oblivious aka ignorant.

I am not going to get into the hostage situation like climate, forced to sleep in bunk beds, the lack of privacy, the forced group dates and feuds over the valuable one on one time, which seems to amount to 15 minutes but that is also enough to make a “connection” with the Subject of all attention and admiration whom they seem to know nothing about other than Age and his Wife’s death. I have heard that story so many times now I pray for mine.

Below is a Critic’s take on the Season. I can assure the only tears I have shed are about me actually watching this and having no one to discuss it with. I cannot believe that this show is being watched by anyone under 60 frankly as no one wants to see Old People on TV. That is the ultimate truth, we fear aging and this is just another way of reminding us how bad it is.

‘Golden Bachelor’ Brings Something New to the Mansion: Grief

When “The Bachelor” squeezes widows and widowers through its melodrama machine, the franchise finally finds true heartbreak.

By Amanda Hess The New York Times

Oct. 19, 2023

The third episode of “The Golden Bachelor” begins with a shot of a 72-year-old man crying outside of a California mansion. “The Golden Bachelor” is a dating competition for people over 60, and the man is Gerry Turner, a kindly retiree with a hearing aid and a full head of hair. Just three weeks ago, Gerry — he pronounces it “Gary” — moved into the mansion with 22 women and started dating every single one of them. Already, he is overcome with emotion.

“The Bachelor,” the ABC franchise from which the show is spun, has been producing its bland heterosexual burlesque for more than 20 years, and it excels in manufacturing such melodramatic scenes. Yet by the end of the episode, I was crying, too.

“The Golden Bachelor” is identical in design to “The Bachelor” — Gerry must methodically eliminate his potential suitors until only one remains — and a promotional trailer for the season shows him and his women stepping into familiar romantic scenarios. Gerry and various dates ride horses, an all-terrain vehicle, a hot-air balloon. They rappel down a waterfall. They make out on a boat. Inside the mansion’s candlelit confessional booth, Gerry admits that he is developing feelings for multiple women. He weeps. His many girlfriends weep.

It’s all classic “Bachelor,” until Gerry says this: “The only time I’ve ever felt worse in my whole life is when my wife passed away.” OK. That is new.

Gerry is not a true bachelor: He is a widower. He has introduced the specter of death to “The Bachelor,” and this has both revitalized the show and scrambled its stakes.

In a typical season of “The Bachelor,” the worst-case scenario is that a couple of 26-year-olds rush into an engagement, and then rush out. The expectation of betrothal lends a ludicrous edge to an otherwise frothy contest.

But for Gerry and his potential partners, many of whom have also lost a spouse, love is not a game. When the producers of “The Golden Bachelor” scheme to turn on the waterworks, they draw from wells of grief. A few minutes after we meet Gerry, we see him cry for the first time, as he tells the story of his wife’s sudden death, in 2017, from a bacterial infection. “And so, and so, I took my wife to the emergency room,” he says, “and she never came home.”

The romantic artifice of “The Golden Bachelor” may be hokey, but for its players, it is risky, too. In the second episode, producers stage a faux romance novel cover shoot, and Nancy, 60, is unexpectedly stricken: her costume is a wedding dress, which reminds her of the day she married her husband. “I know this, my rational mind knows this — he passed away,” Nancy says. But the dress unlocks her emotions from that day, “still the best day of my life.” Later, Gerry takes Theresa, 70, to dinner, where she tells him that she feels hope, for the first time since her own husband died, that she will not always be alone.

The ostensible point of “The Golden Bachelor” is to give Gerry a second chance at love, but it represents an opportunity for the franchise, too. One refrain of “The Bachelor” is that some contestants are “here for the right reasons” (to find love) and others are “here for the wrong reasons” (to chase fame). But over the years, the show’s success has spawned a whole “Bachelor” economy — previous spinoffs include “The Bachelorette,” “Bachelor Pad,” “Bachelor in Paradise” and “The Bachelor: Winter Games” — and its most successful players are rewarded not with spouses but with influencer deals, podcasts or other forms of cultural ambassadorship within Bachelor Nation. (The show’s host, Jesse Palmer, is himself a former Bachelor.) “The Golden Bachelor” makes the initial promise of the show plausible once again.

It is made to feel so plausible that it becomes unsettling. The very idea of a wife contest is somewhat demeaning to all involved, no matter their age. As I watch women be ritualistically dumped by their temporarily polyamorous lover, it is soothing to remember that it is just a television show, and perhaps a launchpad to a remunerative brand partnership. But Gerry’s suitors have brought whole lives to the mansion. I am finding it harder, frankly, to dehumanize them.

Contestants on “The Golden Bachelor” vie to impress Gerry, but they also seem tasked with justifying their very existence. They must prove that women over 60 warrant love and attention, from Gerry and from us. One woman rides a motorcycle to set. Another approaches with a walker, which she tosses away in a kind of age-play striptease.

Even as Gerry’s dates are booted from the show, they are made to feel grateful — that Gerry spoke to them, Gerry smiled at them, Gerry gave them the hope of future companionship with some non-Gerry entity. When Gerry cries outside the mansion in Episode 3, it is because the 60-year-old Joan tells him that she must exit the show early to be with her daughter, who is struggling after a difficult childbirth. “My heart maybe got a little fixed from Gerry,” Joan says as a limo drives her away. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore. Like you’re not as significant as when you’re young.” That’s when I cried; I cried for Joan.

As I waited for a new episode of “The Golden Bachelor” to drop, I watched a very different reality dating show: “FBoy Island,” which returned for a third season this week, picked up by the CW after its cancellation by Max. “FBoy Island,” created by a former “Bachelor” producer, plays like a meta sendup of “The Bachelor,” and it makes that show’s obsession with ulterior motives explicit. On “FBoy Island,” three single women are confronted with a crop of men eager to date them, and the women must decide which ones have come “for the right reasons.” Half of their suitors have arrived on the island as designated “nice guys” (who are looking for love) and half as self-proclaimed “FBoys” (who are only pretending to be nice). If an FBoy cons a woman into choosing him at season’s end, he pockets $100,000.

If “The Golden Bachelor” raises the stakes for romantic gameplay, “FBoy Island” lowers them like a limbo stick. One contestant, Vince, jokes with one of the women that they have “shared trauma” because they have both entered into ill-fated engagements on previous reality shows. But “FBoy Island” is wise in its own way, and one of its insights is that being a nice guy is not everything. Many men are eliminated from the show not because the women suspect them of being FBoys but because they simply dislike them.

And then there is Gerry. On “The Golden Bachelor,” he plays the consummate nice guy — a father of daughters, a grandfather to granddaughters. As he bounces from date to date, he performs the work of seeing women. He holds their hands, compliments their outfits and listens to stories about their dead husbands. He kisses them and brings them flowers. But he is not there to make friends. If “The Golden Bachelor” believes that women over 60 are deserving of love, it also believes that some are more deserving than others.

After Joan leaves, drama brews between Theresa and Kathy, 70. Theresa tells a group of women that she and Gerry had a wonderful date and a strong connection, and that he spoke of a potential future with her. This rattles Kathy, who rats Theresa out to Gerry, accusing her of gloating.

In the real world, a woman tells her friends about her exciting date with a new boyfriend. But inside the mansion, her friends are also her rivals, and her boyfriend is their boyfriend, too. When natural social laws are suspended, the producers can meddle however they like. Nice Gerry sounds chilling as he parrots a longtime “Bachelor” catchphrase: Confronted with drama in the house, he tells the camera, “I’m not here for that.”

“The Golden Bachelor” is still “The Bachelor.” Its cast of older women manages to make the most artificial of shows feel deep and real, but this also makes it hard to watch. Gerry comforts Kathy and punishes Theresa. At that evening’s rose ceremony, he makes Theresa wait and wait for a rose, shaking in a little dress, before he finally saves her from the brink of elimination. For the crime of being excited, she is reminded that Gerry has the power to make her disappear.

Friends-Giving

With Thanksgiving now past we move into the core of the holiday season which actually concludes at Valentines Day in February. So for the next 10 weeks expect some sort of display, advertisement or article on how to stay sane/keep fit/find gifts and of course travel and do so despite rising costs of both travel and entertainment. Wow that sounds so fun!

I also will read numerous articles on loneliness and of course the rise in social isolation that has maintained since the onset of Covid in late 2019, when we thought it was just a simple virus and to be cautionary. Remember those holidays? No me either. I was still traveling between Nashville and Jersey and saw many travelers wearing masks as they were coming from Asia. I had been reading about the virus and knew instantly this was not something that will pass, little did I know how bad it would be. And then by the New Year it turned quickly to shit. Remember those fun pressers with Trump and the counterpoint Andrew Cuomo who would use their pulpit to bully and to coerce others into compliance and cooperation or sheer ignorance and little respect for others let alone their own health? Yeah and the rise of Fauci who retires next month and to never see him again either is fine with me. All three of these Stooges did little to assuage or comfort Americans with their endless polticizing, conflicting and contradicting messaging and of course the sheer bullshit that came out all of it from both sides of the political aisle. Not the first time I have seen a transmissible disease used as a political football, but hopefully the last. Nah, we had Monkeypox and that seems to have faded but that is fine as vaccines for diseases that are totally preventable are on the decline. Enjoy those pox/measles and the like at your holiday buffet and then when you have illnesses later thanks to the post affects of them, you can thank yourself and your family for their ignorance and lack of access to proper medical care. Folks few people have family Doctors and rely on Urgent Care and ER’s for their primary care which by then is now past the preventative stage. America, bringing back epidemics one at a time.

So with that we enter the phase of the moon where after three years of paranoia and hysteria we are to gather together and put all that aside to share a plate of food that may or may not cost more, taste any better or be worth all that time or travel to sit at a table and talk about what? Sports? TV? Movies? Books? Oh wait no one reads books they read Social Media that tells them about books. So they talk about I guess Book reports that they saw/heard on Tik Tok.

I go to a great deal of events of which I write about here, largely because this is self published and with that it is still considered published work and for that I can get some tax credits for the cost of doing so. I struggle keeping up the blog and was beginning another to draft fiction and see how to create work from what is ostensibly non fiction and turn it into fiction to avoid the whole concept of what is “creative non fiction” versus actual non fiction. Meaning that I can change names, situations and blur truth with well lies or made up shit isn’t that fiction, created non truths? Sometimes writing linear stories are boring and why most non fiction is not well read or sold other than a few bios that draw the eye and then the Author disappears back into the world to never have that kind of success again. The late Author, Julie Powell of Julia and Julie is a good example. She never had that kind of recognition and acclaim that began as what? A blog. From that drew attention and success which it evolved into a book and movie that was never replicated again in her brief time on earth. Or how about James Frey who wrote a creative non fiction book that was so beloved by Oprah, then it was discovered it was just that – creative fiction. His life ended in a similar fashion, once infamous now just sorta famous, a cultural footnote.

And that is the struggle for many who despite having had fame, fortune and success is finding a path that maintains this course of life and that the creative fuel or inspiration maintains. It ain’t easy. I can do small doses of inspired thought and then like any drug, it lasts for a moment and then back to real life. I get why people do drugs as they cannot handle the let down, the sense of high and with that the power it brings that makes one feel unique, special, loved. Read Modern Love in the New York Times or LA Affairs in the LA Times. These are the stories of the heart and head that talk about the success and failures of finding love and romance in the big city. I find them incredibly amusing, boring, sanctimonious, sad, or interesting. I don’t read them all the time but I do occasionally pass over them. I read one today, “When love calls, go.” My first thought, “Hang up the phone or don’t answer.” Honestly I did not get one word of that as it was a cultural story that one would have to understand the history behind the concept of race, identity, religion and belief in the institution and dogmas that are embedded into the belief of arranged marriage and its import to one’s family and history. But it continued to reinforce my belief that religion is the bane of all existence, especially to Women. Had that woman stayed in Hong Kong, had a thriving career, remained with her family and met someone on her own or not, what could have happened could have been equally if not more satisfying or joyous than meeting a dude and marrying him and moving across the globe to satisfy what appeared to be her family’s wishes, not her own. Wow. Just wow.

