Loser, 19, Seeking Same

Craig should be ashamed of himself. Casual sexual encounters, lies, and a remarkable lack of self-knowledge. I’m not talking about the senator. I’m talking about Craig Newmark, the eponymous Craig of craigslist.org.

Yet perhaps the two have more in common than the accident of a name. Craigslist seems to hold a fatal attraction for those who—like Senator Larry Craig—take themselves too seriously. In operation since 1995, the anonymous community Web forum has played host to millions of postings in thousands of categories, ranging from “gigs” to “missed connections” to the somewhat worrisome “child-care.” Where else could a forum for “knitting & sewing” exist cheek by jowl with one for “kink & bdsm”? (Anywhere forums are categorized alphabetically, I suppose.) Craigslist standard policy gives each poster an e-mail address from which all replies are forwarded to his or her actual account, thereby providing a level of guaranteed anonymity that brings out the best, worst, and strangest in those who use it.

Yet Craigslist takes the hazards of standard Internet anonymity to a new level. Best known to some as a site for “casual encounters”—a section of the Web site that receives over 500 posts on an average day—Craigslist consists of people hoping not only to post anonymously but to act anonymously. In the “personals” section of the site, a word-search for “discreet” returns over 1,500 entries. “Discrete” returns 404. While it would be refreshing to think that so many people consider themselves “distinct, non-continuous” and want to convey this information to potential partners, it is impossible not to know what they mean. Those who post on Craigslist personals—even in categories that imply desire for a long-term relationship with a man, woman, transsexual, or some permutation of the above—desperately seek to avoid being recognized. Why is this?

The answer, for some, is obvious. Many, like Senator Craig, lead public lives in conflict with their private desires. Many are married. Some are married couples who want someone to come to their home dressed as a cat. (“Please state in your response why you believe that you are qualified for this position,” ends the post, somewhat surprisingly.) But for others, like the scrawny, white, and heavily tattooed “Mr. Cool Ice,” there is a simpler reason. They don’t want to appear pathetic. And at least among those who know what Craigslist is, admitting posting or responding to an ad on Craigslist is tantamount to branding yourself as a failure at life.

A few posters acknowledge this, ironically beginning with some variant of “I can’t believe I’m posting on here.” For beyond any stigma on the activity a poster is seeking to engage in, there is a stigma surrounding Craigslist. The only people there, common wisdom insists, are weirdoes, losers, those whose life plans have not panned out. Otherwise they would be out there in the “scene” that dozens of them claim to be tired of, meeting people on their own and charming them with their wit (44 posts), intelligence (545), or quality of being “hottt” (2). Whenever I want to tell friends or roommates about a particularly humorous ad I’ve discovered, I must first weigh my options. Is it worth admitting that I read Craigslist? That I read Craigslist more religiously than I practice my religion, because there are no two-hour-long church services at 1 a.m. daily, at least not in my time zone?

The “Craigslist stigma” is why postings like the one from a “Harvard senior seeking female companion” have attracted more mirth than uproar. The senior’s insistence on a “white, 5’6” - 5’9”, young, blonde, attractive, and intelligent” date, and his final stipulations: “No Black, Asian, overweight, or unattractive women please,” if expressed in conversation or with his name attached, would have marked him for life. Yet the fact that life has driven this alleged senior to the exigency of posting on Craigslist makes his words more amusing than appalling. He is racist, sexist, shallow, and perhaps even height-ist, but now thousands of people know he can’t get a date.

Craigslist’s bizarre alchemy of anonymity and potentiality breeds hundreds of such posts. The poster would (I hope) be chagrined to admit in his actual life that he prefers women who “know when to be quiet.” What Craigslist offers is the opportunity to meet such women without any of the consequences of doing it in person. And this possibility drives him—and others like him—to fill the message boards with their specifications. Yet the discontinuity between public persona and private desires can be dangerous. One of the fundamental assumptions of Craigslist, what makes it so amusing for the rest of us, is that everyone is taking himself seriously. When people start posting or responding flippantly, the whole model unravels. Anonymity in expression fails to coincide with anonymity in action—as in the case of Senator Craig. If the other occupant of the bathroom had been taking things seriously, Craig might well be known for nothing more than his approval of Homeland Security appropriations.

This past summer, some other Harvard student posted on Washington Craigslist to express his desire for a woman whose “brains match her beauty.” I responded: “Hey! I’m not very smart, but then again I’m pretty ugly, so I guess my brains matches my beauty. Actually maybe not, because my ugliness is so great.” To my chagrin, he wrote back.

I think some of us need to get lives.



Alexandra Petri ’10 is a sophomore in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.