JDaters Anonymous

According to

Or, find a way to pay in advance and walk there, but this sounds like a fun show.

In Wired News: Geek Love, or Lack Thereof

Rose’s one-hour show, Scott’s Search for a Rose, details his bungled attempts at applying computer logic to the illogical business of love. “It’s a true story about my life as a Mac geek who grew up more comfortable with computers than women,” said Rose. “It’s a universal tale of searching for love and all the missed opportunities, mistakes and regrets…. It’s a fun show.” Rose, 32, is a professional speaker based in — where else — Los Angeles… Rose’s show is part entertainment, part therapy (he wrote it after a breakup) and part elaborate pickup strategy. “If single girls want to come to my show, they’ll get a really good idea of what I’m looking for,” he joked.

(That should attract just the kind of Star Wars-motivated traffic I’ve been needing for JDaters Anonymous…and thanks to those people who wrote with suggestions and corrections.)

In yesterday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd ponders the attraction of powerful men to the women secretaries, assistants, PR consultants, etc who take care of them and determines that they’re all just looking for their mommies.

In the article, she quotes several studies, including the one about intelligence and likelihood to marry. But we’ve covered that here already. More interesting to me was the random celeb she asked for an opinion:

I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel “The Best Awful,” who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.

“I haven’t dated in 12 million years,” [EDK note: this is the approximate era of the Clone Wars, which means she hasn’t dated since before Anakin and Amidala met and mated] she said drily. “I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too.”

With princesses commenting on the behavior of kings and consorts, no wonder dating’s such a royal pain.

But seriously, taking Star Wars as an analogy for dating, you’ll note that Jedis, the most powerful spiritual forces in the galaxy, tend not to surround themselves with women (I think there were a few women Jedi in Episodes I and II, in what I like to call the Mace Windu Circle of Jedi). But do you remember what they looked like? Not really. Perhaps having many women inside the circle would divert their focus, or perhaps the women are all out chasing the clones, who look all shiny on the outside, but whose innards are robotic and unemotional. (Sarah notes that the clones were actually human on the inside, which shows you that I haven’t fully grasped the lore of the first two movies. Perhaps my understanding was derailed by the shrill presence of the twice-named after a cookie receptacle Mr. Binks. She’ll have to forgive me.)

There’s only two couples in the Star Wars story who get any lovin’ (in chronological order): Amidala and Anakin, and Han and Leia.

In the next (final?) movie in the Star Wars saga, we’ll find out what consequences there are for the sexual union between Natalie–oops, I meant Amidala–and Later Vader, how soon Anakin abandons his beloved when she’s pregnant, forcing her to use Naboo’s food stamps program to pay for food and daycare for her twin tykes until she sends Leia off to Alderaan and Luke off to Tatooine.

Luke has designs on his sister during the so-called “Whiner period,” before he’s aware of the blood tie that makes their love impossible, but gives up romance to focus on a career in the Light Saber Arts. The closest he ever gets to romance is when Han shoves him inside the guts of a Tauntaun on Hoth, and that can’t be very romantic (“…and I thought these things smelled bad on the outside…”).

It is precisely this scoundrel quality that draws Leia to Han: he’s the master of his domain, and by that, I mean he’s manually guiding the rudder of his ship, and by that, I mean the Millennium Falcon. He’s the equivalent of the blue-collar trucker that all princesses want, the man so totally other that it stokes a fire. Worth noting that she herself is an activist princess, with the intelligence and poise to threaten Daddy Vader while she herself is a prisoner, the strength to usurp command of her own rescue mission (“into the garbage chute, flyboy”), and yet lacks the basic smarts to invest in a sensible wardrobe involving basic black activewear.

What’s my point? We don’t know how the Amidalanakin storyline ends up, although given the age difference and the situations that have been established in SW, ESB and RoftheJ, it does not look good. Han and Leia might make it–I guess we’ll have to find George Lucas’s treatment for movies 7, 8, and 9. Maybe Luke finds love. Maybe Mace Windu becomes a Yoda of sorts for a new generation. Maybe the scoundrel/princess union, which has its literary roots in the fire of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s Southern romance, is something that burns eternal but is, on a day-to-day level, unlivable.

Whatever the conclusion, it has nothing to do with Maureen Dowd’s article. OK, I’m off to Los Angeles to join the queue for Revenge of the Sith.*

(Hat tip to Steve Silver for linking to the O’Dowd article.)

*No, I’m not. I’m not that insane.

This excellent article from Ha’aretz shows us that online dating is online dating, even in Israel:

This is one of the problems of the Internet: Anyone can write anything he likes. The Internet is a paradise for the verbally inclined and the dating sites give an unfair advantage to those who can write well or are clever at hiding behind words.

And yet, I’ve found that many men don’t even bother filling out the profiles completely, never mind stretching the truth. I kind of wish they would write well or be clever enough to write words that made them more attractive. At least it would show a little creativity, a little of their individuality. Because then, in real life, they would be more attractive, even if they are, empirically, less attractive. (They so need E-Cyrano, it’s ridiculous already.)

The chance to fantasize is perhaps the big advantage of the Internet dating sites, and it’s also their drawback. Finding a mate via the Internet takes time and thought. But while we’re sitting at the computer and corresponding with growing intensity with people whom we really don’t know the first thing about, we increasingly come to feel like we’re having a lively social life and that the words appearing on our screen genuinely represent real people who have some kind of connection to our fantasy about them and to the thought that they are the one and only with whom we are destined to live happily and wealthily ever after. Sometimes this fantasizing goes on for so long that when you finally go on the date, you’re already totally in love with the virtual character you’ve constructed for yourself as a result of your correspondence, who doesn’t always bear much resemblance to the actual person.

I think this is one of the reasons that my friends all report having been so successful when it comes to IM and email banter, but why so few of those have transitioned into real life meetings. More often, they report of the instant connection, the “clicking” so loud that it’s palpable even over DSL, followed by a drop-off in correspondence and eventual disappearance. No one wants to shatter the fantasy.

Now here’s a great story–that sounds all too familiar–that’s simultaneously appalling:

Noa says she gave up on searching via the Internet because she discovered that while women are looking for certain personality traits in their potential mates, “with men, it starts and ends with outward appearance, or else they explicitly say that they will not respond to inquiries from women who haven’t attached their photo, and then on the phone they interrogate you for hours to make sure you’re not fat or wrinkled, god forbid, unless they’re the type that are after women who are `plump and juicy.’ The ones seeking women like that are usually also the maniacs who are interested in nothing but sex.”

Adi, for example, talked on the phone with a man who asked her if she “is one hundred percent sure that she is not overweight at all.” She happens to be thin, but this question really annoyed her and so, she says, “I asked him right away if he’s one hundred percent sure that he has no financial problems. He swore that he didn’t and later on, when we met, it turned out that he actually wasn’t employed at the moment and also forgot his wallet at home so it was my job to pay the bill.”

Remember the IM conversation with the guy across the pond? Men are petrified of non-skinny women. It’s really amazing. Is this just a cultural thing? Is it just Jewish men, despising their own cultural types? Are they afraid that the other men in their cave–oops, I mean, peer group–will shun them, forcing them to sleep furthest from the fire and (God forbid) die of exposure with extremely chapped lips?

I think all men (and women too) should read Wendy Shanker. This is not about man-bashing; it’s just that the world would be a better place. To put it in a classically self-deprecating manner, I want to be judged and rejected based on my own shortcomings, not those dictated by society.

This is definitely a topic to be revisited.