And in that same paper they had a story about a Breakup Bootcamp. It charges 4K to mend a broken heart. I knew in my heart I had potential to be a cult leader as I watch the Vow Season 2 on HBO and yet I also could not go through the charades and machinations to maintain such bullshit and duplicity. I mean once I cleared that first million I would be out of there and claiming that we must end this and go on our own journey to seek knowledge and freedom. Then I would immediately move to Switzerland.

I am not going to comment on any of that absurd bootcamp but it is about the same cost for some visits to Therapist over a brief period and add Yoga, a Sex Worker and a short vacation, it adds up so this is fine frankly if that is what you need to feel better. I am sure the ESP/NXIVM folks felt the same after their thousands of dollars dropped for bullshit jargon and coaching from ostensibly two white people that look like Middle School Teachers. Wow. Just wow.

But it is this pervasive FEAR of being alone. This has fueled many of the shooters who have no social ties and cite a lack of a “girlfriend” as their reasoning. The most current crop that shot up a Bus, a Walmart and a Gay Bar seem to have the most diverse reasoning or lack thereof as to why as one committed suicide (the Walmart employee) and the others “motives” at this point will either evolve or never fully be understood as again it is less about the why but more about the how. How they get a gun and ammo and feel compelled to act upon their rage in a manner that kills and harms people just living their lives is the only thing I care about. This is not about mental health as you are already crazy to start amassing guns, get tactical gear and ammo to then act on your rage. Yes, you are crazy. The end literally and towards people who had nothing to do with your rage or anger. The exception it appears is the Walmart crazy who while working their expressed paranoia, delusions and rage yet not one co-worker or supervisor felt compelled to listen to him and inform those around him that this is a problem. And that may explain his list and targets. We truly do not actively listen, we patronize, ignore or simply are that self involved to not. Almost all shooters have expressed similar anger prior to their acts and yet again and again we go “mental health” but hey its clear we have no fucking clue what defines mentally healthy.

And again we have this insatiable belief or idea that you must be partnered off, have a hand count of life long friends whom you rely to be that family of another kind. Great my family were nuts so would this be a sane family and what is sane. While I found my Parents challenging as parents they were not bad people so being their friend is not an issue and with that I accept their limitations and have moved on the therapy stage of blaming them for all my ills. What I did learn was independence and the ability to rely on myself which can be overwhelming and at times I would appreciate someone else to do the heavy lifting. I would actually really love someone to plan something and include me in a genuine offer of friendship. This would be inviting me to a play, a movie, a walk. An ACTUAL invite with the exchange being that they do the planning/organizing or get the tickets and I will pick up a meal, drink or something in the future in which to reciprocate. I can truly say that will never happen. The last time I was invited to something was in Nashville to a baseball game that I did not want to go but felt I could not say no as to not hurt their feelings and I dressed and was ready with a no show text about 20 minutes before. I knew it was a lie and was furious and it was then I decided to lie and fuck with that individuals head from that point on. But is that mentally healthy? No, but I found it by far more entertaining and when I left I finally did admit that I made it all up I could in fact write fiction! I was by far more creative when I put my mind to it but it also changed how I saw people and the limitations I could foresee as I moved forward in life. And that led to the policy of No Compromise. Since landing in Jersey City I have had two social encounters with two different Artists, one I went to Governor’s Island with (which turned out to be the longest and best thing of that) and another who I met for coffee and she drank none and we walked around Union Square for about an hour. It was boring and neither of them I have seen again nor even remember their names. But again effort made, it was stalled and I moved on. No harm no foul and no compromise.

And this weekend I read the below article in the Washington Post from of all things an Economist who is concerned about the concept of Social Isolation. What resulted was not a far reaching discussion on health, loneliness and the overall affects it can pose on mental or physical well being. This was about the issue of choice and of situation. Yes the rise of mental health issues and the like that can be serious when we speak of those who are alone, and wish to be otherwise. That is completely different when one chooses be alone and or is simply alone, and yes folks I was in a marriage of one so you can be in partnerships that are of that nature. I refer to my Parents who again were the role model of that which I duplicated to a tee, so yes I do now know that boundaries and interests and relationships do not need co-dependency in which to thrive. And yes folks that my Parents did not do things together, sleep together, socialize or have interests together they were utterly co-dependent on that dysfunction that I thought that was “normal” or “healthy” and today I find myself content with the idea that yes that works for me now. Irony I am back to where I started only now I can articulate that and am sure I do not want a partner to live with me or fuck me. I just want a great friend whom I can do things upon occasion and have trust and respect as the foundation of such. That will never be a Woman they are incapable of it. We women are an unhappy lot and I just look to the Karen who lives in 946 below me and that performance in my Apt. on October 10. Then last week to get on the elevator with me and act as if she had no clue who I was confirmed it, she is what? Crazy. Just not gunshot crazy. And that is what falls under the umbrella of a mental health disorder.

And when I read the article and the comments that followed they too confirmed the reality is that most people choose to be alone, they are bored, frustrated, exhausted. Some come to it from years of having to care take and be the primary care giver, have had tremendous loss and want to be alone and some manage to have a healthy relationship with their partner/family and feel no great urge to be the life of the party. I am a great advocate of the “random” where your path crosses for an hour or two and take great pleasure in that exchange and then move on. I finally accepted that and often do make an offer of a future time but I don’t mean it and I really do. That is being polite. Most often I don’t remember their names and make sure that I am appreciative and thankful but I am done with it. The nice man I met with his friend (and yes I do recall both their names they were delighful and deserve that respect) on my Birthday whom I had dinner I die offer to reciprocate. My first attempt was in that same week to meet by coming into the city and running errand and saying I was stopping for coffee so if he was around to let me know and left it there. His response, “I don’t drink coffee.” So I told him to have a nice day and keep in touch. He did and with that I have been deeply bored with the texting and after my disaster at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the German Actor in Hamlet I realized I was truly done with plays and theater. I had my few tickets left and was going but not going to discuss or pursue any further drama, literally or figuratively. So this weekend I planned a trip to Baltimore in January to see the John Waters exhibit and attend their acclaimed Symphony. As I planned it I recalled that the Gentleman was coming to see Death of a Salesman again (where we all met) on the 13th but I simply dismissed it then moved on with my plans. And sure enough the very next day I got a text with all the tickets and theater he was planning on attending that weekend. It was packed and unless I attended one of them on the same day and time I could not possibly reciprocate with dinner. I was secretly relieved. But with that I responded. “Wow great choices, shame I don’t do Broadway anymore and with that schedule I doubt we would have a chance to get together anyway. Enjoy”. His response was Happy Thanksgiving anyway. Loved the deep inquiry into “What you don’t do Broadway anymore?” Yeah, like coffee. Again the lack of curiosity and interest said more than had he expressed as such. Even if I wasn’t going to Baltimore that weekend I am back Sunday morning, but with a short window and his lack of coffee I am not sure what he thought we could do. Have Breakfast? I actually don’t do breakfast. So with that I suspect it is done. I am relieved as we had nothing to talk about but the play. There is only so much to talk about there. I am not sure he thought we were to be anything more than friendly acquaintances but the inability to communicate and speak about things other than a single subject be that theater, politics or sports is a problem folks.

I find it fascinating that people find me so “intelligent” which is great but it is really that I simply read, retain and seek knowledge and experiences. It takes so little effort to find things to do that I like. I went to see the play, Piano Lesson, with a very star studded cast on Tuesday. I have been a fan of August Wilson as despite all his plays taking place in Baltimore where he once lived, he lived his later years in Seattle and it was from there is how I became familiar with his work and life. He lived a short distance from me in Mt. Baker and sadly our paths never crossed but I am sure he would have been a lively conversationalist. And with that I decided to stay in the City for the night as to avoid another drama at my home And at what had to be the best find of hotels in Manhattan, Public, in the LES. I have fond memories of that hood, often staying there when I would visit. It is still a mixed but thriving area and with that easy access to and from Midtown and the PATH exchanges. I had the best time at Public, from a room upgrade to a bottle of Prosecco on the house, I can not say enough good things about the service or the hotel. It is a must go to stay or just to dine, drink or visit. I am going to have to find another excuse in the future to stay despite my disinclination to attend Broadway in the future. Yes that much was true as there is nothing next season I plan on seeing unless I buy day of or lottery. It is not worth it. Two more to go with an Off Broadway show, Man of No Importance and the Musical 1776, my calendar is now full of Opera and some Cabaret. But theater is no longer my muse and with that we will always have our moments but it must be exceptional in every sense of the word.

And you do atttend Cabaret you can reserve a table or sit at a bar seat and with that I will never sit anywhere but a bar seat. I am seeing Sandra Bernhardt next month and Joe’s Pub to end the year and wisely will take the bar. I did Below 54 last week as well and they “upgraded” me to a table. I shared with a Mother, and a Daughter and another young woman who also joined the table. I knew after I was cut off mid sentence I had nothing more to say so I listened to their conversation progress and the best part was the Young Woman was originally from Nashville, confirming that I needed to keep my mouth firmly on my wine as flashbacks and reminisces were not on the menu. So I listened to the table next to me discuss their theater going and thanks to that convo again reminding me why it was time to forego it as they defined the “type” of NYC theater audience. Their discussion defined pretentious but while they trashed one production the irony was that next to them at another table was the Stage Manager of said production. Ah NYC folks it is a small town. I have come to the conclusion that yes I am smart and smart enough that small talk is being polite but silence is golden, like the Tony Awards.

So why are people alone? Read Bowling Alone a 20 year old book by Robert Putnam. It explains it and shows that little has changed but the methods in which we did connect and socialize have eroded and with it today’s Social Media is anything but a manner in which to meet and find others just like you. We are all now algorithms, and as in math, like finds like to solve the equation. Math is Hindu-Arabic, its own language and you read it right to left and we are Americans who suck at math. That may be why as we are also not bi-lingual and we assume that all of the rest will come to do as we do, as we do it. Yeah okay.

So embrace aloneness, do not confuse it with loneliness. If one suffers the one prospers and you must find the ways to those tiny relationships that can boost self esteem and self worth. My stay at the Public Hotel did that. With that I found out 946 was gone for the week, but I am glad I did stay regardless; I needed to treat myself to civility and dignity. And that is how you meet others in that orbit of positive energy that enables me to thrive and survive. I have let the thoughts of suicide pass over me and that is all they do – pass.

I spent Thanksgiving watching old movies. First was Blackboard Jungle (which irony had Sidney Pointier as the bad student which only decade later he would be taking on the redeeming Teacher role and my influencer in To Sir With Love) and folks there may be more closeness to reality than I imagined when I read this about a former Teacher at one of the many schools I subbed at in Nashville – Johnson. This was,the last stop before Jail and I knew this Teacher but the story was right out of the movie. That school had many problems, including that at one point Nashville Police quit as they did not feel safe there. Yeah no one did, it was literally a block away much like the other school in Jersey City Bright St which was, until this year and it explains why I subbed there as well, but not one moment did I feel safe. There was no learning, no security and frankly no point. So after that flashback, I then watched the original Boys in the Band from 1970; a film about a Birthday party but in reality a gay night of anger, rage and recrimination by a bunch of Queer friends who define the word in a dysfunctional way, not a fun “gay” way. Toxic friendships are just that toxic and with that it shows that even Men straight or gay have anger issues. Yikes, how perfect for the holidays to remind yourself maybe being alone is not that bad of an idea.

