The Collared Coed

I was giving up.

It was summer 2007, and it was August.

I had spent the summer meeting men off of craigslist, and I was tired of it, and I was giving up on finding someone to fuck regularly. I was getting ready to go back to a college I hated and to work at a job that bored me.

Yes, Mark and I met on craigslist. I almost didn’t post the ad that led me to meet Mark.

But at the time, I figured that one last post, one last hurrah, wouldn’t hurt.

I know that craigslist, that virtual meat market, is slammed by a lot of people in the BDSM community. It’s full of posers, full of crazies, full of psychopaths, people wail. Who needs craigslist? I won’t deny that I haven’t met weird people off of craigslist. However, I still love craigslist. I think it’s a very honest place, in some sense. Where you could post the most fucked up things that you want, because no one will know it’s you. Your posts are not connected to an image or a composite of yourself. It’s just out there. There’s no worrying that people will recognize you. You are just an anonymous, automated e-mail address.

Mark uses it when he’s looking to bottom to a man. It’s just easier to use CL because there’s no profile to maintain and no worry that people will recognize him.

That’s the oddly comforting thing about CL, that anonymous aspect. It’s why I used it to satiate my desire to fuck around with a lot of different men during a hot, muggy summer in NY. I spent my days working retail and working for a non-profit organization. I spent my nights in NYC meeting men and getting into trouble.

It’s also weirdly gratifying to put up a post on CL in the morning and to fuck some stranger that night. I’m not saying it’s the healthiest thing or the safest thing in the world to do, but by summer 2007, I was tired of doing the healthy and safe things.

I was stressed, angry, cynical and eager to explore my sexuality. I was starving myself, too apathetic to eat anything. I was smoking cigarettes. I was too young to drink in bars, or I would have started doing that instead. I smoked a lot that summer. I even fucked a guy who smoked, who let me smoke in his bed after we fucked. We both chain smoked during our vanilla meeting in a park. (He smoked Camels, I smoked Marlboro Lights.) He liked dressing me in different types of pantyhose, and slathering bright red lipstick on my lips, just to wipe it away with his cock. I pranced around in his apartment on teetering high heels. He owned a shoe store on Park Avenue. I chain smoked on the way to the subway, after he kicked me out of his apartment, after our third session. “You’re not submissive enough. Come back and see me in ten years.” He said as I got dressed, stuffing my feet into my battered Chuck Taylors. He told strange stories about his time in California being a submissive. He was just a strange man.

Another strange man was the high school teacher that I met. We fucked in an hourly hotel that had one channel of cartoons and four channels of porn. I stopped seeing him because he wouldn’t stop showing me pictures of his students.

There are a lot of strange people on craigslist. There are also a lot of normal people on craigslist, just searching for something. Normal people searching for love, for their lost iPhone on the subway, for an apartment, for a submissive, for a bike, for a dominant man or for a free bookcase.

When I told him I was writing this post, Mark wondered out loud, “Are freaky people attracted to craigslist? Or are normal people just freakier when they use craigslist?” Good question. It’s both, probably. I’ll be damned if I know.

For women, it’s just so fucking EASY. It’s so easy to find men on there. Illustrative example; I received 65 replies to the post I made when I met Mark.

I fucked my way through the summer solely off of craigslist. I didn’t even GET an alt.com or collarme.com account until I met Mark.

I used craigslist because it just seemed less intimidating than actually registering for other websites.

I honestly did not think anything would come out of the post I made. Something about my post must have touched a nerve with people, because I received quite a few decent responses from people. I “flagged” the ones that were interesting. I was actually surprised at the range of men that replied. Teachers, businessmen, journalists, writers, artists. Most of them over 35 and expressing gratitude that I liked older men. A lot of them were well-spoken. Some of them were creeps.

Yes, I did spend a week talking to another man before I messaged Mark. I feel stupid for it now, since Mark is so perfect for me. A week after I figured out the other guy wasn’t for me, I started talking to Mark over Yahoo Messenger. I saw him on webcam! (I didn’t have a webcam at the time.) Then it came time for the all-important in person meeting at Starbucks. (So much love for Starbucks for craigslist meetings, by the way. It was so useful when I wasn’t old enough to have drinks in a bar. That “third place” atmosphere really helped me feel less nervous. I can’t help but wonder how many people use Starbucks to meet their internet hook-ups. Heh.)

I’m a shallow slut; I chose Mark because his pictures were cute. But he also seemed smart, sane and like he knew what he was doing. Plus, he was older. Everyone knows I adore older men.

He was actually LATE for our meeting! He was stuck in traffic. I wandered around waiting for him to show up. Then I tucked myself in the back of a Starbucks and cracked open the book I was reading. When he did show up, we talked for two and a half hours. We talked about sex, about television, about everything. We just had this very real connection. (We often use this particular Starbucks as a meeting point when he comes to NYC now, since we both know where it is. Sometimes he even sits at the same time we sat at the first time.)

I actually had a connection with some guy I met off of a craigslist ad. A genuine connection that did not seem dirty or sketchy. We stood around outside the Starbucks afterward, both of us lingering, not really wanting to leave. I didn’t smoke around him. (I waited until I walked away.)

I’m going to probably totally humiliate myself doing this. . .

This is the actual text of the ad I posted. You can tell that it was the end of the summer, because I was tired of being shy and cajoling and coy. I knew what the fuck I wanted.

- – - -

girl next door seeks something more sinister – w4m

——————————————————————————–
Reply to: pers-xxxxxxxxxx@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-08-16, 3:22PM EDT

I’ll be blunt.

College student looking for a dirty old man to:

-act out her long suppressed older man/younger girl roleplay fantasies (take your pick: daddy/daughter, teacher/student, etc.)
-act out rape fantasies
-generally revel in the fact you’re helping to corrupt a younger woman (oh, the horror)

Said dirty old man must be:

-YOUNGER than 45 (older than my father is a little -too- old and quite frankly a little creepy) [this girl next door happens to love the suit-wearing business set]
-willing to host, either at your place or a hotel
-safe, sane and have a little experience with this
-in Manhattan or Brooklyn

I don’t care what goes on in your personal life, married, divorced, whatever- I’ll be just as discreet as you are.

ONE LINERS and dick shots get you deleted.
PICTURES and detailed responses get you to the front of the line.

I’ve done this before, I know what I’m looking for and I can smell bullshit from a mile away. Let’s not play games now.

My university classes are starting up again soon, let’s end summer with a bang.

- – - -

Hahahaha. It’s kind of funny to read it now.

I just can’t hate on something that allowed me to meet so many interesting and sane people. I still have email correspondence with some of the people I chatted with online that summer. (I never met any of them in person for one reason or another.) And I just can’t hate something that brought me to Mark.

People don’t hide their surprise when we casually reveal that we met on craigslist. Mark and I were kind of embarrassed about it in the beginning. As if meeting on craigslist makes us any less legitimate, pffft.

“I found, like, a really awesome couch on craigslist once. But never a girl!” – Direct quote from someone that we met at a BDSM club.

So yes, we used craigslist to meet. We used craigslist to meet and both of us thought that we would just be each other’s friend-with-BDSM-benefits.

I like craigslist. I know that there’s a lot of weirdness on craigslist, and that it was sheer fate that I found Mark. But I still dig craigslist. Because if I never met Mark, I would be a completely different person right now. I kind of shudder when I think about where I would be if I never met him. It’s a little freaky.

Of course, we didn’t expect to fall in love and actually, you know, have a relationship. We just thought we’d fuck.

I wouldn’t have my first scene with Mark until a few weeks later.

But that’s for another post. . .

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