Oooo, don't make me MAD!

And don’t forget the one in the Times on Thursday where the writer said that L.A. men were shallow and superficial because they didn’t come on to women in the streets the way they do in New York. This sort of thing doesn’t bother me because I figure, who needs competition? Anyway, if we take these women at their word than there’s a bright side: The men in L.A. are lousy but the women are perfect. Two observations about this:

1. Every guy I ever met from the East Coast says women in L.A. are stupid. My own perception is that if anything the women tend to be a little bit smarter, but that’s what the paragons of the East say.

2. One perception I have, based on 20 years of experience, is this: In L.A. you hardly ever seem to see an unattached woman in a bookstore or a record store or at a concert or other cultural event. Women with fellas (or fella equivalents) yes, but not alone. It’s as if women in L.A. thought it was shameful to be without a man.

"if anything the women tend to be a little bit smarter than the men," I mean.

To be fair and balanced, she should take that same ad, change it to appear as though from a man, put it in the M4W listing, and change the height request to a butt or chest size request. I imagine she would get some angry notes from females in L.A.

And N.Y. and S.F.

Actually, having no other requirement than that the man be taller than you seems pretty liberal to me. The problem is that the entire tone of the ad seems to be antagonistic, though the woman considers it to be witty.

Her problem is that you get what you pay for. What do you expect for free on Craig's List? It's a great way to sell an old bike but if you're serious about finding a date, you'll get a much more thoughful bunch of folks over on Nerve/Salon personals, for example. There's something about having to spend a buck to contact a potential date that weeds out a lot of yoyos.

The L.A. forum at Craigs List is very interesting. I spent about three weeks trolling the personals boards as research for an article.

Here are a couple of facts: The Casual Encounters and Man For Man boards are the only ones that require the user to click on a "sexually explicit comments" disclaimer.

On average there are 50 fresh posts daily on Women Seeking Men.

40 fresh ads daily in Women Seeking Women.

But in the Men For Men board ....

... 500 fresh postings per day. 500. And an additonal 400 fresh posts in the Casual Encounters board daily with roughly half of THAT traffic devoted to Men Seeking Men.

And oh ... Marna thinks her ad was "a little sarcastic"? As Robert points out, it was dripping with antagonism and if I learned one thing at CL it's that an antagonistic post is the wired world's equivalent of wearing a KICK ME sign on your back.

Though not in New York or San Francisco, she says.

You're right, Bob, I should have qualified that statement. Should've said "the L.A. wired world". They're a mean swarm of bees when they feel antagonized.

hahaha, guys in LA are "angry and short." sorry fella's! i've met a handful through an ad I placed on CL, and 2 out of 3 were under 5'5." it just struck me as interesting. there must be a strong correlation between short males and craigslist readers, if that makes sense.

and in response to mr. fiore's comment, i'm one of the few females that's not shameful to be without a man. it's the same for guys too, they're ashamed of being without a female counterpart; and that's really visible in LA. i like the single life. for now at least. -end o' rant-

I don't see the ad as being shallow, although I think it's unneccessary to include being an east coast transplant and having a masters degree in a personal.
It's always been really strange to me when someone perceives others dependent on being from eastcoast/westcoast/norcal/socal. It's even more bizzare that someone, when feeling defensive, would devise this kind of "study" and use it as validation of her conceit.

Pllllleeaaaaaasseee. Little man complex is as old as them thar hills. as a 6'4 male, i have had to deal with a world of Robert Conrads daring me to knock whatever off my whole life. Short guys, deal with it. its better to be tall than short if you are a man. don't whine, blame your parents and hope you grow a few inches in your next life...

I remember once I saw one of those game shows where the questions are based on a survey, and in one survey they asked a teenage girls, "If your boyfriend had to be one of these, which would it be: Short, fat, bald, ugly or stupid?" Now you would have thought "short" wouldn't you? You'd be wrong; it was "stupid" in a landslide. I don't know quite what to make of this, but it would seem that short guys have something to complain about.

I'm also an east coast transplant and would chalk this up to a difference in styles of humor. New Yorkers tend to be unsubtle, mean-spirited and haughty in their humor, while Angelenos tend to be more self-deprecating and wry.

Perhaps it's because Angelenos spend all their time muttering to themselves in traffic, while New Yorkers shove through crowded subways cars. New York humor is all elbows, while my LA friends have enough driving them nuts without ex-New Yorkers running over them (sorry, all puns intended -- I spent time in Britain too).

This is entirely anecdotal, of course, and I'm sure people will leap all over me. Nonetheless, it's what I've noticed.

"But in the Men For Men board ....

... 500 fresh postings per day. 500."

Rodger, I get the feeling that you're urging me to feel shocked or outraged or incredulous at this number. Why?

As somebody who writes about relationships, I think she was doing guys a favor. Why have a short guy spend a bunch of time pouring his guts out via e-mail if he's not going to be in the running anyway? For the record, women generally don't care as much about looks as men do. They want tallness and symmetry. What's important to women in men is status and power. It's men who care about youth and beauty -- because we have very old psychology still with us today...based on who would have been a good mother back in the Pleistocene, and whether a man would invest in the mother's furry little children. As I wrote in a recent column, thanks to our evolutionary psychology, all men are beauty-grubbers and all women are status-suckers...even today. So, if you're a girl and you want a guy, don't dress like you're enroute to repair somebody's septic tank...maybe go to the gym and slap on some Revlon? And if you're a guy, don't think you can lie around unemployed on some woman's couch and have her like you for your winning personality.

