March 2007 RantRhapsody

THE BROOKLYN RAIL PRESENTS RANTRHAPSODY #8
MARCH 18TH, FREDDY'S BACK ROOM, 6:00PM

This month marks the SECOND Brooklyn installment of our lovely, lively and
literately non-fictional reading series. We return to the ever-cozy
Freddy's Back Room (495 Dean St., at 6th Ave. in Brooklyn), where
admission is free, the beer is cheep and the crowd unruly. Please
join us for the edifying, amusing, anecdotal, analytical, political,
polemical, and poignant musings of the following angry and/or euphoric
writers:

Gabriel Thompson, author, There's No Jose Here
Jean Railla, author, Get Crafty
Bill Batson, community activist, Develop Don't Destroy
Doug Cordell, Playwright
Virginia Vitzhum, author, I Love You, Let's Meet
An Xiao, poet, contributor to Tanka Fields
Sabine Heinlein, Rail Contributor

SABINE HEINLEN
Listening to Robinson
Tyrone Robinson is a sturdy looking man more than six feet tall with a very dark complexion. He is 46 years old and maybe a bit chubby. It is hard to say, though, whether it is his body that makes his clothes bulge or all the stuff he carries in his pockets. Dark-blue and black seem to be his favorite colors, although maybe the dark-blue coat, the dark-blue pants, the dark-blue hoody and the black wool cap just happened to be the clothes charity had for him. Robinson wears big glasses strapped to his head with an elastic belt. The bulky brown frame obscures his features.
The Holy Name Center in SoHo runs a one-woman case management program and offers showers to homeless people like Robinson. On four weekdays from nine to two, Christy Robb, Holy Name’s caseworker, helps people like Robinson navigate through the convoluted requirements of the welfare system. On weekdays, Robinson takes a shower, picks up his mail and sometimes walks up and down the badly lit chapel. At other times he rests on the chapel’s wooden pews or looks through its stained glass windows out onto the street.
***
Today the chapel effuses the biting smell of ammonia and Robinson crams himself into a corner of the small dark waiting room. He seems far too big for such a tiny room but doesn’t seem to mind. He politely urges me to take a seat. His name is second on the waiting list, but he lets the other men go ahead. Robinson has time to spare. He doesn’t have a job or a place to live.
When I enter the waiting room the men there urge me to put my name on the list. But Robinson explains, “she doesn’t need Christy to help her.” Still, one of the men is afraid to lose his spot in line. The man’s light, feathery hair seems like it has just been shampooed and blow-dried; he looks clean and well groomed. Despite his spotless appearance he insists that he desperately needs a shower. But shower-time at the Holy Name Center is between 6 and 9 in the morning and it is now 10:30. The man repeatedly whines, “I’m starting to get very frustrated. This is just really frustrating.” His hands are jittery. I ask him if I can help and he shows me a form listing the addresses of different charities in New York that might offer showers. I give him my cell phone to place some calls but he doesn’t know how to use it. He wants me to dial. We call the numbers without much success; all we get is more numbers to call, numbers of places that might offer showers. I alternate between dialing and jotting down numbers for the man who smells like soap. I listen to him plead, “No wait, please don’t hang up on me. I’m getting really frustrated; I already called that number. They don’t have showers. And I really need to take a shower.”
Christy, the caseworker reappears just in time. “You’ve got to stop talking so much,” she says to the man with the feathery hair as she thrusts him into her office. Robinson, who has been quietly standing in his little corner observing the situation, concludes with much world-weariness, “news don’t travel too well. A lot of stuff on these lists is outdated.”
Robinson’s booming voice fills up the dim little room, reaching out into the hallway and chapel, blending with the pungent smell of detergent. “Whatever you need, Christy will try to help,” he concludes, “and she is pretty good for talking. When I talk usually no one listens to me.” And then Robinson starts talking.
This winter he spends the cold nights at a shelter downtown. “But the only thing you can get from the Bowery mission is misery,” he chortles. When the weather is over 40 degrees the mission closes, and Robinson sleeps on a park bench or in front of a vacant building. He complains about the “lunatics” at the mission. All the junk they talk about, their babbling about nothing while he tries to read.
Suddenly Robinson remembers the rumor that one of the guys at the mission has died. He wonders who the guy might be. He lists several men who seemed to have been in poor condition. Maybe the guy who had diarrhea the same night he did? Robinson hasn’t seen him for a while. “It certainly was a very violent case of diarrhea,” he chuckles. “I almost thought I’d die.” Robinson never looks up while he talks, and I wonder whether he’ll ever take a breath.
