Schoolmarms

Cruising sites are the wild west of the internet. Anything goes in them there parts. They’re dusty and sometimes seemingly deserted; the arbitrary rules on some totally disappear on others, making the whole thing seem lawless. The stage coach pulls into town daily, disgorging a whole new gaggle of passengers who immediately put up profiles proclaiming that they’re not there for hookups, really, don’t ask them, and that they are ONLY there to look at photos and NOTHING ELSE. (Until they’re horny five minutes later from looking at photos, and hitting me up.) It’s every man for himself, in those wild regions of cyberspace.

Every sheep for itself, on some of them.

And they’re pretty uncivil, by and large. It seems as if a lot of the Manhunts and Gay.coms are populated by guys who make rudeness almost into an art form, transforming it in new and always creative ways to get the maximum impact out of an unkind word or obscene gesture. Behind the anonymity of a faceless profile, or a profile sporting a face that belongs to someone else, it’s easy to strike out at someone—it’s easier to think of other cruisers and chatters as abstracts, rather than living and breathing people whose feelings might be hurt. Those moments when a sarcastic remark, a put-down, or a jab at someone’s appearance might elevate a bastard’s ego are totally worth any theoretical pain on the parts of their intended victims.

I get that. I get that guys are tired of putting themselves out there and being shot down, or being treated rudely, or getting the short end of contentious arguments with numbskulls. We all want—and even more importantly, deserve—a little respect.

But gentlemen. Let us not. in our horrified reactions to the incivility we witness, swerve too far in the opposite direction.

I mentally call them ‘Schoolmarm Profiles.’ What they all have in common is the desire to instruct, chastise, and whap the palms of their readers with a sharp-edged ruler in punishment for all the mischief they may or may not have caused. And as rude as I find the if u r old enuf 2 be my dad then dont msg 2 get with me unless you are super hot LOL idiot profiles out there, I find the schoolmarms even more off-putting.

The schoolmarms usually have a litany of musts and must-nots that they’ll gladly list in exquisite detail in their profiles for you. Usually with an abundance of capitalization. I’m excerpting from one:

It is a shame that on sights like these we cannot be polite to each other. Polite means REPLYING to EVERY EMAIL YOU GET no matter if you want to meet the guy or not. For example I answer EVERY EMAIL I GET and I expect you to do the same. Is it so hard to answer your mail guys? All you have to do is say NO THANK YOU if you are not interested, be a MAN not a PUNKASS, it isn’t so tough.

Or, and I’m quoting again,

It is 2010 not 1800 so dam fools, GET YOURSELFS A PIC. You got NO CAUSE to be on here without one and I WILL NOT TALK TO YOU if you don’t got one. Also NO SMILES NO WINKS NO BLANK MESSAGES where you just unlock and say nothing. If you disobey any of these rules I will delete your ass!!!

Sometimes the schoomarms will take up long, long stretches of screen real estate in their lectures on internet etiquette and propriety. Running through it all is a barely-concealed anger that, boiled down to its essence, sounds like it would be the refrain to a country song: someone done me wrong.

Now, I have some sympathies with what the schoolmarms are often saying. The basics of their messages aren’t wrong. I think it is polite to reply to all the notes I get on these websites. I think a polite ‘no thanks’ is much better than rudeness. And I don’t think that asking for a photos is really too much.

However. I completely support the rights of guys on websites to behave how they want, if they’re not being outright tools. If someone doesn’t want to have a photograph—fine. Don’t have a photograph. I personally won’t be meeting you until I see one, but I can understand that some guys are shy about it, or afraid to show themselves, or worried that a constituent in the congressional district they represent might recognize them from their campaign literature. That’s peachy. Be prepared to get a lot of rejections and to have to explain that you’re worried your grandmother who doesn’t have internet access might run across your fisting4dollars.com account, but it’s totally your life and your right to do what you want with it.

Likewise, though I think it’s polite to reply to every email I get on a cruising site, I don’t always do it. Though typically I’ll reply to just about anyone who’s not unpleasant with a thank-you or a nice remark, guys who are dicks I’ll simply ignore. And if someone’s aggressively obnoxious, I’ll either decline to engage with them. If it’s a guy writing to tell me I’m not following the rules he’s decided to enforce in this particular little corner of the internet, well, I’ll probably block him from communicating with me altogether.

As much as I’d like everyone to be nice and pleasant with each other, I have this basic resistance to anyone else controlling my reactions and attempting to dictate how I live my life, even on something as trivial as a hookup site. If you’re not paying my fifteen dollars a month to belong to Manhunt, you have no right to tell me how to use it or what I can do there. If you were paying it, probably still not even then would I let you.

It seems to me that, as with so many other things, setting a good example is the best way to avoid the spiky officiousness of even the best-intentioned schoolmarmery. Say something like, I answer all messages! and leave it at that. No one needs to know that anyone who doesn’t behave like you is a fool who deserves to be shunned. Be polite. Let your personal philosophy shine through your actions, not be codified in an impenetrable wall of text.

The internet is wilderness enough. We don’t need the schoolmarms dashing about with their canes and rulers, meting out justice.