Opinion Americans are choosing to be alone. Here’s why we should reverse that.

By Bryce Ward

November 23, 2022. The Washington Post

Bryce Ward is an economist and the founder of ABMJ Consulting.

The covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our social lives. Cancellations, closures and fear of a potentially deadly infection led us to hunker down and avoid acquaintances, co-workers and extended family. Time spent with friends went down. Time spent alone went up.

Thanksgiving was not spared. Americans spent 38 percent less time with friends and extended family over the Thanksgiving weekend in the past two years than they had a decade prior.

And now for the scarier news: Our social lives were withering dramatically before covid-19. Between 2014 and 2019, time spent with friends went down (and time spent alone went up) by more than it did during the pandemic.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the averageAmerican spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline.

By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37 percent decline from five years before). Social media, political polarization and new technologies all played a role in the drop. (It is notable that market penetration for smartphones crossed 50 percent in 2014.)

Covid then deepened this trend. During the pandemic, time with friends fell further — in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58 percent decline relative to 2010-2013).

Similar declines can be seen even when the definition of “friends” is expanded to include neighbors, co-workers and clients. The average American spent 15 hours per week with this broader group of friends a decade ago, 12 hours per week in 2019 and only 10 hours a week in 2021.

On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone.

No single group drives this trend. Men and women, White and non-White, rich and poor, urban and rural, married and unmarried, parents and non-parents all saw proportionally similar declines in time spent with others. The pattern holds for both remote and in-person workers.

The percentage decline is also similar for the young and old; however, given how much time young people spend with friends, the absolute decline among Americans age 15 to 19 is staggering. Relative to 2010-2013, the average American teenager spent approximately 11 fewer hours with friends each week in 2021 (a 64 percent decline) and 12 additional hours alone (a 48 percent increase).

These new habits are startling— and a striking departure from the past.Just a decade ago, the average American spent roughly the same amount of time with friends as Americans in the 1960s or 1970s. But we have now begun to cast off our connections to each other.

It is too soon to know the long-term consequences of this shift, but it seems safe to assume that the decline of our social lives is a worrisome development. Spending less time with friends is not a best practice by most standards, and it might contribute to other troubling social trends — isolation, worsening mental health (particularly among adolescents), rising aggressive behavior and violent crime. Americans rate activities as more meaningful and joyful when friends are present. Friends and social connections build on themselves and produce memories and fellowship. They also boost health and lead to better economic outcomes.

We can hope, as covid-related barriers recede, that people will change course.Time with friends did increase in 2021 after the vaccine rolled out; however, at the end of 2021, it was still an hour below the 2019 level. Furthermore, a Pew Research Center survey made public in August suggests that covid might have changed us permanently — 35 percent of Americans say that participating in large gatherings, going out and socializing in-person have become less important since the pandemic.

The potential harms of these trends are sufficient to demand that Americans devote some resources to understanding and reversing them.

You can help reverse these trends today without waiting for the researchers and policymakers to figure it all out. It’s the holidays: Don’t skip Thanksgiving with your family. Go to that holiday party (or throw one yourself). Go hang out with friends for coffee, or a hike, or in a museum, or a concert — whatever. You will feel better, create memories, boost your health, stumble across valuable information — and so will your companions.

Put effort into building relationships that you can count on in good times and bad because, as the song goes, that’s what friends are for. Besides, you just might have a good time.

Dating Women

I do and don’t mean the actual concept of dating women, as well writing as a woman, who is heterosexual I am not sure I would know how to tell anyone how to “date” a woman, be you a man, woman, or fill in the blank name/acronym you use to describe yourself. I had to stop dating when the last one tried to kill me, so that seems a good enough reason. But age and trauma aside, I was never good at dating, fucking sure, dating notsomuch.

Right now I am listening to another rambling incoherent lecture about Satan and sexuality from the mentally ill man-child Ethan, who is confused about this issue among many others in his 24 year old life. But with that I read the below article on the new dating shows that are modeled on the show Bridgerton. Okay, I have never seen it and may eventually if I get bored enough but I grew up on a heavy dose of Masterpiece Theater and the ethics and ethos of dating in the gentile era of another time and place. That clearly was a shitty lesson plan or model. Then came the Rules. I think I read it and may have filed it with The Preppy Handbook which I also failed to achieve/attain.

The Rules reminds me of The Secret, something Oprah peddled back in the day. Dear God, pun intended as I am listening to this preach shit about sex, why are there so many hucksters and how can I be one is the real question. And with that the Dating Game Killer died this past week and if you haven’t heard that true crime podcast add that to your list with the other true crime/cult ones that are the best on offer even in post-pandemic times. Just thinking about the Sweat Lodge Guru who was on Oprah it seems that we have been living in perpetual reality show culminating with the Reality President who had a hard time handling hearing “You’re Fired!” when it came to him. Irony much?

So have we in this time of the too’s learned anything, me? No, I knew that women are ignored and not believed and still are. The New York Times did a lengthy article that found out that sexual assault claims are still the least prosecuted and investigated. Shocking! No, not really. And when I read this essay from The Post I was more interested in the comment section which covered the reality of how those in reality see this, as bullshit. I have been through more manifestations of how women should be viewed than I have had hot dinners. And we are still not discussing sexuality or assault and how it relates to the Queer Community. Hello! Do men not assault each other? Yes they do.

This weekend I watched the HBO documentary on the 1999 Woodstock Revival and its overwhelming failure. What the time reflected was I think a shadow of what was to come, the overwhelming rage of the American White Male and twenty years later these are the same ones that raided the Capital on January 6th (which given the average age yes they are) or their sons. The women are also the same mistreated and abused women of that era who in turn are with these men, divorced them and now have children who thought Girls Gone Wild was sexually liberating so they believed showing their tits was harmless; and in turn, placed themselves literally in dangerous hands, as they were abused and assaulted repeatedly during those days and nights celebrating music and peace love and understanding or whatever bullshit the promoters were hawking; but with only three women on the bill and the rest of the acts loud angry white men singing about hate and rag, it only fueled the rage. MTV even ran from the campgrounds when they realized that this was not fun in any sense of the word. And they people are the ones who promoted this kind of shit, I can see why they are now off the air. This music festival is no Coachella and for that I am not going to it either. Either way/Neither way not something I would have ever gone too. I didn’t get it then, don’t get it now.

So history is supposedly a teacher and a lesson, and so now we are looking back at a fictional story about fictional people and somehow thinking that they have the key to success when it comes to sex and sexuality. Okay, sure, let me know how that works out.

Opinion: Every generation needs a dating philosophy. Better Regency romance than ‘The Rules.’

The Washington Post; Opinion by Alyssa Rosenberg Columnist July 26 2022

Every generation has its trendy philosophy of love, sex and marriage. The success of “Bridgerton,” Netflix’s spicy adaptation of Julia Quinn’s period romance novels, seems to have convinced TV networks that the next big thing is Regency romance.

Despite the perennial popularity of Jane Austen, love stories set in England during the end of King George III’s reign and his sons’ monarchies might not seem like they have a lot to offer modern singles. But frankly, we could do a lot worse than mannered public courtship that fuels explosive mutual pleasure in private.

Certainly, we’ve done worse. It’s hilarious and dismaying to look back at “The Rules,” the 1995 self-help book by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider that became a massive hit by selling what even they admitted was the old-fashioned art of playing hard-to-get as a surefire path to a terrific marriage.ADVERTISING

The book was an obvious response to a marriage panic embodied in Newsweek’s infamous 1986 cover story “Too Late for Prince Charming?” “When you do ‘The Rules,’ you don’t have to worry about being abandoned, neglected, or ignored!” Fein and Schneider pledged in “All the Rules,” a collection of the original book and its sequel. The pair presented the husband hunt as a joyless slog, lecturing that “Simply being a better person won’t get you the man of your dreams. You have to do ‘The Rules.’ ”

But by 2003, even the most famous Rules Girl, Charlotte in “Sex and the City” , had given up the gospel. After having followed that philosophy into a dysfunctional marriage, Charlotte found true love with a man she pursued with a total lack of cool detachment. If American women weren’t quite prepared to emulate “Sex and the City” libertine Samantha Jones, Charlotte’s tale gave them permission to chuck “The Rules” and to pursue a wider range of desires.

Enter, eight years later, E L James’s trashy, moderately addictive “Fifty Shades” series. The books, which follow the travails of traumatized kinky billionaire Christian Grey and the feisty Anastasia Steele, started as “Twilight” fan fiction.

But James hit the zeitgeist in her own right, arriving at a moment when many women were reckoning with the gap between their sexual and romantic aspirations and realities. How were young women supposed to close the distance between campus hookup culture that seemed unsatisfying at best and violent at worst, and the sexual liberation that “Sex and the City” sold?

James’s solution was contract negotiation: specifically, the document Christian and Anastasia used to govern their sexual relationship roles as dominant and submissive. The novels and movies prompted a vogue for floggers and nipple clamps — and underneath it all, some useful new values.

Certainly, the #MeToo movement has prompted some unwarranted anxiety among young daters about the ethics of making the first move. But the conservatives who mock millennials for checking in on their sexual partners every step of the way miss James’s key insight: Communication and negotiation can be a way of ramping up passion, not dampening it.

If James’s novels treated domination and submission as a kind of trauma therapy, Regency romance, as embodied by “Bridgerton,” takes a lighter touch. In these stories, everyone knows that the rules that govern relationships between young, unmarried people are ridiculous. Chaperonage is an easily evaded farce. A single smooch shouldn’t actually require the swift dispatch of wedding invitations. And yet, both nominally following these conventions and pushing up against their limits turns out to be a lot of fun for the characters.

No wonder NBC is planning a Jane Austen-inspired dating show, and Netflix is looking to build a “Bridgerton”-inspired live events business. Obviously, there will be concessions to modern mores: No one’s calling for the resurrection of the London marriage market or the end of sex education.

Rather, the genre in its current form makes the case for restraint and formality as forms of play. Experiment with — and push up against the limits of — convention, “Bridgerton” argues, not because men need to be tricked into marriage a la “The Rules,” or because passion requires formal safeguards, per “Fifty Shades,” but because it’s hot. As pornography and soft-core content become more mainstream and ubiquitous, holding back is more intriguing than stripping down.

That argument seems even more persuasive after seeing “Zola,” director Janicza Bravo’s recent adaptation of A’Ziah King’s epic Twitter thread about two strippers on a work trip that turns into a sex-trafficking nightmare. “Zola” is set in an anarchic zone, where women think of themselves as liberated sexual capitalists. But they find out too late that they can’t always enforce the rules that are supposed to keep them safe.

Better to have some agreed-upon guardrails, especially if they can turn into something fun. After all, if you put on a corset, whether for a pole-dancing class or a Regency reenactment, you can always take it off later.