A small, gray-haired Ecuadorian who sits on one of the chairs carefully balancing a cane suddenly interrupts Robinson. Like a dog afraid of his master’s raised hand, Robinson twitches and immediately vanishes into the chapel. The Ecuadorian tries to continue where my last question had left off. What do the men and women who come to Holy Name need help with? The Ecuadorian needs to get the plumbing in his apartment fixed. The caseworker will call his super and the housing authority and then Beth Israel to track down his medical records. The Ecuadorian now thinks that it is time to ask me some questions. He wants to know whether I am married and why I don’t have any children. I try to explain, but my answers don’t please him. “If I was your husband,” he admonishes, “I’d lock you up at home and make you some babies, because a woman without babies is nothing.” I am a little taken aback by this little man’s chauvinism. I diplomatically disagree, so he compromises. “A man who hasn’t made any babies is nothing either.” He then asks me if I could write a book about his life.
I decide to follow Robinson into the chapel to talk some more about his reading. He tells me he loves science fiction. And yes, he has read Robert S. Heinlein. He starts to list the titles of Heinlein’s novels. “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Time Enough for Love,” Robinson pauses. We both take a deep breath, then he continues. Since his edition of Time Enough for Love looked like a romance novel, the kids in high school made fun of him. He got embarrassed and stopped reading it.
Robinson isn’t a man of lucid transitions or sudden stops. He is very educated, but a bit of a procrastinator. And he rarely starts a story at its beginning. He gets caught up in every little detail; and he remembers lots of little details. He now tells me about his criminal case and how the caseworker at Holy Name helped him out of his mess. One day he found an ID and a credit card on the street. “I bent down behind a parked car, and there it was, a little brown wallet…” He wanted to give it back to the owner, but got distracted. Robinson recounts the complete address on the ID, including the zip code. He wonders out loud where the street might have been and excuses himself, “I’d never heard of this street and didn’t have a map with me. Besides, I didn’t have a subway card to get there.” A few days later the police saw Robinson peeing on the street. They searched him, found the cards and charged him with larceny.
After hours of waiting at Holy Name, it is Robinson’s turn to receive help. “Tyrone, sweetie, what is it that you want?” The caseworker asks, her head peeking out of her office. Robinson pulls a large green plastic bag filled with stuff out of one of his pants pockets. As he ruffles through the bag, he tells the woman about a man on the street who had offered him housing over a year ago. He remembers the address of the house where the outreach counselor had noticed him sitting on the stoop drinking beer. Sorting through a stack of business cards, he describes the color and the brick pattern of the façade. “I didn’t find him, he found me,” he says. He hands the caseworker a dirty, worn-out piece of paper – the business card of a counselor at Common Ground, a non-profit housing organization.
Robinson started the application process with Common Ground over a year ago but then decided to skip the required chest X-rays. “I don’t know why. I just didn’t want to go back then,” he says. Christy, the caseworker, calls Common Ground and finds out that Robinson is still in their system. He can go back and reapply. He has to go through a number of evaluations, psychological and physical exams and interviews.
The next time I see Robinson I ask whether he reapplied for housing at Common Ground. He admits, squirming, that he hasn’t gotten around to it. “I can’t go in these clothes,” he says. “I first need new pants.” I drop the subject. Christy eventually gets Robinson a pair of brand-new (dark-blue) pants. “Sweetie, you need some new underwear as well?” She asks.
***
A latchkey child, Robinson grew up in a basement in the Bronx. His father, the building’s super, let his mother do all the work while he stayed out drinking. His mother later married another man, to whom Robinson owes his name. About his family Robinson says, “they seem to die off regularly.” He goes through all his aunts and uncles, interjecting that one of his favorite uncles introduced him to Chinese food. After school his uncle would sometimes pick him up and treat him for lunch. Robinson lists all the diseases his relatives had. Once he is finishes with the diseases he starts listing his aunts’ and uncles’ professions. After that he rambles on for a while until he comes to the conclusion that there is no one left, or at least no one he knows of.
In the 1980s Robinson worked as a computer programmer for the NYPD. This is the only job he ever mentions and I don’t dare ask him why it ended. I don’t want to hear what he refuses to address. I only want to know what he wants to tell me. And there is plenty.
He tells me that today he receives public assistance. He gets $150 in food stamps, $137 in cash and a monthly restaurant allowance of $65 to buy warm food. “With food stamps,” he explains to me, “you can’t get anything cooked. You can buy seeds. But by the time you can grow food from seeds you’ll be dead.” Robinson pulls a letter out of one of his many pockets to show me something. I’m not sure what exactly, because his mind trails off to the past when he was able to cook for himself. “I would buy the cheapest chicken in the store, put hot sauce and pepper on it and put it into the microwave. If I get my own apartment that’s the first thing I’ll do. Buy a new microwave and a cheap chicken.”
