As it is easy to change the photographs that we post in order to
market ourselves on dating sites, I decided to swap mine for
radically different ones, to see what happened. My pictures thus far had not
shown any cleavage. They were what I would call Girl Next Door Grown Up – I’m
fond of a chunky sweater, a long, full skirt and boots – and what my pal Jack
calls “50-year-old headmistress of a progressive girls’ school”. Jack has his
detractors but he can be relied on not to gild the lily, and sometimes I need
that inability to lily-gild.
So I hunted through my camera files and
found the perfect thing. It was taken at a black-tie do five years ago, and
features a silky black frock with a plunging neckline, smoky eyes, scarlet
lips, a bit of a come-get-me expression and lighting so flattering as to render
me unrecognisable. Bingo. I went to one of the sites, posted the photograph,
and sat back and waited. In seconds, men were clicking on the photograph to
look at my profile page and – more to the point, I suspect – to look
at that photograph at full size. My visitor numbers immediately shot up and
began to accelerate in a crazy way. “You’ll get a lot of attention if you do
this,” Jack had said, and he was right.
Intrigued, I went to another dating site
and changed the photograph from the sweater shot to the cleavage one. I’d been
getting about 10 views a week, but when I went back half an hour later I’d
already had 63. Messages began to arrive that said, in short, in ways both
innocuous and presumptuous, that they liked the new me. Among the approving
responses there were explicit descriptions of what some of them were doing with
the picture and many invitations to Skype-sex. I didn’t get dates, though. No
lunch offers. No offers of non-legover meetings.
I wondered what response I would get if
I signed up at a new website and used this as the only photograph. So
that’s what I did: I joined a free dating site, and got 27 responses in 24
hours. I was fresh meat for the waiting wolves. None of the wolves’
messages were conversational and none talked to me as a person. Perhaps I had
removed the need to talk to me as a person by appearing to set the agenda
myself.
After 48 hours, I had more than 100 responses, most of them
one-line stuff: “Mmm great tits, howsabout we get together xxx.” There were
some that were much longer than that and detailed, and had phone snaps
attached. I deleted the account and opened another one, giving myself
a different name and using a different picture, just one, taken when I was
40 and looked a lot younger, and wholesome as you like, in a field in
a Fair Isle sweater. I didn’t fill in the blank fields about achievements
and interests, but let the picture speak for itself. By that evening, there
were several serious-approach emails of respectful tone. Before answering,
I went back to the page and added information about my achievements and
intellectual interests; I was frank about being bookish and didn’t hold back
about ambition. Not a single man sent me a message after that, not until I’d
reverted to a more self-deprecating version of myself.
Back at the site where I had left
the cleavage/evening dress picture up, I began to get hostile messages from men
I had rebuffed. Several young ones thought it disgusting that
50-year-old women should be there looking for sex. What did my being
50 conjure up for them? Did they see someone on the verge of decrepitude,
about to be elderly, on the downward slope to the bus pass, the pac-a-mac,
coupons, bungalows and yellowing net curtains? Did they foresee trouble with
hills and stairs, a retreat into orthopaedic footwear and elasticated trousers,
false teeth and tinned ham, quiz shows at teatime and death? Not that there is
anything wrong with most of those things; I will even admit to being keen on
some of them (aside from death).
The psychology was debatable,
but one thing seemed clear. When someone on a dating site appears to
announce that she is ready for sex, she is treated rather differently from
a woman in a Fair Isle sweater having a picnic in a field, surrounded
by daisies.
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