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Personal Hell

Ask a group of people to evaluate one another anonymously, and you will witness breathtaking racism. Hence the concept for Hot or Not (www.hotornot.com), one of America’s leading personal ad services, which asks users to rate participants on a 1-10 level. Last week, we explored the attenuating circumstances leading to personals addiction; this week promises less sympathy and more haughty judgment. It is telling that the society making up Hot or Not treats most harshly the race of its own founders (two Asian Berkeley alumni), and favors, or rather worships, unblemished blondes, most likely to score in the high nines. Of course the whole format is prejudiced in favor of the well-networked, who benefit from repeatedly sending their friends the link to their ad in order to get a favorable rating. Minority races score highly only if they conform to a readymade image—blacks and Latinos get points if athletic, brawny, jockish, fierce or soulful, but not if intellectual or avant-garde, and especially not if political or resentful. Asian women are exoticized to the point of dehumanization and Asian men ruthlessly emasculated. An amazing thing happened to my rating once I added the words “Middle Eastern” and “politics” to my list of traits: My rating nose-dived 40 percent, evidencing Hot or Not’s aversion to “problematic” personalities.
For the less blatant, racism takes a more apologetic form: “I’m not a racist or anything, but I’ve found I’m only attracted to ____ (fill in an ethnicity) girls/guys, it’s just the way I am and I wish it were different. Sorry!” I would opine that sexuality remains the last refuge of ineradicable racism, due to a stubborn subconscious. Because of its unintentional nature, this racism becomes a preciously truthful indicator of character, concealing traumas, fetishes and all manners of love/hate complexes. Faced with inevitability, we, the personals society, should admit to all sharing in this socially constructed prejudice and finally put an end to the pretense that racial/sexual preference might somehow be “arbitrary” (bring it on, PC scholars of sexuality, my in-box is empty).

Despite showcasing the worst filth of human interaction (on par with Blind Date), personal ads still stand as an awesome social experiment. Out of this forum for massive collective input, a micro-civilization emerges, with its own language and conformity pressures, starkly contrasting with those of the real world. You have the distinct feeling that originality will result in bullying or mockery, and it impairs your typing hands. At its most intense, the bulldozing force of monolithic sameness takes hold of your vocabulary and twists it into acceptable shapes. You get to the point where the object is no longer to be yourself, but to be the perfect personal ad.

Prolonged personals exposure leads to unhealthy and self-deceptive habits. As you enter Phase III of addiction, in which the passage from ad to ad accelerates to a frenzy and your eyes start to glaze over from watching too many progress bars. You become familiar with the otherworldly, vertiginous personal ads rhythm, which gets increasingly difficult to extricate oneself from. When you finally stop three hours after, clutching temples in frustrated exhaustion, it feels like waking up from deep slumber at an excessively air-conditioned Barnes & Noble, during which ants crawled inside your ears. You turn to expedient devices in order to speed up the process, employing buzzwords to capture someone’s attention, or monitoring turn-off words in order to more quickly dismiss. Soon the innocent individual becomes the unthinkable: a personality fitting neatly into likes and dislikes. So much for the irreducible singularity promised by mom.

The face soon becomes the most trusted barometer in assessing others. In the same way the Nazis measured craniums, the personals connoisseur interprets an eyebrow or dimple as indicative of social worth. If she perceives a displeasing forehead or misplaced strand, most often she won’t even wait till the picture’s finished loading before moving on to the next. One can easily identity the jaded veterans due to their succinct, businesslike prerequisites: “Be 24 to 26.5 yrs, stunning, IQ 180, imperatively within walking distance of the Chelsea Koo Koo Roo.”

One incredible redeeming factor lingers after the criticism. Despite all the monotony and redundant teen chatter, one can always make the effort and go through 3,000 personals and find two people, who, through the saving grace of demographic necessity, will be exceptional.

Full credit for story goes to: The Daily Californian, CA