Lonely hearts club: The horny vulnerability of personal ads
Musings on 'Kissing Jessica Stein', panromantic heterosexuality, and the romance of obsolescence, with a quick intro to the kinkily brilliant @ldn.leatherdyke.ads 🥀
One of my favourite, favourite queer films (it was marketed as a lesbian movie, but I can’t bring myself to use that term to describe it – it feels inaccurate and reductive for a project that somehow anticipated a lot of mid-2010s-era discourse more than a decade in advance) is 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein. The titular Jessica is the protagonist but it’s really Helen Cooper, her some-time love interest, who makes the film’s universe go round. She’s the kind of bisexual I aspire to be: sexually insatiable, with three boyfriends on the go at any one time, and is also a gallerist (a chic job which means she’s good at realising the fantasies of others).
While Jessica is ostensibly straight, she discovers Helen’s personal ad in the Women Seeking Women section of the newspaper classifieds. Importantly for Jessica, it includes her favourite quote on relationships, by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke – don’t listen to lesbians, straight women are the true romantics. For her, it’s a sign that two souls can meet even if the bodies don’t quite align with what you’re expecting. For Helen, it’s not that deep. She was advised to put in an overly intellectual quote by her gay guy pals who may be dubious about her wanting to experiment with women but who also want to see her score.
So… lots of dates and very, very, very slow amounts of physical sexual contact ensue. The bottom line: while Jessica can eventually get on board with the idea of being romantically involved with a woman, she can’t quite get her body to comply. Is she pan-romantic, hetero-sexual? Or is it a case of her own body not complying with what she wishes she wanted? The answer isn’t clear. (The two divas do spend some time in the back of a cab talking about blending lipsticks to get the perfect shade which, to me, signifies some awareness that we have to mix-and-match our platonic, romantic and sexual desires to find the ideal).
Anyway – surprise! – this is a long, diverging and rambling intro into the phenomenon of personal classified ads. The concept of putting out an ad in a newspaper to say “I’m horny” or “I’m lonely” and providing concrete details of your type and what you’re looking for seems chronically retrograde in 2024. And yet… it’s also kind of delightful. Explicitly communicating your needs??? Not relying on the digital overlords who scrape our data to train robots who will eventually cause the intellectual, spiritual, creative and probably literal death of our society??? Suddenly, I’m sold.
There’s something of a nostalgia for personal ads in the air. This is not least because they are pop culture gold. They don’t just feature in Kissing Jessica Stein (which I have blown my shot at gate-keeping by including in this piece, but whatever) but also feature in Ghost World, Desperately Seeking Susan and other landmarks of tv and film which ~quirky~ girls seem to like. Additionally, a girl I once developed a parasocial online relationship with used to be obsessed with ‘Rush Hour Crush’ – the missed connections section in the Metro, where people write in with details of hot people they saw, but didn’t talk to, on their commute. There’s a certain romance of obsolescence here: things which were never bad, per se, but which no longer really serve their intended purpose – like typewriters, ipods, water wells – are always ripe for nostalgia. They seem… quaint.
But for queer people, there’s an added resonance. Obviously (so obviously I don’t know why I’m even taking the time to explain this, but whatever) outside of gay bars or women’s rugby teams, the queer community traditionally had a hard time meeting people to hookup with, because we live in a cis-hetero society where queer and trans people have been historically forced to hide their identities. Personal ads, then, were important for the community to find one another – especially in more regional areas where there wasn’t a local gay watering hole.
Personal ads have also played a role in defining our queer vernacular: famously, it was ads on Craigslist which originated the term T4T. Due to restrictions like character limits, and the fact that some newspapers charged by the letter for their ads, the copy for personals was always littered with abbreviations – some of which we still use today. Acronyms like BB (bare-backing), B&D (bondage and domination) and FWB (you know that one) entered the collective consciousness via these ads and persist today on dating app profiles, where being overly transparent about your sexual desires can lead to swiftly being banned from the apps.