Early in the morning

I normally am up at 3 am to workout in the gym as it is one of the most unsafe places in which to spend time, next to restaurants and hospitals. The one thing good about my gym is it has windows and fans and I can open them while in there to secure ventilation and air circulation even when alone. And I have come to the realization that people act like freaks in the gym for whatever reason their behavior veers on the strange to the outright bizarre. But today I just slept in then got up to do live streamed yoga and even that got on my nerves and you can see that even online there were fewer attendees as there is nothing more boring than those classes day in and day out that do nothing but the same routine over and over again. We are already rats in a cage that does not help.

Then we have the daily news, as always it is dark, really dark. The reality is that is by intent and it serves to brings eyes, ears and clickbait to the masses. Who then quickly go online to their social media perch to rant, rave, reserve the same dish now ten times cold to their followers to get affirmations or stir shit, whichever is preferable to serve the rat in the cage and give someone a sense of purpose and identity that they matter, their opinions matter and they are right. Whatever that means. We are a lonely isolated nation and that was before Covid and now it is even worse. The Keyboard Warrior is as dangerous if not more than the crazed armed up Proud/Boogaloo/Keepers/Waffen maniacs that seem to think the bigger the gun, the bigger the dick. That may be true just not how they intended.

I am bored out of my skull. One more shot and I will have a moderate immunity to the virus. It doesn’t mean changing my behavior but it enables me to move somewhat more freely with less of a time clock/bomb on my head. I went to the play Blindness, which submerges you into that state as the Actress, Juliet Stevenson, reads the lines of the book as narrator and guide through the dystopian fiction that is the plot of the book. The New York Times gave it a moderate review but they are critics in a time when we need less critical analysis of anything frankly. I found it oddly inspiring and strangely affirming as the protagonist was a woman who was of a “certain age” and she had the foresight, the vision, and the cunning to manage it all. After years of watching most of these fall to the males of the pack, there was only one voice, hers and it rocked. We marginalize women even in fiction (and let’s get real women are not Wonder or Super nor are men either) and this was not the case. Brava!

Then we have the lack of a social calendar at all. Thankfully that prior to the play I was at Union Square Park and encountered to charming funny smart young people, they were not there together but as we sat physically on our own benches we met each other and did what people in New York did before the pandemonium, chatted and laughed about all things from politics to people and that is what satiated me in my life before and to realize that it can again means there is light and hope. And then the next day I commented on a Gentleman’s dapper outfit and whe chatted briefly as he was a character and bon vivant that I took in with great amusement not believing a word he said but enjoying all of it. Why not? We all take on the persona of whom we wish to be, want to be seen as and we wear costumes to compliment that, and masks now are just another addition to the ensemble.

And this brings me to friends and the reality of what a new world will look like once we reach a safe level of inoculations and the ability to meet herd immunity. And it appears that may be a long way out as the anti-vaxx community and fear factor heightened by the press and their ability to drone on about well nothing, such as the J&J site being shut down due to side effects that included the ones standard to most vaccines, nausea and dizziness. But this again may be due to the scandal regarding the J&J plant fuck up, a site with a history of problems, and a billion-dollar contract with the Government that went unregulated for decades.

I read the article below in Vanity Fair about the state of friendships once the restrictions are lifted. As I believe and still do that my lack of them was why I was safe despite all the traveling I was doing in the nascent days and that I can’t miss what I never had also kept me sane during the lockdown. Say what you want but independence is freeing on many levels; however, we all enjoy some human contact be that random and superficial or more intimate and deeper on however you wish to define it. But that is what the pandemic enabled me to do, inventory my relationships past and future, present was off the table as the acquaintances I had spent time with were the crew at my coffee shop and my building staff, not exactly a peer group in any stretch of the imagination. As I wrote about one of them the New Age Anti Vaxxer who is eventually leaving but I doubt will change my mind about that store and hence my transferring to another did enable me to meet the interesting character I met yesterday, superior to the Covid denier I had also met at the other shop. That one is fucking toxic, even the owners don’t hang out there anymore as I saw them at the second location and laughed. Not wrong, that much I knew as it was shades of Nashville and that is one place that is toxic on a much larger scale.

With my new approach, I decided that the year was one of NO COMPROMISES. We spend most of life trying to reconcile wants and needs and negotiating with ourselves how much we are willing to sacrifice in which to at least have some satisfaction of having some of those needs and wants met. And with that, I am done with it all. My way or the highway and having spent the better part of six decades not compromising but capitulating on it all, I am pretty fine as I am. Bitches I survived a pandemic on my own, what more proof do you need? It also does not mean I am not agreeable, amenable, or even willing to open up to new ideas or minds, far from that as those make me thrive and survive as well, it just means that I will only do so much, go so far and do only what I feel makes me feel good about it. The Vagina and checkbook are closed for business so that should allow one to understand how far that is. Not very.

Which brings me to men, again I see that there are going to be problems with this so ladies think about that. I suspect MeToo will take on a whole new meaning only in the affirmative as opposed to the cautionary warning it once represented. I see women and their Instagrams and the insatiable need to be liked for being “sexy” and wanting to show that you can be all that with little more than a bad costume and a willingness to pose with your mouth slightly open, all the better to suck cock with. Ladies did you not learn anything? No, apparently you didn’t. The super cute gal I met on Tuesday was adorable and she is smart in that she knows who she is and may not have needed a pandemic to figure that out but now was the time. So what did you do in the down time, there was a fuckload lot of it? I often asked the anti-vaxx new Ager at the coffee shop what did he do in the other four days he was not working. He was always vague. And the few times he ventured out they were failures as he has more issues than National Geographic, so I presumed he sold and did drugs. He claims to be working on his music, well where is it as that time you seemed to have again produced little. Mental health is going to be the biggest winner post pandemic that much is clear.

And when young man at my local wine store asked me to “hang out” post vaccination for both I said sure. I did not have any reason to say no as there was nothing to say no to. My only request was he get vaxxed, which he did and enable me to finish my two shot protocol and he had no problem with that. Again we had not made anything specific and I am not going down the dark road until the time comes and it came rather quickly. Again, given that our code reading and communication skills are rusty I am not sure within hours of agreeing to the parameters of “hanging out” post vacc period of building immunity, which is April 28, to text me and ask to come over with wine and have some light eats that night is not reading boundaries correctly. Then when I said no, it was an invite to go to the Liberty State Park and do it there. I countered with a coffee and he said he could pick it up at Starbucks and then go there. Again at night? Who is this, Ted Bundy? I said no, not at night but any morning before he goes to work at 12 we could do that and then it went crickets. Stopping by his work he seemed to push further with a day trip down to the Jersey Shore. Okay then and that became again another odd invite with me taking the train down, him meeting me at 4:00 pm and then we can walk the boardwalk and hang out on the beach and have a picnic. At night? And then we can stay overnight if we want. We can do what? As this venture escalated and I offered to say that I have been waiting to do the shore but that I was planning this any way he could come down and join me for dinner and if he was tired I would get a fold-up bed or a room that could accommodate him but that was only if he was willing to realize that it was strictly platonic and it was not going further. He kept at it and finally I said; “You realize there is nothing going on down at the shore and all venues are closed and I am not going to any of them regardless, so this is sort of all for nothing and an expensive pointless waste of time.”

I already knew all of this early on by reading his texts and his face when I suggested that he buy dinner when he comes down, he had no intention of eating in a restaurant. He seemed confused, asking me questions about food and what I eat, and I said, “Hey you come down its 5 pm and I have spent the day and would be wanting dinner and otherwise why are you coming down?” To fuck was the subliminal message. DEAR GOD and that was the trigger, not listening to a word I said, the lack of respect, and immediately knew what patterns I was doing, I call it Going Nashville, where I lead people down the garden path to fuck with their heads and then call them out. Well old habits die hard and trigger warnings were there and this past year I had not had to deal with them so I admit failure on my part to do better. However, this young man seemed to think he could manipulate, coerce, flatter, or talk me a woman twice his age into a sexual compromise. NO MEANS NO. I actually had to say that and of course, tell him that it was not about him but me and that I was now setting myself up to be a solo traveler in life and that while I find him a nice charming person I did not want to mislead him as he deserves a good partner, his age who wants all the perks and benefits of a fully realized friendship. I could not believe the bullshit but even my hairdresser is his age and she said all of it was odd as never once did he seem to want to do anything in broad daylight or in a public forum. All of it was, to say the least, sad.grim.pathetic. I still think some of it is the pandemic and the inability to develop healthy relationships when you have nowhere to take, do or establish them and now the endless isolation and sexual frustration adds to the confusion. So this is rocky roads and waters we are traversing here, so good luck and good travels. I am going solo.

What Will Happen to Friendships When We Crawl Out of Our Pandemic Hidey Holes?

A year of isolation has left our lives strewn with carcasses of friendships once held sacred—but can reopening revive them?

VANITY FAIR LAUREN MELCHAN APRIL 8 2021

Daisy Alioto’s pandemic experience has been a master class in self-optimization. Never mind that she was laid off in the early stages of lockdown. She found a fun-sounding new job, got married (via Zoom, on her couch), and signed with a literary agent. Most remarkably, she tells me, “I didn’t fuck up any of my friendships.” Not a single casualty, unless you count somebody named Karoline, who has an Android phone that can’t participate in group texts.

Alioto is all set for the “Roaring Twenties” we’ve all been promised, eager to trade in shivery park meetups for the sweaty, crowded parties she will roll up to with her pack of friends. “It will be so invigorating with other people to bump into and other people to talk about,” the 30-year-old said. More nobly, she plans to go on a “national tour of friendships,” a cross-country trip where she will visit the people she’s been unable to invite to come crouch on her picnic blanket. “We’ve got to get some of that time back,” said Alioto. “Because I did not want my world to narrow so much.”

Alioto’s tale is inspirational. It also shames me to my core. What I would give to have such a clear-cut social-reopening plan. My life is strewn with carcasses of friendships I held sacred but that seem to have withered in the glare of Zoom and the absence of gossip. Other relationships have come up from behind and flourished to a degree I never fathomed possible. It’s weird, almost scary. Even my best and most stable friendship, with a woman who lives across the country, has taken a wonky turn. We now speak for long stretches on the phone every day, and recently had a conversation in which we acknowledged the inevitable drop in communication once the pandemic is over, sounding like two teary parents sending their firstborn off to college.

Two years ago I wrote an op-ed in which I made the case for ending friendships. It had seemed a radical thing to say, that a person should feel free to walk away rather than wait for a bond to fade out on its own time. But that thinking rested on the assumption that there was a predictable rise and fall of a friendship, and we didn’t have the time or heart to wait out a yearslong degradation. This past year, just as we’ve seen our social muscles atrophy, many of us have witnessed our social networks warp into unrecognizable configurations. Thanks to the flattening effect of social media, casual acquaintances were upgraded to close confidants. Meanwhile, some of our tightest bonds came undone, submerged in a bath of equal parts boredom, anxiety, and sparkless group texts. What happens once we crawl out of our hidey holes?

“There is no reason to expect the world to be the same afterwards,” said Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist known for “Dunbar’s number,” a quantifiable limit to the number of close relationships the average human can handle. He argued that the changes that set in over the past year might not have been completely random. “It might have been an exacerbation of the natural order of things and speeded things up a bit,” he told me over Zoom, looking every bit the Oxford don with his thatch of white hair and afternoon mug of tea. “The movements wouldn’t have happened so soon but for the fact that you had this kind of interjection.” In other words, the pandemic acted like something of a platonic truth serum.

