Nerve Personals: The White Hipster's Last Romantic Refuge
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Personal Affronts
Before DSL, there were fewer ways to meet and arouse an anonymous date. Maybe a few utilitarian lines in the back of New York: "Beautiful redheaded PhD seeks successful white man for long-term relationship." Maybe you typed with one hand on Internet Relay Chatting while seducing a freshman from Ball State. You didn't have the loading capacities to type out your feelings about, say, Kierkegaard. Now, according to comments made on tv not long ago by Rufus Griscom of Nerve, that Web and print organ of so-called "literate smut," you'll "be able to go online and say, 'I'm looking for someone who loves Faulkner, hates their mother...'"
He's referring to Nerve's online personals, which he claims have "the power to energize the world of online dating." Simple formula: Take Nerve's demographic?90 percent urban or suburban, 81 percent college-educated, with an average household income of $70,000?and give them some rope.
"We want to create a high-end flirting environment," Griscom has said.
There you are, deposited in the city by a cheerful and rehabilitative liberal arts college?Bard, Brown, Sarah Lawrence. Maybe you got a degree in comp lit, maybe race studies. You move to an outer-borough colony and write liner notes for your friends. You bring red wine to dinner parties, noting the vintage. You've slept with all the girls in your circle of friends, twice?first at college, then at your bassist's birthday party in Fort Greene. It gets harder, you notice, to meet the kind of girls you're used to?self-referential, with low self-esteem. You decide to take action, and while the boss thinks you're working on a links page for the company's new client, you compose an ad. You have a dog-eared copy of Stendhal, in French, next to the iMac and the Dutch lube you picked up in Amsterdam. You dream of your next trip to Iceland. You try your hand at pathetic fallacies: your fingers itch, the trees shudder. Belle & Sebastian are pretty awesome. You work for a website, but you know what's up.
You once lied your way out of a Tunisian police station.
You've been to Dollywood.
You're constantly perplexed/repulsed/ amused by the general hum of postmodern life.
You collect classic porn.
Your requirements:
She considers herself a postfeminist. A Buddhist. She likes McSweeney's. Terrence Malick. Burt Bacharach. Ideally she'd look like Isabelle Adjani, but you'd be okay with that girl from That '70s Show. Maybe she'll be a poetry major, like your ex-girlfriend.
She calls herself SamanthaJones, from Sex and the City, or something vaguely Italianate (Vittoria, StellaMaria35). Truth is, sex with her last boyfriend wasn't the greatest, but when asked about it, she writes: "We went out and I proceeded to fuck him within an inch of his life." She has a "drawer of pleasure" and a hybrid bike. Anne Sexton got her through her last year of high school. She tells you she likes Camille Paglia, but you think she's just being flirtatious. "Hottentots are sexy; Matisse's colors are sexier." You look it up. She quotes Roland Barthes: "The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing."
You meet. She likes your hair; you like her glasses. You introduce her to your friends. She doesn't want to tell people how you know each other, but you think it's a funny story. When your sublet runs out, you move in together.
If there's a vague and gnawing and terrible feeling that this is what your higher education's amounted to, ignore it. Give her your screenplay to read instead.