Gosh, darn it. Only if the LA Times would let Alkon write about such things. And remove her name from their Banned From This Paper (BFTP) list.
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NOT.

Thanks for thinking of me, Nokly. Lucky for you, you can read me in the OC Register every Monday, and about 120 other papers. It's so nice to have so many people here obsessed with the fact that I don't run in the Times.

People are overlooking the obvious. The red flag in the original ad is "East coast transplant" ... which generate a touch more animosity here than in NY (duh) and SF (NY wannabes). That touch, multiplied by 10000 people reading the ad, translates into some nasty replies.

Imagine the same ad with "LA transplant" in SF, and then you'd see some bitching and moaning about superficial Angelenos.

She's posting a personal ad, yet she complains of people with too much time on their hands?
Then she loses it when she gets emails that don't conform to her fantasy of appropriate suitors who she presumes would bow down before her precious twatiness?
Yeah. L.A. sucks.

Marna happens to be a very good friend of mine. Her ad, from a New York perspective, was direct and to the point. So much to do about not very much other than a desire for a tall guy. I myself am only 5'2", and my other half is 6'2". My cut off has always been 5'10"...

Men are always being told to look beyond the superficial. Yet she won't do the same. As a 'short guy' (I'm 5-7) I'm used to it. She could find the man of her dreams, but if he was two inches shorter (which would put his eyes at about her chin, not the other area she referred to), she'd rule him out? How sad.

I'm sorry Amy, how many papers did you say you write for?
And where did you say you were writing from?

And thanks for that column about ugly americans. Now I know why I find you to be such a worthless talent, but so much fun to mock. Somebody wore a tube top you didn't like! I'm so ashamed. And you ran a picture of someone in shorts picking their butt. I guess Europeans don't pick their butts. And I guess Parisians all dress nice.

I can't say you're wasting trees with this pablum because you're posting online, but really, there ARE only so many electrons in the universe so please stop using them up!

That's what I'd do if I were in Paris right now. I'd haul out my little American turista map of places Papa went to, and cross check to see if any of them by chance had wifi. Then I'd go to one that did and order a croque monseiur and a decaf to place right beside my laptop. Then I'd boot up log into LAObserved.com in case I was missing anything else. A post at LAObsered.com about how to attract the opposite sex would absorb my undivided attention all morning. Heck yeah, that's exactly what I'd do if I were in Paris right now.

Allan, your reading comprehension is a problem, apparently. That was Jason Stone's bit about tube tops from his Paris blog. I guess you still haven't gotten over your crush on me, or you wouldn't sit around waiting for me to post so you could attack like a tiny little vulture on carrion.

And Joseph, you're in the United States, clearly overly interested in my life. But I do thank you all for visiting my blog so you could resent me even more.

LAObserved is a site I really enjoy. Because I'm in Paris all the time, I live like I'm living here instead of spending all my time running around to museums. At this point, I've been to most of the museums over a dozen times, so I just go to shows I like -- and to non-touristy places...like Bagatelle and the Cemetière Des Animaux that I mentioned.

I have the luxury of being here a month, as I usually am in July, but I have to write my column, which is what I was doing at La Coupole. I know my seething little detractors here (and I'm very flattered at your interest/obsession!) would prefer that I'm at some Denny's in West LA, but I'm not. I'll be in Berlin on Wednesday for the Human Behavior And Evolution Society Conference, back in Paris on Sunday. Anybody else who's obsessed with despising me who wants to know anything else?

PS Regarding WiFi, more and more places in Paris have it. I have a Mac, so I can see, thanks to my Airport card, if a place is Wifi -- but my friend Mark Gaito, who lives here, told me about La Coupole's Wifi. And I know it'll make you hate me even more (all this attention being kind of amusing) but because I'm in Paris pretty often, I know it well -- and have a Paris cell phone with a permanent number (thanks to mobicartes/Carte Orange, which lets you buy time by the minute instead of subscribing monthly) and I have a Paris Plan which I don't need to use too often, unless I'm out in some nasty arrondisement. But even if I were very touristy, and running to the Musée D'Orsay...what of it? Why do you care?

Amy, I'm not overly interested or even vaguely interested in your blog, which I'm sure I haven't been to in at least a decade, and certainly not interested in your life. Even at this site, I am only merely distracted by your gravitas-bereft, lickety-lollypoppy comments, and I can't help but comment myself on them on occasion.

There's a war going on; the country is a political trainwreck; American media resemble Pravda circa 1974; yet all you ever seem to say here are things about is Amy Alkon, how great she is, how she should be even greater still, how she could be doing it better than someone else, how abundantly farflung she is, 11 whole hours from Los Angeles. You think about these things so much that it also appears that you think all other people think about Amy Alkon and her 120 papers all day long as well. Please don't confuse my comments for any kind of scintilla of interest.

Joseph, if you weren't interested, you wouldn't mention me. Hope you get over it. I must tell you -- your crush is a hopeless one. Big kiss, -Amy

Online dating has a lot of potential and prospects. However, is it possible to meet your MR/MRS RIGHT online? I doubt it...

Online dating has a lot of potential and prospects. However, is it possible to meet your MR/MRS RIGHT online? I doubt it...