Dunbar’s number is actually a few numbers, figures that stack Russian-doll-like and express the capacity of our complex yet scientifically predictable social networks. The average human being, per Dunbar’s research, has the ability to maintain five super-close confidants. These five friends sit within a group of 15, the people close enough to regularly see at dinner parties. The next stratum includes 50 friends, those who might come to a barbecue or a birthday party. The final layer, of 150, is made up of those who can be counted on to show up for a bar mitzvah—“or a funeral,” Dunbar added with a mordant chuckle.

What typically happens, with particular alacrity in early adulthood, is our circumstances change and our friends move up and down the layers. When we move to a new city or switch jobs, the dear friend we used to see a few times a month can drift into the category of vague—but valued—acquaintance. Strangely enough, a year of absolute entropy has turned out to be the ultimate catalyst for our friendships. Just as many of us have aged beyond physical recognition, many of our primary relationships will emerge on the other side of this time warp as something altogether unrecognizable.

“Living in a bleak time requires a different tool kit,” said Sarah O’Dell,a 44-year-old content manager and mother of two who lives in Redding, Connecticut. The trauma of this past year, which included her husband having a stroke (he’s doing well) and her seeing certain associates exhibit less-than-prudent behavior when it came to masking, pushed her to “get real” and KonMari her friend list. “There used to be many people I would have put on pants for—not yoga pants, but the ones with buttons,” she said. “That number has definitely plummeted.”

If one is inclined to find a bright side of a year in hiding, think of how it has had an exfoliant effect, giving us an opportunity to slough off the social customs that might have lost their sheen. One of the new members of my Dunbar Five (she used to be in my Dunbar 50) is instituting a ban on saying yes to coffees with friends of friends. “The coffee dates are never so bad, but I could do without the weeks of dreading them with every fiber of my being,” she said. Now that she’s been vaccinated, my mother-in-law, as social an animal as any, has resumed her busy nightlife, except for one thing: “I’m done with eight-person dinner parties,” she told me.

It made no sense, but I completely understood what she meant. If there’s one thing this has taught us, it’s the needlessness of a middle ground. Make it wild, or make it meaningful. A party where I enjoy absurd conversations with strangers I will never see again? Yes. A return to those obligatory one-on-one drinks that used to litter my calendar? Sure, on the 12th of never.

“Maybe we got better at paying attention,” said Kat Henning, a 33-year-old freelance shoe and home goods designer who lives in Brooklyn. In the Before Times, she and her friends used to meet up at the same cool restaurants their other friends would frequent. They’d chat as fast as they could until the check came. These days the members of her pod come to her apartment for pasta (she lost her job during the pandemic, which put an end to $22 salads) and endless hours of talking. “There’s no such thing as the two-hour hang anymore,” she said. It’s a reality that she’s gotten used to, and she predicts it will carry on well into the future. “The summer is going to be wild, but after that the idea of FOMO will quiet down. Nights out are going to be less go-go-go, hopping from a restaurant to drinks to who knows what,” she said. “I never used to invite people over, but now home is my favorite place to be.”

There is no chance Starlee Kine’s social life will bounce back to what it once was. And that’s both okay and not okay. The past year has been illuminating and vindicating for Kine, a writer for HBO Max’s Search Party and a podcast host. “What I kind of thought about people in relationships before the pandemic turned out to be true in the pandemic, which is that they have friends who are single a little bit for…entertainment, I guess?” said Kine, who is in her 40s and single. “We’re kind of like seasoning to them.”

As soon as Los Angeles went into lockdown, her coupled friends closed rank, retreating into their homes. “It didn’t seem like any of them needed anything that was outside their households, and it didn’t seem to be much of a sacrifice,” said Kine. “I feel like I lost touch with almost every adult I know.”

She told of one morning last January, which might have been a scene in a Jordan Peele movie about podded people. Kine was walking her dog on the streets of the Silver Lake neighborhood when she heard cheers coming out of a house. It was then that she realized the election must have been called for Joe Biden. Apart from a male jogger and an older man outside his house, who said, “Ding-dong! The witch is dead,” Kine was the only person on the street. Noises of jubilation started to stream from all the other homes, and the street was suddenly a parade ground of people rejoicing with their loved ones, behind walls. In this moment, which should have been a communal celebration, Kine was left out in the cold. “I started to, like, burst into tears,” she recalled. “It’s going to be a long time before I want to spend time with a couple.”MOST POPULAR

It’s not without hope, said Dunbar, the Oxford professor. His studies of telephone data of the residents of an “unnamed European country” show that humans are wired to repair close friendships that have frayed. After disruptions in a pattern—say, a long vacation or a hospital stay—their phone calls tend to be twice as long. “It’s something we subconsciously do.” Still, he hasn’t studied people hit by a pandemic. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

On a recent evening, on what I can only hope was my last social Zoom, my fellow participants shared their new hobbies. The host told us that he had been studying a Wikipedia page devoted to missing persons throughout history. The other had started playing the flute under the tutelage of her teenage son. As she held up her sheet music, I wished I’d made better use of my pandemic.

The New Times will be my second chance. Even if I don’t get out as much as I once did, I vow to take for granted none of the moments of serendipity and hilarity, the petty slights and little frivolities that have been so absent from day-to-day life. I’m giving myself permission to duck the drinks with the people I’ve known forever and have had zero contact with over the past year. Not to get ahead of myself, but I might even ask a new friend to get coffee. Spring is in the air!

Drama Mama

When I read this I laughed as apparently that applies to women as we are just drama for one’s mama.  Okay so no one has a met a Drama King? I have.

I just spent the better part of three hours being lectured and martyred by a 22 year old boy I once believed was a friend.  He has been the subject of the last few blogs as I have tried to understand and reconcile the entire friendship and tonight I finally confronted the child-man with what he has done his best to avoid the past month and it was quite revelatory.  His bizarre religiosity aside he only confirmed to me that he was what I suspected – passive aggressive hypocritical and judgmental.  In other words a typical Christian.  I felt better walking out of there loathing him in a traditional non Christian way than I have in a long time.  I won that one and that is all that matters. Dude turn that mirror on yourself, I own my evil can you say the same?

Just last week I sat there with a Doctor ranting on about his marriage that is unfulfilling sexually and apparently emotionally after trying to hit on my, buy my Antiques and act basically like a self obsessed 15 year old to the point of extreme that I could not believe my eyes that I was watching this not once but actually twice as the second time I invited him to coffee to get some free medical advice. Clearly I paid.  I finally told him that his marital problems were not mine but to either get a divorce, a prostitute or marriage therapy. So again I own my evil.

Once again the sexist train roars out of the station firmly attached with cars filled with men.  Bitch Please! Or in this case Bastard What?  Men are no less drama bullshit filled than women. Let’s start there. 

I loathe drama, what I love is drama on the stage and  Good luck finding true love with ‘no drama’ – fulfilment takes work

Romance, like much else these days, comes with the promise of infinite possibility – but what we think we want isn’t always what’s best

Oliver Burkeman
Guardian
Fri 9 Aug 2019

Apparently, in the dating world, there’s now an epidemic of men specifying partners and relationships with “no drama”. “I understand that people want joy, laughter and happiness in their relationships,” wrote Laura Hilgers, in a New York Times essay on the phenomenon. But the men who use such phrases, she argued, “want something that doesn’t exist: a problem-free partnership with someone who has no life experience. Are they looking for a woman who never gets angry or afraid or sad, who never worries about her family or struggles in her job?”

It’s hard to say, because “drama” is so vague. That makes it a worthy successor to the now rather 70s-sounding “issues”: a label capacious enough to include people with severe personality disorders – whom you might be forgiven for wishing to avoid – but also everyone who has displayed any human emotion other than upbeat good cheer. So, by demanding “no drama”, you get to characterise your fear of difficult emotions as a simple matter of self-care. Of course you don’t want to date somebody with, you know, issues! (To be clear: if drama means emotional or physical abuse, you should definitely avoid it.) On the other hand, good luck finding a fulfilling relationship if you will only consider people with no issues.

If I have sympathy for these drama-avoidant men, though, I can sum it up in two words: internet dating. Romance, like much else these days, comes with the promise of infinite possibility: if this particular match doesn’t work out, there are countless fantastic alternatives on standby. The promise might not be real; maybe none of those astoundingly attractive women would date you. But it’s the belief that counts – and in this environment, filtering out the prospect of being exposed to someone else’s emotional struggles makes a certain, rather soulless, kind of sense. Why choose a challenging experience if a fun one seems like an option? Sure, the challenging experience may ultimately prove more meaningful, but it’s still a big ask. It’s a mild version of that phenomenon where people have a brush with death, through illness or accident, then say it was the most meaningful experience of their lives. Fair enough – but even so, few of us would choose that path if we thought we could skip it instead.

The problem here is the collision of a timeless truth – that what we think we want isn’t always what’s best for us – with a modern one: the way the “convenience revolution” makes it so easy to get what we think we want. Convenience plays funny tricks: “I prefer to brew my coffee,” writes the academic Tim Wu, “but Starbucks Instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer’.” A decade or two ago, it didn’t matter so much if you couldn’t handle negative emotions in others; if you wanted a relationship at all, you would have to learn to cope. These days, when it takes willpower just to go and meet a friend instead of staying at home watching Netflix, how much more willpower does it take to voluntarily submit to the risk of difficult feelings? You still should, since it’s the only way to fulfilment. But like many other things worth doing, it’s getting easier and easier not to do it.

Work In Progress

I have a joke that I am can channel anyone’s spirit animal their totem and guide for life.  But as we change and age we find ourselves with a new animal in which to guide us on the journey and what like life we evolve as do the animal we resemble.  I am always a work in progress.

My spirit animal was a Fox in the way Foxes and cunning and quick on their feet and often valued to simply shoot or to wear as a coat or stole.  Over the last few years I have called myself an OWL for Old White Lady but in all reality that too could be my spirit animal, all seeing, knowledgeable and often on lists of endangered species.  But the one thing I would never think I would be is invisible and that I have found by far more distressing than aging and at times also quite relieving.  There is something about being able to walk in a bar or a place and not see leering eyes or dealing with that awkward walk of shame and other assorted bullshit that comes from being single and sexually active. I look back not with regret or shame but again relief.  Men are shallow, boring and from we have learned obsessed with sex and often with violence as just having a simple consensual sexual relationship with a professional seems to be insufficient for men in power, they need to take, to conquer and harm with it.

The Tiger that killed his prospective mate this last week in the London Zoo was distressing as they are on the endangered species list and it doesn’t look good for any prospects in the future either.  Gee Tiger coats aren’t they popular?   But what we know in the wild we know now that it happens in captivity as well and we are beginning to see that animals don’t do any better regardless.

We are all animals and we have the ability to think and this concept of free will which is supposedly the reason we are elevated above our animal instincts.  Or not.

But aging is this time in life that is supposed to be a time of exploration, relaxation and wisdom from age enables those to be sages and respected guides for those in search of age old questions that one seeks. Fuck that we have Google.

I remember a time when the New York Times was fixated on Autism and I suspected a Reporter had a child with that disorder and in turn there were article after article on the subject then not.  This year seems to be the year of woman and of course the aging woman.  I am supposedly the subject of that topic and I have yet to find one sagely written piece that addressed any issue that I face as a working woman who is single, no children, no family and not a single friend or support system in place so maybe I am alone in every sense of the word.

Then I read this on Sunday and laughed my ass off so at least it offered that. The essay was by a  woman of 82 was shocked that a younger man expressed interest in her.   He was 30 years younger.  That would make him 52.  That is an older mature man who is not a boy nor one I would label as “youthful” Isn’t that Brad Pitt’s age?  Oh wait Brad is 55.  Bitch really?  Yet he could pull a woman 30 years younger so that my friends is what it is like being a woman.  When Angie hits 60 let’s see how we view her.

