There is a male version, too.

Via copyranter

[Via: online dating]

Sitting outside her apartment building on the bench is a fratty, slick-looking guy wearing a pink button down and talking loudly on his cell phone:

“I don’t know man. You know, it’s a hard divorce. We’re having a hard divorce.”

This is said in a way that expresses that this divorce is, as divorces go, hard, but does not seem concerned or even phased that a divorce is taking place. He continues.

“Turns out, man, those pictures I took of her and sent around the internet are proving a problem. Such a problem.”

WTF?! advice of the day. Stay away from this guy.

Image via ktylerconk

Image: English Club

“I guess you could say I won’t settle. I want an incredible relationship. I want to be a partner. I want a woman who blows my mind while making me hard. I want love. I want someone who I respect and who respects me. I want belly laughs and fart jokes. Nothing more and nothing less.”

from Why I Created TimWow, The Dating Infomercial by TimWow

Our pal, Spencer Walker of COOK TO BANG, is hosting cooking classes to lust for just in time for Valentine’s Day. Aphrodisiacs? Fun, cool people cooking? Sounds like a tasty non-date to us. We will be there.

Sign up for ‘MY TASTY VALENTINE’ HERE!

Check out  Spencer’s WTF?! Guest Blogs

DINNER AND A MOVIE DATE: RIP by Spencer Walker

VALENTINE’S DOOMSDAY by Spencer Walker

COOK TO BANG. BANG TO COOK. by Becky

Maya Ondalikoglu Bobbitt married Professor Philip Bobbitt on December 14, 2011, at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008, the New York Observer dubbed him “the James Bond of Columbia Law School.” (Hrm.)

Read about the whole thing at Above The Law.

There was a WTF?! email chain. Skeeved or not?

What do you think?

photo via jeffk

One sunny Tuesday at 3 pm, I met, for the second time, a handsome man at a cafe in Gramercy. We had first met there the week before when he came up to me, made a reference to the Greek muses and was (he intimated later) charmed that I could hold my own in elevated conversation. He was an intellectual by profession and a contemporary artist of excellent repute. What a shame, I thought, it would be more thrilling to have an artist of ILL-repute in my gaggle.

Nonetheless, I was intrigued that he was South American and impressed by his strong opinion on which red wine should be enjoyed in the afternoon. I called him “Professor,” a moniker he accepted begrudgingly until he started “assigning” me “book reports” on Houellebecq with pedagogic delight. We left the cafe, and I let him lead me on a wolfish jaunt through the bustling neighborhood, during which he kissed me, long, hard and for half an hour, up against the wrought iron fence of Gramercy Park. Between deep breaths and our lips touching, I demurred when he whispered he knew a hotel near by. (WTF?!) He left me on the street corner crazed, red-cheeked, mortified, aroused.

Naturally, I emailed him right away saying that I enjoyed our afternoon together, but could never see him again. It was all too much, too fast, too soon, too sudden, too overwhelming, I went on. When he responded cordially, cheerily and bid me farewell, I immediately changed my mind and agreed to meet him at the same place and time, the following week. The idea that he rapaciously desired me was profoundly unsettling (and hot), but the thought that he could be indifferent was unbearable. He had to see me again.

The second time at the cafe, we again drank a light, mild red. Again, he kissed me, this time indoors, at the table where we were sitting. With increasing urgency, we discussed our predicament. He lived in Harlem, I lived in Brooklyn, we both had evening meetings, and yet we both wanted to…steamy fantasies were smoldering in my brain… About that hotel… I ventured.

When I wrote last week about Love Hotels in Japan (2% of the country’s population visit one every day!) it did not occur to me that I had been to one in NYC. Here in the prudish U.S., there is apparently such a stigma around the idea of taking a break during the day and getting it on with a consensual partner in a designated place for sex that it simply did not register in my mind that I had done…exactly that. Because, in fact, there is a “hotel” near Union Square that seems to be set up for this purpose.