In some ways, then, personal ads haven’t ever really left – they’ve just evolved into our dating app profiles. That’s why it’s so interesting to not only see Instagrams crop up which catalogue or curate historic personal ads but to witness queer folks trying to revive the personal ad tradition. Famously, Lex (who ~rudely~ did not reply to my request for comment… what happened to queer community?) was born from an IG in 2017 as an account which would share personal ads inspired by vintage lesbian mags and connect the author with interested sapphics. Nowadays, it’s an empty playground, an underpopulated digital space where ads and callouts ricochet around with minimal engagement. Sad!
But continuing the original spirit and praxis of Lex (back when it was @personals) are pages like @ldn.leatherdyke.ads – an IYKYK IG page for London’s expansive leather dyke community whose pinned example ad (which you can also see above) reads: “Me: trans twink with a sadistic side, they/them, You: femme bottom, t4t preferred, Us: exploring needle play together?”. Personally, I’m obsessed with this page for one simple reason: the ads are loooooong and explicit. Far exceeding the sparse word count of the example post, anonymous posters share their fantasies and desires in horny, meticulous, needy, vulnerable detail. From searching for someone with a “firm hand and an assured stride” to proclaiming that they will “let you use my ass, face, and thigh as your cl*t riding toy”, the people posting on here know what they want and are fucking great with words.
In the spirit of digital culture journalism, I reached out to the account owner of @ldn.leatherdyke.ads who clarified a bit about their project. Juicy deets are below!
The aim? “The project is mostly just me running an Instagram account, where people are invited to submit kink and leather focused personal ads for other local dykes/dyke-adjacent people to take a look at and respond to, and then hopefully they hook up!”
The inspo? “The inspiration was honestly repeated conversations with friends/lovers/people in the community about how Lex isn’t as fun or horny as it used to be, and particularly the sense that it had gone from being a very explicit and dykey space to being a lot more general and social/community focused. Which is obviously useful for some things but it wasn’t what myself and my immediate community wanted from the app. So I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world and start something different.”
Okay, but why are we still doing personal ads when dating apps exist?! “I think personal ads can work a lot better than dating apps especially for those of us whose tastes are quite… specific! On dating apps, I tend to find people aren’t really that detailed about what they want, or someone’s profile might say that they’re interested in ‘dates or hookups or friendship’ so if you match with them you don’t know at all what they’ve actually matched you for. And if you’re not up front about it, you might not know if someone is compatible with you sexually, kink-wise. You also might not want to be direct about that stuff if your colleagues could see you on there. Whereas the anonymity of a personal ad allows people to be very direct about what they want and know for sure that whoever responds is interested in exactly that kind of scene or play or dynamic. For leather people and other people with more niche interests, it can be a lot better.”
And now, back to me!
Cool, right? I don’t know what to call this person (I didn’t ask, I'm into the mystery) so let’s just call them @leatherdyke. Anyway, @leatherdyke makes an interesting point – there’s a level of intentionality to personals that we just don’t get anymore with the apps, not even on online spaces like Feeld which are more tapped into the often hyperspecific needs of the queer and kinky communities. Dating apps can often imply a certain abnegation of responsibility. The idea of “matches” harks back to match-making services rather than emphasising each user’s own agency – and that’s probably by design, after all, apps want to suggest that they are instrumental in facilitating romance and that we wouldn’t be able to make connections on our own.
There’s a huge emphasis on the dating app as the third party, the connector, the enabler, the invisible hand of romance and lust. But they’re also the big brother of libidinal energy – cropping up to warn you if you write a message that’s too sexually direct, kicking sex workers off their platforms. Within this schema, if you want to find love, you’ve got to “play by the rules”.
I much prefer the idea of personal ads – rather than being met with a sea of faces in an overly sanitised play-pen created by big tech, it feels like it’s just you and a pen (or a Notes App) and the void. It may be anonymous and faceless but it’s the ultimate vulnerability: you pour out your deepest, darkest desires and hope that you’re not alone, that someone, somewhere understands.
That, to me, is the kind of horny vulnerability I want to see more of in the world.
<3 obsessed, great topic