At any age we are all looking for someone to care for us as individuals but we all are works in progress and the very thing that attracts us at one stage appalls us at another.  The laugh that you found charming becomes annoying, the way they drink their coffee is cute then not.  That we are all evolving, ever changing is what makes us human.  But even my spirit animal has changed and it is all part of living, it doesn’t mean the fox is gone he is just in his fox hole for now.  So go with whatever rocks your boat if it brings no harm how harmful is it?

Does anyone know Brad’s number?  

At What Age Is Love Enthralling? 82

A confession of attraction from a man 30 years younger causes an octogenarian to reflect on desire, sensuality and aging.

By Sophy Burnham
The New York Times/Style
Feb. 8, 2019

It has been many decades since I went through menopause. At the time, I regretted the concurrent invisibility, when men stopped noticing me on the street. The funniest moment happened in Italy, where, as a young student, I had grown accustomed to walking down the street in a mist of commentary: “Bellina, bella.”

Later, visiting Florence in midlife, I heard two boys on a motor scooter cry out behind me, “Bellina! Bellissima!” And then, as they passed: “Ah, scusa, Signora.”

I broke out laughing.

Over time, I grew to appreciate the freedom of not having to wear stilettos, attract anyone or struggle for the exquisite body I once had. I moved into what is now termed the aging process. And I wondered: What does it mean to age?

As a teenager, I read a book by H. Rider Haggard called “She.” In my memory of the story, a white adventurer in Africa comes across the most beautiful woman he has ever met and they fall in love.

It turns out she is immortal, having walked through the flames of eternity, which are found deep in underground caverns. She wants him to become immortal as well and to live with her, but he is too fearful of the fire to enter.

She tells him she’ll show him the way and steps into the flames, only this time she turns into a withered hag and burns up. He staggers back, surrendering to aging and mortality.
Tiny Love Stories
Discover our new weekly feature, Tiny Love Stories, which is essentially Modern Love in miniature — reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.

It’s the sort of story that makes an impression. I’m an old woman now, although blessed with the accident of health. I feel youthful for my age — active, playful, energetic, lighthearted. I’m told I’m attractive, but I don’t believe it, of course, because how could I be? I’m old.

And if I occasionally forget, the high numerals of my years rush back into my brainpan, as big as Burning Man, to remind me that I should be practicing a shuffling stoop, hunching my back, sitting heavily, taking naps.

The other day, however, I was brought up short. A younger man I know came knocking on the door. We sat on the deck behind my house to talk about what I expected would be the death of his father, or the girlfriend he had broken up with recently. I’m accustomed to being a kind of mother figure, the wise older woman who provides empathy and advice. Instead, this man 30 years younger than I screwed up his courage to blurt that he felt attracted to me.

I was stunned. Embarrassed.

Yes, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is married to a woman 25 years older than he, and I have friends who have had affairs with men 18 or 20 years younger, but that was when they were 40!

Yes, the writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who married the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, took up after his death with a young writer, Ned Field, nearly 40 years younger and wild about her when she was in her 70s (which 100 years ago was the equivalent of today’s 80 or 90). She was, he wrote, the only woman in the world worth dying for.

After her death he married her daughter, only 20 years older than he, and who knows how she felt about not being the only woman worth dying for.

On the morning of our conversation, I was swept by a confusion of emotions, including the embarrassment of not having thought of the younger man in that way. I thanked him for the compliment. I probably blushed. “You made my day,” I said.

I didn’t tell him how embarrassed I felt, with wrinkles on my face and liver spots on my hands, so ashamed by my visible signs of aging that I no longer like to look in the mirror. Or how my heart lifted with pleasure at his compliment, at the same time that somewhere in the back of my mind I became a scolded child again, curling like a cooked oyster before my mother’s disdain: “Shame on you! Who do you think you are?”

I no longer remember what she was scolding me for, but I know that voice well, that of my inner judge thundering up the basement steps to flog me for my hubris.

After my admirer left that day, it took me a good hour to quiet my inner judge and send him hulking back down the cellar steps of my consciousness to prowl grumbling and mumbling. (I might add that one of the pleasures of getting older is knowing how to deal with the inner judge before he becomes the torturer, to pet and calm him like a good animal trainer, a horse whisperer. When I was young, these harsh judgments could send me spiraling into depression for days.)

My admirer, if I can call him that, is not the only younger (or older) man to express affection for me, but I assume those men have meant it the way someone may say, “I love tomatoes.” They appreciate my openness, my playfulness, my sense of wonder and joy.

But this man left me shaken. I have no desire to take him up on his sweet confession, but he has made me stop and think — about myself, about age, about life.

O.K., I admit it. I suffer from ageism. I find myself buying into our cultural concept of age, which says I’m ugly now, a hag. I’m a product of my culture and of the advertising that swirls around us, presenting beauty as a 19- or even 16-year-old, perhaps, in Victoria’s Secret lace or a Calvin Klein string thong, with her bee-stung lips and sulky face. And look, she is beautiful. She is breathtaking. But why is it that a man can be desirable his whole life long and a woman can’t?

And then there’s the study about online dating from last summer that claimed men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50 while women’s is highest at 18 (and falls from there). So what can it possibly mean for a woman like me, in her early 80s, to be told I am still feminine and attractive? Or to admit that I still find men attractive? That I like to flirt, to play?

What does it mean to be a woman? What is it that attracts?

When I was 20, flooded by hormones and unable to keep my eyes and quivering senses from every boy, I thought it was about physical beauty, or sensuality, and I thought it proper to heighten the interest of others by wearing miniskirts and floating fabrics. It was all about sex, nature’s way of propagating the species.

Later, men took second place in the currents of my life to interests and family and career, but they’ve always held a high place in my consciousness. Sex and power were linked for me, and the freedom of my sensuality was an expression of my own confidence and love of life.

I think I never felt more sexually alive than in my 50s and 60s, and yes, even 70s, free from the dangers of childbirth but with sensuality aflame. For women of my generation, who grew up without birth control pills or much sex education, a lot about sex was fraught.

And later, sex in long-term relationships can become routine. But life brings unexpected changes. Marriages end. And I have found that love later in life has been every bit as enthralling as when I was young.

As we age, we can gain a comfort level with ourselves that lets us pursue whatever we wish, without shame. Even my mother’s reproving voice died down long ago (mostly), and I have felt myself free to choose whom I wanted — or not — and to act from my core.
More reading about late-in-life romance and joy

I like men. I like to look at men. I like their company. And just as I find a youthful girl’s body lovely to look at, I find my eyes also tracking a fit male jogger on the street, shirtless, his body glistening.

So what is it to be a woman at 82? What does femininity mean at this age? Beauty? Sensuality?

I should say that I have never been happier than in these later years, never more filled with wonder and delight. I think sometimes I’m back to being a 9-year-old (only with a creakier body), filled with joy at being alive and with none of the damage that the raging rivers of hormones later inflict.

So what do I want to tell women of tomorrow about the brilliant decades that lie ahead? I want to tell them about how good they can be. I want to tell them about joy.

Save Space

No, not Safe Space as there is no such thing.  Maybe in one’s home if one’s home is built like a fortress and you don’t allow negative thought or ideas inside so that eliminates the internet, TV, Movies or Books. Sounds like a lot of fun!  But save some space in that bunker for those who are afraid of living.  That will be a hell of a big bunker.

In the real world people are assholes and some more than others.  Again if you never leave the bubble you may not know that and since I spent my summer going to “secondary” cities I can assure that people are people and most people are pretty fucking amazing.  True there are idiots but that is in just a stupid way not a dangerous way. Okay exception Resting Dump Face in Chief who simply due to his position is in the latter but until the morons of America actually elected him he was more of the former.  But I have been most lucky to have discovered cities that are no longer flyover to me.

But as a woman of a certain age I have one advantage that can be also a disadvantage the invisibility of presence.  I am outgoing and that enables me to generate conversations, have a radar that let’s me assess a situation and quickly extricate myself from potential problems.  Add to this an amazing memory for faces (not names I truly rarely give a shit and then immediately forget them when not in use.  I never said I wasn’t a bitch) that allows me to recall who I have encountered before and what flag (if any) was raised.  I am much more in alert now a days than I was before in life when someone I knew did try to kill me but once burned once learned.

And that is why I don’t date anymore.  I have no way to meet men in safe spaces which would enable me to learn more about them while SPEAKING to them face to face, meeting friends and seeing them in their element be that the gym, at work or some social environment that gives a fuller picture.  In today’s world we just have and app for that.

Really have we not learned anything?  The endless tales of harm including murder from Craigslist. The Ashley Madison scandal. The Grindr house of horrors  which makes one label this a killer app in every sense of the word.   Then we have endless stories about other dating sites that have led to women and men being robbed, assaulted and raped. 

It appears that Bustle and Tinder are the sites du jour and again I have read in the New York Times more sagas in their Modern Love section about failed romances tied to these sites than I care to in a lifetime.   My favorite was the Sugar Daddy story. Bitch please what part of that site would make one think anyone on there was sincere and honest?   And of course the role of the “Influencer” and now Facebook, YouTube and Instagram can enable you to find love or whatever you need for the now.

As for women over 18 we are sorta kinda fucked without dinner and that can be both literally and figureatively.  Men, however,  have no problem meeting anyone at any age,  willing to go the distance, again that can have any meaning, but women are no longer desirable once the pussy has a closed for servicing sign on the door.  Mine says not just closed but out of business.    There is game and there is game but again maybe its age or experience or just acknowledging that I suck at it… metaphor only at the parlor games of my youth.  I am not good at networking nor caring about what I can get out of every situation and that is dating which may explain why I was and am not good at it. I live in the now and if I like your company now that may or may not mean I like you later so take time and figure that out.  No one has that time and with men that means let’s fuck now talk later.

Yes and we need legislation to monitor and regulate social media that much is true but really how do we moderate and control human behavior when it comes to sexuality?  Well apparently we are to make everyone heterosexual, christian and white and meet in Church where we will have women stay at home and have children to ensure that we can avoid having immigrants do the jobs no one wants and stop all that abortion as well.   Sounds great! Can I get a Witness.  Home is the best safe space right?  Sure tell that to women whose husbands cheat, abuse and harm others. You know the GOP members of Congress.  Right Duncan Hunter?

As my mother used to say, “Take them to a motel, don’t exchange last names, get it done and get out.” She was right.  And I add, “Get over it”  Seriously I have no idea how to make dating, safer, better and kinder.  So just live your best life and it may work out.  Or not but hey we could go back to 1950 and make America great again right?

The case for cracking down on Tinder lies
There should be a legal penalty for obtaining sex through fraud.

By Irina D. Manta
The Washington Post
November 16 2018

Irina D. Manta is a professor at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, its associate dean for research and faculty development, and the founding director of its Center for Intellectual Property Law.

Anyone who uses an online dating site — Tinder, Bumble and the rest — quickly learns that people don’t always look like their photos, they sometimes add an inch or two to their height and maybe they fudge their weight. One study found that 80 percent of people lie in their profiles. Many falsehoods are mild, easy to see through within seconds of meeting someone in person and do little harm.

But other lies are more dangerous: They become instruments of sexual fraud. A 44-year-old woman in Britain, for example, fell in love with a man who told her he was a single businessman who often traveled for work. A year later, she learned that he was a married London lawyer using a fake name to sleep with several other women whom he had apparently tricked in the same way.