I want to know what Robinson likes to eat. It seems like we share a passion for food and Robinson cheers up whenever he talks about it. He mentions a charity on the Lower East Side that serves vegetarian Indian food and sometimes distributes clothes to homeless people. He raves about the pasta they serve on Saturdays. Suddenly a memory that makes him giggle strikes his mind. Robinson’s giggling comes from deep down his chest. It makes his whole body tremble. He remembers how he once waited in the wrong line. He meant to get a winter coat but had mixed up the clothes line with the food line. By the time he switched lines all that was left were socks and giant pants. “Size forty pants,” he chuckles, “are for humpty dumpties.” Robinson didn’t get a winter coat that day. He left with two pairs of socks.
***
When I return to the Holy Name Center a few weeks later the door is locked. I bang against the door and throw stones against the windows. A homeless man who sits on the stoop tells me to bang louder. I follow his advice and finally the man who cleans the basement showers opens. Robinson is alone in the dark waiting room asleep on a chair. I wake him carefully. He seems to be in a rotten mood. “I’m doing as bad as I possibly could,” he barks. “Last night I fell asleep on a park bench. You know how silly that feels?” I don’t. “When I woke up at 3 in the morning I was all alone. There was only one woman walking a small dog.”
As Robinson digresses into a lengthy description of this woman and her dog his mood seems to lighten a bit.
I interrupt him to ask whether he already went to Common Ground to sort out his housing situation. He tells me that he went to the required physical, but still has to go to the psychiatric and psychosocial evaluations. “They ask me the same questions you do,” he says nonchalantly. That frees me to start at the beginning. “How come you are homeless?” I ask.
On a freezing day in February 2003, the Federal Marshals kicked Robinson out of his apartment. He had no money. As he was walking around aimlessly he found three dollars that he immediately spent on beer. He chuckles at the thought. Then he explains, “It is the law that the rent for public housing in New York can’t take up more than 30 percent of your income. So that’s what I paid for my apartment. Exactly 30 percent of my income.” But Chelsea Housing charged him far more than that. Robinson went to court and lost. I don’t exactly understand all the specifics of the lawsuit. I understand that Robinson represented himself and hear fragments like “as decided in Beckman v. New York City Housing Authority” and “it was a bad judge.” I interrupt him as he lists all of New York City’s districts, delineating the course of their borders. I ask him where he does all his research. “In the library and in Barnes & Noble,” he says, his voice suggesting that this question wasn’t worth the interruption. He now lists the location of all the libraries in the city and describes their interiors. I am entirely absorbed by his speed and the abundance of information he unleashes. I have long lost track of his transitions. I hear him mention Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis and that he walks to his welfare appointments to save his fare cards for more “important” things. I want to ask what “things” exactly, but Robinson is now in the middle of explaining how the welfare system works. “That moron Pataki,” he says, “has changed the name to ‘Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.’”
I don’t remember how Robinson and I got from “the moron Pataki” to Camp LaGuardia, the homeless shelter in Upstate New York where he spent several months in the winter of 2003 or 2004. According to Robinson, Camp LaGuardia is a facility for 1,001 men. “Exactly 1,001,” he points out. Robinson caught tuberculosis while he was there. “They didn’t tell us that there was an epidemic,” he says.
Camp LaGuardia allowed the homeless men to keep cats. Robinson had a cat he named “The Boss.” I smile at the funny name coming from someone without a job. I see Robinson frowning and pursing his lips into a snout. “That’s what ‘The Boss’ looked like,” he says. He tells me that some of the other men kept skunks as pets. “It is prejudicious to say that skunks stink,” he adds. I make a note to look up prejudicious. To my surprise, I find that it is correct.
Robinson hated Camp LaGuardia. The shelter is in the middle of nowhere. There are no stores, no communities and no public transportation nearby. When I ask Robinson why he was sent there, he mumbles, “a neurological problem.” At Camp LaGuardia they offered vocational training, but Robinson didn’t attend. He spent his days in the sparse library. “They had a big map of Antarctica mounted on the door,” he says. “Camp Vostok, a Russian science base, is the coldest place in the world. They found fresh water lakes deep under the ice. One mile under the ice. There is nothing else down there.” Within seconds Robinson and I travel from Camp LaGuardia to Antarctica and from there to the Falkland Islands, the only connection being the cold and a scarcity of population. “On the Falkland Islands,” Robinson continues, “they have 600,000 sheep. And they have 1,800 residents at Port Stanley.”

