With all the MySpace controversy in the media, the author does an excellent job explaining why the typical person might not want to start a MySpace profile (how many people haven’t yet?).
So now I’ll tell you why I avoid Myspace.
To begin with, I was never really inclined to hang out on Myspace, which seems to be absolutely full of people I have nothing whatever in common with. And since I do phone sex, it seems like there’s never enough time to do what you want to do and you need to do. Why waste my time with something that I’m not interested in and which has no potential for business?
A couple of summers ago I was hanging around the house doing phone sex and whatnot. I got IM’d by a guy from out of the blue. He wanted to chat, and chat a lot - ask me sometime what I think about guys who think you have so little to do that you’ll want to chat with them for endless hours. Guys like this tend to fall in love with any girl who will chat back. I think it has to do with being socially disabled, or maybe it just has to do with being a guy, but I digress.
One day he finally convinced me to put up a Myspace profile so I could read his profile and blog. And he convinced me to put up a pic, not exactly a photo like the one you see here, but a pic of my hair from behind. I had this feeling that I was going to get unwanted attention, and most of it was going to be from guys who I was very unlikely to have anything in common with. My thesis here is that it is impossible to judge compatibility based on a small pic, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
Anyway, he was convinced we were some kind of “soul mates”. Since he just loved long hair, I thouught maybe he’d located me randomly through some sort of yahoo hair group or hair forum I belonged to. Oops, it was random, but actually it was a lot more random than that. He found my yahoo profile with no information but my age and gender in it, and decided based on the decidedly code-like name I had chosen that we were meant for each other.
So I tried to start a profile, but Myspace was not cooperating. It just wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. I ended up trying multiple emails before I was able to create one. Then I tried to upload a photo, and it was, again, not cooperating. Things were going really slow. It didn’t help, of course, that he was sending me two IMs a minute demanding that I update him on my progress. It must have taken an hour and a half if not two hours for me to finish it, all the while trillian sending me those annoying little bleeps about messages arriving.
So finally I’m all done, and I started reading his profile and blog. He posted pictures of him and his wife and kids staying with her family on vacation. Turns out he’s married, but he doesn’t love his wife, and she doesn’t satisfy him. Huh? You put this on the Internet for everybody in the world to see? What were you thinking, that this would make you a chick magnet?
He had learned a bit about long hair from what I’d told him, and he started lecturing to me as if he was my daddy or hairdresser or something. I was really getting annoyed, so I just put him on permanent invisible.
You know, that doesn’t stop somebody from IMing you, but I ignored them and finally they went away. What didn’t go away was the spam from him. Between fundamentalist religious propaganda and heart string plucking pleading to “email everyone you know about this story, they need to get as many emails as they can!” for some hoax, the email just kept on coming.
Finally, after about a year, he IM’d me again. He told me he was divorced now, because his wife wouldn’t “take care of” him. He was clearly thinking of picking up where he thought we left off. I told him flatout that I do phone sex for a living, and it didn’t seem to register. He asked me if I’d “ever had a man.” Umm, you’re not listening. YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, ASSHOLE! This time my messenger client allowed me to block him.
I hardly ever get an email invitation to join a social networking website from him anymore. Guess he’s still holding the flame for me.