There have always been people who tell lies to get sex, but apps make it easy to deceive victims on an unprecedented scale, and in relative anonymity, well outside the perpetrators’ social circles. Yet we punish low-level shoplifting, or false claims in commercial advertising, more harshly than we punish most forms of sexual deception, despite the suffering and harm to one’s dignity the latter brings. For a woman in her late 30s or early 40s who wants to marry and have children, the opportunity cost of a fraudulent relationship can add another dimension to the pain in the form of diminished fertility.

Legislators have been wary of wading into this terrain, for reasons both reasonable (it can be difficult to document deception or measure the harm it causes) and less so (nonmarital sex is a risky business, and people who are duped supposedly deserve what they get). In a forthcoming law review, I propose that state lawmakers confront this issue with statutes that would punish, with relatively modest sanctions, material lies that deceived someone into having sexual relations. Confining the cases to small-claims court — which, in the District, would mean that fines would be capped at $10,000 — would deter individual liars, and the cost would add up fast for serial fraudsters.

One way to measure dating-app fraud would be to look for information that (1) was misleading and (2) involved one or more material facts about a person that (3) a reasonable person could have used to decide whether to engage in sexual intercourse. While such legal intervention wouldn’t capture every possible form of sexual fraud (think of lies that originated in a bar rather than on an app), these measures would make a real dent in addressing some of the large-scale problems in today’s dating marketplace.

This legal standard is modeled on how we treat misleading commercial branding through statutes like the Lanham Act. In both the world of brands and the world of dating, there’s an incentive for sellers to misrepresent what they are peddling to gain an advantage. Yet the law recognizes that outright deception about important facts that shape the decision to buy a product not only inflicts real harm on individuals, it also causes markets to break down, because “search costs” balloon. If people can’t trust sellers, they will be forced to undertake expensive or time-consuming investigations of products, or they will simply hold on to their money.

Such concerns led the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in an important 1988 case , to reject trademark registration for the name “Lovee Lamb” for synthetic car-seat covers: The products were not made with real lamb’s wool, and a mistaken impression that they were might have swayed purchasing decisions. We can use a similar standard to deal with wolves in sheep’s clothing in the dating arena.

Currently, the law only haphazardly penalizes misrepresentations in the context of sex. Some states make it illegal for people to lie about their sexually-transmitted-disease status (such as HIV positivity), although prosecutions are rare. In other situations, the legal landscape shields victims from some harms and not others without much rhyme or reason, largely driven by historical happenstance or high-profile stories of abuse that drove narrow legislation.

One case that resulted in legal punishment involved a Tennessee defendant who telephoned women and duped them into believing that he was a current sexual partner or friend. He then asked to have sex with the women after they’d blindfolded themselves, supposedly to fulfill a fantasy — and either entirely or partly succeeded in the ruse with three victims. He was convicted of two counts of rape by fraud and one count of attempted rape by fraud, which resulted in a 15-year sentence. In 2002, a California man broke into a sleeping woman’s bedroom and let her believe that he was her husband (who was asleep next to her), then penetrated her. The perpetrator was convicted of rape and sexual penetration by artifice, pretense or concealment, and assault with intent to commit rape, which resulted in a sentence of six years in state prison.

The impact of dating apps, and the associated lying, is only going to grow. By 2013, one-third of married Americans had met their spouses online, and it is estimated that by 2040, more than two-thirds of people will have met their significant others that way. (I found my own husband on Bumble. ) But even as apps amplify the harms caused by lies, they make documenting lies easier, because people’s misleading profiles can be reviewed, and text messages repeating the lies can be saved.

Perhaps all seduction involves embellishment — after all, isn’t makeup or a push-up bra trickery, when the truth might be disappointing? But lies exist on a spectrum, as the law around false advertising already recognizes. You are allowed to boast that a product is “the best in the world,” whether or not that is accurate in the eye of the buyer, and dating-profile claims of being “witty” or “the most amazing cook you’ll ever meet” should be treated similarly. New laws in the dating area should focus on lies that are clearly false, are not easily discoverable before sex takes place, and have a potentially large dignitary or emotional impact. Lies related to physical appearance would thus typically not be punishable, while ones about marital status, fertility circumstances (say, existing children or the ability to have future children) or employment may lead to sanctions.

States might draw the line on deception differently. A number of them may decide that a married man who omits his status from his profile is guilty of misrepresentation. A more cautious approach that requires explicit misrepresentation could also be justified.

Some Tinder users who bend the truth might say they do it so that potential mates don’t weed them out. They hope to win people over in person, and at times they succeed. But “I won’t be able to get laid as easily” is a poor argument for lying in the sexual setting. That line of thinking reflects an often misogynistic attitude of entitlement to sex that, in its more extreme forms, has been used to justify rape and has been embraced recently by the “involuntary celibacy,” or incel, movement.

Most people understand that there is no right to have sex with a particular person — or with anyone at all, if nobody is willing. The #MeToo movement rightly subjects all sorts of behaviors in the dating arena to greater questioning, and the legal boundaries in this context are up for fresh discussion. How to handle sexual fraud in the age of Tinder should be a part of those debates.

F*&K me

Craigslist has shut down their “personal” section due to the new Congressional law regarding sex trafficking.

What has everyone in arms seems to be  largely Gay men, Sex Workers and sad lonely men who are now heading back to Ashley Madison after their hacking scandal a few years ago.  Men need their cocks sucked people and they need it bad! I have not heard one single woman or married woman complain that they cannot find a way to get laid.  Just go to work.. oh wait guess not.

Well I for one think the bullshit surrounding sex trafficking is utter bullshit. Right now we have here in Tennessee the idiot, Trump lover (but not in a payoff way) Diane Black running for Governor driving down down the highway in search of sex traffickers. Really? Are they in some gigantic truck or bus that makes it easy to spot?   When I think of human trafficking I think of the semi that left dozens of Immigrants roasting to death from lack of air and water,  or running for their lives on boats that sink due to overcrowding or weather.  And yes many are forced into sex servitude in exchange for “freedom” but the reality is that this like many other bullshit crime targets is exaggerated.

Recently in Seattle the King County Police decided to create as Prostitution roundup entirely funded by an anti-sex work group and of course it was bullshit and led to nothing.  Yes free or at least affordable  sex and speech please!

I used the Craigslist personals when I was first divorced a decade ago, I met a great lover and a few nice folks but mostly it was sad fucked up men, many married and utterly in it for fucking.  After a while the trash stinks and you need to take it out.   I have read not one but two articles about how predatory men troll online dating sites for women in my age group to exploit and rob. The Atlantic has an excellent story about such a man, The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t, who preyed on lonely hearts a story that is not new in the least.   And yes men have been harmed too.

Our country is obsessed with sex, with drugs, with booze and the rest of it notsomuch.  I am pro legal prostitution, I am pro legalizing marijuana and decriminalizing many others and I don’t have a problem with booze.  Here in Tennessee the irony is that as they debate legalizing medical marijuana they are seriously considering restricting the ability for someone to buy booze if they get a DUI and this is from a city that makes it living off booze. Good.luck.with.that.  I imagine 40 year old men standing outside liquor stores like teenagers and saying, “Hey lady can you get me a fifth of Scotch?” There is a new way to find a date!  See it works out.

But Craigslist is a sewer.  It is not just the personal sites it is the for sale sites, for rent and even services where many users have found themselves victims of crimes that are not related to fucking in the least.  Remember the Craigslist Killer?  Irony that was a fitting death.  Good times.

Why I respect the idea that online dating should be permitted but in reality you need full ID’s, photos and vetting.   Not.going.to.happen.  Well you are going to have to find your one night stands the old-fashioned way – at bars or at golf courses where porn stars are.

Sexual freedom is at risk from these damning new bills passed by Congress

Craigslist closed its personal ads due to Congress’s patriarchal, homophobic bid to control sex workers. It won’t stop there

Steven W Thrasher
Guardian UK
Thu 29 Mar 2018

Craigslist shut down its personals section entirely last week. This left me shaken – for what it portends about my own sexual history with Craiglist’s “M4M” personals, about the safety of sex workers, and about the growing surveillance of sexual freedoms in the US.

The reason for the shutdown? The US Congress had just passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta) bills. Donald Trump seems likely to sign these anti-sex bills into law, even as the nation hears all about him allegedly getting spanked by adult film star Stormy Daniels.

As Craigslist explained on its site, Fosta seeks “to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully”. If any sex work happens on their site, Craigslist itself could be sued.

“We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking Craigslist personals offline,” the ever simple internet billboard wrote. “Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through Craigslist, we wish you every happiness!”

If you think none of this applies to you because you’re not queer or into kink or sex work, think again

That kind sentiment hit me hard. One frigid February night in 2007 – a few weeks after my mother had died, deep in the darkest winter of my life – I responded to a Craigslist ad in the “men seeking men” category. We met that night and had sex.

Afterwards, we talked a bit in that lovely post-orgasmic way gay men sometimes do, in that space of connection that Craigslist M4M has made possible for me to meet other gay men in the far reaches of the globe. He was a smart and delightful man. We didn’t live in the same city, but later when we did, we dated for several years. Except in very rare instances, shame and embarrassment kept me from ever telling anyone that I’d met this boyfriend in this way. But he became one of the great loves of my life and is still a dear friend.

It’s sad that no one else will get to meet their boyfriends or missed connections on Craigslist any more, but my sadness isn’t only about the loss of “respectable” connections. I mourn all the connections people had through Craigslist that were meaningful for them, including sex work.

Craiglist M4M was fundamental to exploring my budding sexuality, and I hooked up with guys through it in my 20s. I don’t have the kind of face or body that generated much interest on Match.com when I was in my 20s, and I still don’t have the right looks to generate any interest on Grindr or Tindr.

But sometimes, in the flirting exchange of emails generated by Craiglist ads, I found men to explore with – sometimes sexually, sometimes not. It’s a tragedy other people won’t have the freedom to explore as I did in this way.

But stymying sexual acts like mine wasn’t even the primary intent of Sesta or Fosta. The major purpose of these bills is to conflate coerced sex tracking with willing sex work, as well as to better punish anyone who willingly engages in sex work (and any website that facilitates it). This is a particular economic assault on people who are queer, trans and/or formerly incarcerated who have been locked out of other forms of earning income.

As senior reporter at In Justice Today, Melissa Gira Grant has been writing for some time, these bills are opposed by survivors of sex trafficking and will put the lives of sex workers ever more at risk. The answer now is to make sex work legal and to facilitate ways it can be done more safely, not to drive it more underground.

More people should care about sex workers’ rights. But if you think none of this applies to you because you’re not queer or into kink or sex work, think again: the US Congress wants to further regulate sex by way of the internet, and most people’s modern sex lives interact with the internet.

Craigslist shut down its entire personal section because of the overreaching congressional desire to control sex work. And there’s no reason Congress couldn’t similarly intimidate Tindr or Grindr to remove you or shut down entirely as it has Craigslist – and then where would you be?

There has been worry that the #MeToo movement could lead to a sex panic. But the real sex panic is not due to feminism run amok, but due to the patriarchal, homophobic, transantagonistic, theocratic desire of the US Congress to control sex workers – and, by extension, to smother the sexual desires of any of us who don’t want to conform to their puritanical ways.