I LOVE YOU, LET'S MEET: ADVENTURES IN ONLINE DATING- AN EXCERPT
Virginia Vitzthum

END OF CHAPTER FOUR:

….The big online dating sites have taken a beautifully unmediated communication method and made it into a mall full of products that nobody needs but that we’re increasingly scared not to try. Eharmony’s suggestion that by quitting their site I was going straight to eaten-by-my-cats spinster hell was the most blatant, but all the big sites apply similar pressure.

They also aim to make us feel alone at our computers. Most online content providers – blogs, magazines, newspapers – have added a “place” for people to gather -- interactive comment sections or discussion pages. As Lila discovered in the AOL chat rooms, those bodiless parties knit individuals into a group, sometimes more tightly than IRL. But even as they pile on the options, dating sites generally have not added such gathering places. Scrolling invisibly through the profiles is very isolating, on purpose. You are alone without your scientifically determined soulmate. There is no casual contact and no community.

As the sites butt in more and more – “say this on your caption; light your picture like this; here are 10 tips for breaking the ice,” they’re undermining what’s best about meeting people online. It was not long ago a place to be more honest, confessional, curious, yourself but maybe a little braver. The big sites are discouraging that, warning instead that outliers will be shunned. And who can blame them? “You’re fine the way you are, so be yourself” has never sold anything to anyone.

CHAPTER 5: ALICE: BRANDING IN THE YOUTH MARKET

Compatibility quizzes may not do much for consumers, but they’re a godsend to advertising departments. Who needs focus groups to tease out secret desires and vulnerabilities? Online daters fork over details of what they want, how they want to see themselves, how they dream and spend their money. The sites mine profiles for “skiing,” “David Sedaris,” “lingerie,” “cruises” and send you the ads you’ll fall for along with your newest matches.

Chemistry.com is using technology to fashion TIVO for humans. When I clicked into the “How You Match” tab from a man’s profile, it told me to toggle a little tab between “No Interest” and “High Interest.” Then it anticipated my next question:

“Why is this important?
Your feedback is an integral part of our matching process. By indicating your level of interest in potential matches, you help us get to know you and what you're looking for in a long term relationship. Over time, as our system accumulates knowledge about your preferences, we will refine our matching criteria to bring you even better, more compatible matches.”

What’s happening to all this data? Dating sites generally do not sell the information they gather straight to advertisers and marketers. OKCupid’s Sam Yagan says, “That’s where our reputation lies, keeping our users’ privacy. If it got out that everything you say to OKCupid, they sell, we’d lose our users.” OK Cupid and other sites instead guarantee advertisers that they’ll get the ads in front of the right eyeballs, and the advertisers can track the click-through rates of the ads. (And even without dating sites selling ads, a spreading mass of corporate and government interests are looking at everything we buy, write, or look at online. Even the geek-beloved Google tracks what we read and write to determine what ads we see.)

As Yagan says, “the Internet has the most accountable advertising structure of all media.” He lays out what OKCupid can offer advertisers. “Every member has given up a lot of information about themselves, so we’re going to know, for example, if you like to use a cellphone. And we might be able to target users for ringtones. If your favorite band is going on a tour, we can sell you tickets.” They see the selling and the matching as unproblematically seamless. Coyne adds, “We can ask members any question we want and a lot of them to determine what makes a good match. If we want to know if you like action movies, we just put a question in the database that asks, ‘do you like action movies?’ and we will have the majority of users answer that and we can target ads to action movies to them. It makes matching better and targets ads better.”

