Sunday, January 19, 2014

I guess the beauty of the internet is that no one has to know that you are a cane toad.

Heh. 4 Things I Learned from the Worst Online Dating Profile Ever by Alli Reed

She puts together a dating site profile so repugnant that it would scare away all suitors. But apparently, on the internet, that's not actually possible.
I got the feeling that a lot of men on that site would message literally any woman who had a profile, but the optimist in me wanted to believe that there was a limit. Maybe there was a woman so awful, so toxic, so irredeemably unlikeable that no one would message her, or if they did, at least they would realize they never, ever wanted to meet her. So I made the OkCupid profile of the Worst Woman on Earth, hoping to prove that there exists an online dating profile so loathsome that no man would message it.

I did not accomplish my goal.

In making this profile, I made sure my creation touched on every major facet of being truly horrible: mean, spoiled, lazy, racist, manipulative, and willfully ignorant, and I threw in a little gold digging just for funzies. I maintain that there is not a human on this planet who would read this profile and think, "Yes, I'd like to spend any amount of the fleeting time I'm given on my journey around the sun getting to know this person." This profile is my magnum opus; it will be engraved on my tombstone. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
A little trying as an article, but amusing. In the first 24 hours, she had been contacted by 150 hopefuls.

It reminds me of a documentary I saw years ago in Australia. Australia has a problem with Cane Toads, a species introduced in the 1930's from Central America to Australia in order to control insect pests. A task at which they were unsuccessful. However, cane toads were very successful at destroying numerous other local fauna.

One of the points the documentary made was that cane toads were in part so successful adapting to the Australian environment because they had such a powerful urge to reproduce. They illustrated this point by including a film segment of some minutes of a male cane toad attempting to mate with a female cane toad. The problem being that the female cane toad had been run over on the road some days prior. That incidental detail did not seem to at all deter the amorous ambitions of the male cane toad. It was at that point that I glimpsed the awesome power of nature in programming our actions.

Alli Reed's experiment seems to add further data to support that view. I guess the beauty of the internet is that no one has to know that you are a cane toad. The miracle is how they learned to set up accounts on OKCupid.


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