I like long walks in the rain

And yes I do actually, just returned from San Francisco where I walked for hours as it turned dusk and began to drizzle then rain and I honestly never felt better if not exhausted. But that is about cleansing the spirit and the mind and I the only companion I miss on such excursions was my beloved Emma, a Shar Pei-Lab mix whose company I shared much longer than my marriage and the best thing that came from the same.  So no I don’t miss marriage, I miss my dog and I would like anyone enjoy an intelligent companion of two legs as many do.

 As Valentines Day approaches and the holidays are behind us the look of love never goes out of style. But as the anniversary of my near death/murder/assault comes on the 8th I have no intention of worrying about it.  I packed in my kit awhile ago and I have no idea if I ever will find myself trusting men in any way shape or form other than professionally?  I don’t even trust that as it depends on the profession!

But I wrote about the lonely Bachelors of NYC and thought they were either rare breeds or full of bullshit in the age of swiping and texting and moving on to the next and sure enough I was not alone in that view.  The responses were immense and I reprinted some of them below:

A storm of readers’ comments — over 650 on The New York Times’s site and over 200 on The Times’s main Facebook page — followed the posting of “Meet the Bachelors Who Yearn for Something More,” an article by Sridhar Pappu on aging single men in New York.

Back in the day — June 2, 1986, to be exact — a Newsweek cover story offered up a statistic seemingly meant to terrify women: They were likelier to die in a terrorist attack than to marry over age 40. Since debunked, it no longer makes the rounds. Yet articles on the plight of “aging” women (over, say, 25) still proliferate.

Many of the nearly 900 readers responding to the article about midlife men panicking because they hadn’t found “the one” expressed relief at seeing the shoe on the other foot.

“Finally,” Jane from New York wrote. “The guys are getting the same treatment from the Media that women have been getting for generations: ‘hurry up and get married before you’re too old and nobody wants you.’”

She added: “My take is that you get out of life what you really want, even if you think you don’t want it. So if you’re still single, maybe on a very deep level that’s exactly where you want to be.”

Indeed, hundreds of readers, some with long experience in the dating trenches, questioned if the men profiled had realistic expectations.

“I lived in NYC from when I was 18 to 32,” HeatherR. from New York City wrote. “I am 46 years old now and am shaking my head in dismay at the older guys that were interviewed here because I know very well that they are of the same age group that would drop someone like a hot rock for any excuse back in the day (one guy who had spoken of marriage changed his mind because he didn’t like the eyeliner that I wore one night), just because there were so many options out there.”

She added: “I finally had to move to another country (France) and my sister to another state (Michigan) to find a good man. So sorry guys, none of you are getting the tiniest amount of pity from me.”

SaraJean from Greenville lamented, “I am on the other side … as a middle age woman with teenagers still living at home, I see many men sabotage relationships before they even begin. On dating sites, I am mainly contacted by men at least 10 years older than me … but they don’t want women with kids at home, even if they are not home most of the time. A woman must be able to ‘travel’ on a whim and follow the man’s work schedule … but will not consider the woman’s schedule.”

LNL from New Market, Md., a therapist, scolded, “Men in their 40s living in New York City who have good careers and fairly attractive looks, but who have never been married and want to get married, need to stop blaming fate or outside circumstances and hightail it to the nearest competent psychotherapist.”

Demographically, LNL wrote, “women in their 40s and 50s are in a far worse position looking for decent single men. Men who are good and loving and aren’t out of work or morbidly obese and who truly want a loving permanent relationship are usually in wonderful new relationships within eight months, and frequently within four.”

Plenty of other readers, however, both straight and gay, sympathized with the men’s stories.

“Spot on,” Jim Neal of Chapel Hill, N.C., wrote. “The older I get the more cynical I feel, especially as other gay men are celebrating gay marriage — something I fought for but may never experience. I just feel resigned to living the rest of my life alone and that brings a sort of creeping despair. Well — I’ve got an awesome cat.”

Another reader, avery t, from TriBeCa, complained: “Okay, but as a 5’ 7” guy, I know that many, many, many, many, many women’s profiles say ‘be 6 feet tall’ or ‘I like tall guys’ or ‘no short guys.’ In 2011, I tried OkCupid. In 12 months, I saw about 3200 (not 32. Not 320. But 3200!) profiles that said, ‘I like tall guys’ or ‘be taller than me in heels.’”

In “real life,” he wrote, “plenty of women are less concerned with height, but online, women are seeking Thor.”

MVN, also a New Yorker, cheered: “Bravo to these brave men who dare to show vulnerability and desire for more within their lives. New York sure breeds this situation — it’s an ambitious town and everyone here is ambitious for more and certain they’ll find it — including in the romantic sphere. There are so many fun and interesting opportunities for people to socialize and blend and it’s hard for many people to develop the skills of intimacy.”

Others questioned if the search is worth it. “We all want a ‘partner for life,’” Carmen from New York City wrote, “but the reality is that most of us wander into the emotional wasteland that is marriage only to find we’ve never been so alone.”

MCS, a single New York man, commented: “Most of my married friends don’t have much of a sex life. Many of the guys tell me, having kids is great, but being a husband is a challenge. They envy me. I don’t envy them, but I do support them, as a true friend should.”

On a cheerier note, one reader leapt at a chance to turn her own luck around. Addressing one of the men profiled, Kathryn Smith from Atlanta, who described herself as “a single 30 year old woman in finance who studied English,” wrote: “I’ve dated older before, and had a really great time with someone more mature who didn’t incessantly play video games and get blackout drunk. Paul Morris sounds right up my alley. Hit me up, boo.”

And as I am now officially a Senior, sans the AARP membership,  as well retirement is as elusive as a having a date frankly but here is where being left out is fine by me.  But I have posed as “someone” on these sites to try to understand them, not catfish nor con nor manipulate them but to get a sense of what it means to date online.  Frankly the sad tragic characters I did meet and the few that managed some garbled communication told me that this is loneliest and isolation and its peak so really is their social in media or are are all just alone and getting lonelier with each passing day?

In Online Dating, ‘Sextortion’ and Scams

By KATE MURPHY
THE NEW YORK TIMES
JAN. 15, 2016

DATING websites and apps typically see a surge in activity this time of year as people who felt lonely over the holidays try to follow through on New Year’s resolutions to find someone special with whom to share their life, or maybe just someone agreeable to share their bed on a cold winter’s night.

But whether they’re looking for sexcapades or long walks on the beach, the desire for companionship and connection makes people vulnerable to a most 21st-century crime: the online romance scam, which bilked victims of all ages and orientations out of more than $200 million last year, according to the F.B.I.

“The drive to find a preferred mate is extremely powerful,” said Lucy Brown, a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who studies the brain activity of people in love. “It’s a reflexive urge, like hunger and thirst,” which can cloud judgment and make people less likely to question the motives of an online match.

Moreover, she said, romantic love can produce feelings of euphoria similar to the effects of cocaine or heroin, which explains why otherwise intelligent and accomplished people do irrational things to get a fix. Of course, people have always been fools for love — it’s just that the global reach and altered reality of the Internet increases the risk and can make the emotional and financial damage more severe.

Have you been targeted on a dating site or app? If so, how did it unfold and how did you find out? Share your story in the comments with this article or on Facebook. Please avoid descriptions that could identify an individual or site. We may highlight your response in a follow-up article.

“I don’t think there is a general understanding of how much of this romance scam stuff is out there, how it works and what the consequences are,” said Steven Baker, director of the Midwest region of the Federal Trade Commission. “It’s staggering how many people fall for it.”

Scammers typically create fake profiles on dating sites and apps like Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony, Grindr and Tinder using pictures of attractive men and women — often real people whose identities they’ve filched off Facebook, Instagram or other social media sites. This lures victims who swipe or click to begin corresponding.

The perpetrators may be working out of call centers in West Africa, wooing four or five people at a time. Or it could be some dude at a Starbucks texting victims on his cellphone, or a pajama-clad woman in her apartment sending bogus love bombs from her laptop. They may assume the identity of actual soldiers deployed overseas or pretend to be engineers working on projects in far-flung locales. Scammers have also been known to pose as university professors, clergy members, doctors, chefs, swimsuit models, waitresses, nurses and librarians.

“They have a canny ability to mirror what the victim seems to need and to create a sense of intimacy very quickly,” said Debbie Deem, a victim specialist at the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles bureau. “They are able to manipulate the victim into believing they have found their one true soul mate.”

Victims are as likely to be men as women, young, old or middle-aged, gay or straight, highly or poorly educated. After a few days, weeks or even months of romantic and sometimes hotly erotic back-and-forth via email, text or Skype, come the requests for money.

Maybe the soldier needs a new cellphone so the lovers can better communicate or needs cash to get the necessary papers to go on leave so they can finally meet. The offshore engineer says his child is in the hospital and he’s having trouble wiring money to cover medical expenses. The model or nurse may need money to pay lawyers’ fees to get a restraining order against an abusive ex. Or maybe the scammer doesn’t ask for money at all but requests that the victim receive money and then transfer it to another account, giving marginally plausible reasons.

“It’s common for victims to become money mules where they are unwittingly helping facilitate other crimes,” Mr. Baker said. “There have been prosecutions of victims who kept receiving and sending money even when they were firmly told they were working for crooks.” Yet prosecutions of romance scammers have been rare, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet and the difficulty of tracing wired funds.

In the latest twist, scammers coax victims into taking explicit photos and videos of themselves and then threaten to distribute them to their Facebook or Skype contacts if they don’t pay them money or help them launder money.

“We’re seeing a lot of these sextortion cases lately,” said Wayne May, an administrator who gives advice to the lovelorn on the website ScamSurvivors. “We get about 30 requests for help a day,” usually from young men who sent a picture of their privates to a buxom Tinder match who turned out to be a blackmailer. AARP has been fielding similarly cringe-worthy distress calls from seniors who exposed themselves in front of a webcam.

There are even reports of online recruiting of youths to join the Islamic State using romance and marriage as enticements. Young women, particularly in the West, are promised a so-called jihottie (jihadist hottie) of their choosing for a husband. Young men are offered an attractive and devoted wife, which they might not have the money or social standing to obtain otherwise, particularly if they live in the Middle East, where unemployment is forcing many to delay marriage (and sex if they are devout).

“There is a lot of talk about developing love, falling in love and finding love on the battlefield,” said Katherine Brown, a lecturer of Islamic studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain who researches terrorist recruitment tactics. “They present quite a saccharine image of romance and marriage using the image of the lion and lioness together, supporting each other, being best friends and companions.”

The F.T.C., F.B.I., Homeland Security, State Department and United States Army Criminal Investigation Command have reported an avalanche of complaints about scams in the past two years. Average financial losses are $5,000 to $10,000, but the F.B.I. says many victims have lost more than $400,000. And these are just losses reported by those who fessed up to being had.

“I more often hear from people who call on behalf of a relative or friend who is getting scammed,” said Chris Grey, director of public affairs for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command who learned quickly not to contact the victim in these cases. “I’ve been cussed out that I don’t know what I’m talking about because they are so infatuated with this person they’ve never even met.”

Psychology experts liken this to the crushes or strong feelings of connection people develop for sports figures, rock stars, actors and other celebrities. It’s easy to project perfection on someone you’ve never met, particularly if, along with a pretty face, he or she is emailing, texting and calling every day or several times a day telling you how awesome you are.

“For most of us, there are pockets and maybe whole sections of our minds and hearts that are not really reality-driven,” said Stephen Seligman, a psychoanalyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

That puts law enforcement officials in a bind when lovestruck victims so willingly and willfully participate in ruses. “People don’t want to know what’s behind the curtain,” said Mr. Grey. “They really don’t.”