Does it make a difference if I answer a question thinking it’s to match me to a man and it’s actually to sell me a movie ticket? Yagan and Coyne insist well-targeted ads are news we all can use (“I don’t want to see a tampon ad! Show me the BMW!” Yagan cries). I do appreciate free media -- radio, alt-weekly newspapers, TV so long as I can hold the remote with the mute button -- and ads bring them to me. And forewarned is supposedly forearmed. If I know what’s going on, I should be able to just tune into dating and ignore the static of the ads. Right?

True.com CEO Herb Vest helps clarify what rubs me the wrong way about the overlap of selling and mate-searching. He explains in his honeyed but not-to-be-inter-RUP-ted Texas drawl how True.com uses data it gleans from the quizzes and the profiles. Vest commands the room with just his voice booming through the phone line from True HQ. He’s 60, very rich, with a gorgeous new wife the same age as his son. After making his fortune in financial services, he started True in 2003, now the second-biggest dating site. His modest golden-years goals include “protecting people from the pain of divorce” and “solving the whole love business with technology.”

He says True does not sell data to marketing firms. “No, no, we don’t sell e-mail lists or anything like that. I learned a long time ago to never say never, but I don’t see that.” Then he starts pitching a scenario he obviously doesn’t see as dystopian. “I can see us using that data in other ways. For example, what TV programs they might want to watch. Products they might want to buy. Let’s say you and I have a date, but I only know a little about you from your profile, so my first question is where would Virginia like to go and should I bring flowers? We have a search engine that would go in and see your demographics and they’d come back and tell me if women of your demographic would like a small gift or where would you like to go for dinner? Do you like sports jackets or suits? In what color? The more targeted the demographics the better, but it’s always better than nothing. Lawyers have been doing this for years with juries: Does this jury like facial hair? Glasses? Sports coats? They’ll dress themselves and their client to please the jury. There’s a book called Dress for Success, it talks about all this,” he explains.

I suppose the sales paradigm covers some love affairs. Herb Vest laughingly admits he dressed for success on his dates with his bombshell bride-to-be Kerensa. He wore his ten-thousand-dollar watch and designer suits, because that’s what her demographic would like. But outside of golddiggers and the men who buy them, for whom does this work? A zero-sum market simply isn’t where real relationships happen. Love is a renewable resource: When lovers give themselves to each other, they aren’t diminished. But in the marketplace only a sucker gives it away.

THE YOUTH MARKET (subhead A)

I wasn’t sure if my interviewees in their 20s would share my antipathy toward advertising and marketing. What does “selling out” even mean now that “indie” bands and movie directors treat TV commercials as an art form? But I found a surprising distrust, even fear, of ads among younger online daters. Aaron, a 25-year-old social worker from Philadelphia, reads media and marketing studies like they’re radiation reports from a nearby nuclear plant. “You need to know that marketing people have psychologists and behavioralists playing on people’s inadequacies, using psychology as a way to market products,” he admonishes me, til I tell him, Dude, I’m in your camp already.

Aaron stuffs his ears and eyes against the siren songs of mass media to preserve his free will. “If I spend more time watching TV, movies, on the Internet, I fear that could mold my opinion of what’s sexy, what’s attractive. That’s happened to a few friends. One guy I know, regardless of what party he’s at, will find a skinny blonde woman and talk to her. I think it’s media influence,” he diagnoses solemnly. Yet, for all his self-policing, Aaron admits, “I don’t know if my attractions are biological or environmental, that is, media-based. I’m not able to tell because I’ve worked so hard to keep other people’s opinions out.”

Many young people who fear and loathe corporate manipulation of their desire by corporations are Webtopians. But Aaron lumps the Internet with the rest of ad-driven media. He stopped online dating because he found himself responding to images, not words. “I let the pictures be the gatekeeper. I was picking people based on their looks, and I’d notice myself grasping at straws to deny it: Hey, this person likes Morcheeba. Hey, she reads George Orwell. She works with kids!” He blames this looks-privileging on the mass media distorting his tastes and desires -- perhaps a bit unfairly. He admits when prodded that he also gravitates toward physically attractive people IRL.

I ask Aaron how he feels about the concept of people “branding” themselves like companies and he passionately denounces it as the scourge of his generation. Looking at profiles of people 21-29 on nerve.com and other sites, I tend to agree. It’s like flipping through a stylish online catalog of vintage T-shirts and butt-crack jeans. The poses and headlines are types from a John Hughes movie – the sex kitten, the rock star, the brooding intellectual, the geek girl in cat eye classes and thrift store dress, the class clown. The pictures are magazine-arty, the “ad copy” breezy.