Thus I arrived in the tiny, non-descript lobby with The Professor. We checked in “for the night,” though there was an implicit understanding in our barter with the sullen desk clerk. This was best described by Alison who said later, when debriefed about this adventure: – “We must charge you for the night, but there’s a discount if you check out early.”

Up we went, through narrow hallways painted mawkishly yellow and orange, featuring large scale prints of modernist paintings from the MOMA. I questioned The Professor about the artistic merits of each one. Was it foreplay or was I losing my nerve? I felt like I’d entered a foreign space, maybe on another planet, where I could not know what to expect. But with every rush of hesitation was an equal thrust of yearning – the desire, I think, to explore this bizarre physical and emotional landscape. I’m not surprised that Japanese Love Hotels often feature fantastical themed rooms. The allure of the whole experience was escapist, transporting.

Our room was small, with a heavily draped window that let in no light. Who knows what, if anything, the window opened out to, or if it was even a window, since dark purple fabric covered it entirely. The bed was the width of the entire space and all along the right hand wall was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Enough said? This room existed for one purpose. There was nothing romantic or even welcoming about it. Still, the pure functionality of the space was strangely and unabashedly erotic.

We had sex, every which way, and then lay talking (on top of the sheets) on the bed for just as long a time afterwards. When we finally got up, got dressed, and walked out, the busy street felt bright, open, free and magnificent after our dark, shrouded love nest.

God I love this city, I said.

What? The Professor said abruptly to me.

I said I love this city.

Oh, I thought you said you love me, he replied.

We walked together to the end of the block and made another plan to get together in two weeks. This time, at my place. We would still meet up in the afternoon, and he would bring the correct bottle of red, but other than that it would be a play-non-date the good old fashioned, normal way. A part of me was disappointed.

A makeover is the answer to EVERYTHING. Have you learned nothing by reading women’s magazines?

Oh, wait? You don’t read magazines anymore? Appears you’re not alone. Glamour Magazine, Hearst’s most lucrative publication, and Harper’s Bazaar aren’t doing well. According to the NYT:

Glamour’s newsstand sales were down substantially last year, by 17 percent through June and (as submitted to the Audit Bureau of Circulation) 9.9 percent in the second half. Most women’s titles were down. Part of the problem, it would seem, is that by exploiting a winning formula, fashion magazines have made themselves indistinguishable.

Indistinguishable, and to me – beyond shiny colorful things to look when I get a pedicure – increasingly irrelevant. I realize I write for a blog here, so I’m not trying to trash magazines because I’m not writing for a magazine. But really, it’s true. I’m a writer, who writes mainly about women, and I don’t read women’s magazines. Just a fact.

Except, I’m being catty with my intro here. Another fact. But, that’s probably because the homogeneity of the current glossies has made them staid for me. It seems like the editor of Glamour, Cindi Leive, agrees.

“We felt like Glamour had become a little too formulaic,” Ms. Leive said. “If I’m bored, the reader probably is, too.”

I love to read. The more provoking, insightful, visually adept publications the better. I’d love to love Glamour.

What I’m saying here is: I’m not expecting Gloria Steinem but regarding the shift, good-on-you, lady mags.

NY Mag’s recap of this week’s New Girl. The main characters duke it out on the subject. Innnnnnteressssting.

When do you embrace…and when do you scorn, gender identifiers?

*Non sequitur. I really like Lizzy Caplan.

Image: Toon Pool

“He wasn’t strictly a computer geek like I had originally thought – he even did theater and opera in college.”

from How We Met on Geek2Geek (Her Version!) by geeklover – gal

“She was on the internet, and yet…she actually looked and sounded like a real person who had a social life outside of…well…antisocialism… She was the kind of woman I had so much difficulty approaching when I first started this online odyssey. In other words she was, not all that geeky!”

from How We Met on Geek2Geek (His Version!) by geeklover – guy