…..[[The sad tale of 27-year-old Alice online, then]]…

Alice quit online dating to do things that “don’t emphasize the lack, positive things like reading a book or going to the gym.” She admits to some baby panic (at 27!), but like Aaron, she’s not sure of its source. She thinks the media planted that worry in her brain. “You’re selling this commodity, your womanhood, and online dating makes you feel like you have to hurry, hurry and catch the man.” She comforts herself that she’s not ready anyway: She subscribes to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s to-do list for true individuation. “He says you have to get things straight with your family, your friends, you find your career, and only then when you’re OK with yourself, only then when you’re a whole person on your own can you be part of a successful relationship. Until then you’re just these broken pieces.”

In one’s embryonic 20s, Alice says, “You’re “desperately trying to live up to others’ standards” because you don’t trust your own yet. You haven’t earned the authority to accept you, much less to declare a self in a profile. You’re not sure what you have to prove and to whom. What do they want of you? What do you want? Alice soft-pedals her loyalty and compassion, and leads with freewheeling and wild though her best sex was with someone she spent months getting to know first. Thoughtful, educated, self-aware, loved and emotionally supported by her parents, Alice cannot find her own vast stores of likeableness while she’s online dating. The self-actualization of [[other online daters in the book]] -- not happening here. And it’s not helping her conceptualize the couple she wants to be in either. Though online dating leads some to fantastical expectations, Alice and many of her cohort suffer the opposite. They can’t spell out a trusting, contented relationship, even with a form provided.

Alice finds selling herself distasteful, but she can’t see online dating any other way: she cannot connect the image-making to an honest articulation of who she is and what she wants. She’s suspicious of introspection, and so she looks out for answers. And there is “aspiration,” clothed in the sounds and visions of her demographic. Alice has grown up on ads targeting her since birth through made-up-by-marketers stages like “tween” to adulthood. Like Aaron, she knows it but she’s not constructed any alternative value system yet out of the “broken pieces.” I ask dark-eyed, dark-haired Alice, Who’s the dream girl for her dream man? She considers a while before she answers. “Cameron Diaz. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. She’s fun, hot, legs up to her neck. A girl who looks like a supermodel but can joke around like a sailor.”

Everybody’s a Star

Online dating lets us into the flow of images that flooded most of last century and every available inch of space and second of time in this one. The image that everyone chases, the godhead of consumer capitalism, is the sexy girl – the image Aaron resists. Women chase men who gaze at two-dimensional reproductions of a woman younger, prettier, thinner, blonder, bustier, “hotter” than almost all the real ones. The same pictograph is sold to women as aspirational, tweaked slightly for the different markets as it moves down the conveyer belts through The O.C. and Vogue and Esquire and Penthouse. The hot-girl pictograph has morphed over the last century from prettier-than-most to our current ideal of Auschwitz-skinny13-year-olds with breast implants. Women chase the pictograph knowing perfectly well that if we did somehow draw close, it would just get photoshopped still further from reality. (“Spring’s freshest look: two heads!”)

Now we online daters can be public images too. In our profile photos, we mimic the pictograph in our poses and hairstyles. (Men are being sucked into this world now, too, a depressing step down toward equality. Now we both have magazines dedicated to what’s wrong with our bodies.) We write advertisements for ourselves like copywriters, sometimes with professional help. The serious online dater now employs a new industry of amateur starmaking: the make-up artist to paint, the cinematographer to shoot and light, the consultant to write the profile, the advice columnist to walk you through the date. We all have a promotional campaign; we’re all celebrities.

Which sounds both egalitarian and glamorous for about three seconds til you remember how Americans rip the famous apart like they’re gazelles on the veldt. Paparazzi stalk them for magazines devoted to candid photographs of their cellulite and morality plays about their marriages. It’s much more pervasive and cruel now than when John Updike wrote, “celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

The more we sell our images in the online marketplace, the more embarrassed and hidden we get about our sweaty, saggy, unairbrushed selves. As dating sites adapt to the fear of ending up alone industry, they plug us even deeper into the commercial matrix. Lust and loneliness and fear keep us scrambling to stay in demand, fresh, hot. Herb Vest has succeeded wildly for a reason: He’s sold the idea that this is how you “solve the love game.”