Onion personals

The Onion's new romance section brings to mind some headlines we'd like to see.

1. "Saucy Web Designer Juxtaposes Sex With 1950s Clip Art"

2. "Man Seeking Woman Is Multifaceted, Horny"

3. "Unlikely 'Flashdance' Reference Makes Personal Hygiene Tips Enjoyable"

4. "Unattractive Omaha Man Can't Relate To The Onion's Hedonistic Orgy Advice"

Remember their old article about an orgy ruined by overweight, middle-aged participants? Pretty good, wasn't it?

Now, this is no Rev. Donald Wildmon attack on unchecked Onion smut. Some of the best articles of the Classical Onion Era were lurid as all get-out. It's just that the Onion, whose darts ripped holes in everything good and enjoyable in the '90s, revealing only cruel emptiness and boredom beyond, now expects us to be excited about love, or sex, or some combination thereof.

Last week found the Onion recovering from one of its periodic slumps, during which articles like "Developmentally Disabled Senator Wants To Be Just Like Everyone Else" appeared below a weird new link on the beloved green navbar. Mercifully, it's improving again — except for that link, that nightmare personals link.

Click that link and the mockery gives way. You plunge into an unfamiliar new dimension, not of Wisconsin stoners, but of people who want to meet you, after paying a few dollars.

And why not? Isn't it time you met the people — Jesus, the potential loves of your life — with whom you've shared so much laughter? If you and another human being both can enjoy Steven Hawking's state-of-the-art crime-fighting exoskeleton, it may not be much in this world, but why throw that chance away?

Yet, much as the bad password screen tells you, "Oops! Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!" (what sassy Web scripting — who would have expected a Hamlet reference?), a looming unease as you click around hints that something rank and monstrously unnatural, or whatever, is at work.

lyceus "I'm looking for: Someone to throw some sparks my way and see if they light a flame."

midgetbigot1 "Why you should get to know me: Well, my last boyfriend called me Stimulli Extraordinaire."

Are these the typical Onion readers? Sensitive art students and computer technicians interested in poetry and tantric sex — capable of such hyperadvanced aesthetic taste that they can simultaneously appreciate Milan Kundera, Miles Davis, Afghan cinema and old school rap? Do they catch up on their Jim Anchower from the Macintoshes at the MoMa just before their Qi Gong energy healing classes? Or their Jean Teasdale from waterproof laptops in the unspeakably sensual jacuzzis of their live-work lofts?

And yet, testimonies assure us, this is exactly the kind of person who bought all those copies of Our Dumb Century. This could be you:

I met my The Onion Personals date at the Film Forum for an early showing of Shampoo [...] Afterwards a martini and some hot innuendo [led] to a blissful make-out session in the taxi on the way to Brooklyn [...W]e proceeded to sip [red wine] as we slow-danced to a Bing Crosby CD...He gently undid the braids in my hair, combing them out as he read to me from Whitman's Leaves of Grass...
How very "personal," indeed. I think I am in love.

Was Onion founder Scott Dikkers ever this much of a mack?

But wait — wasn't there a similar incident reported on Salon the other day?

I met my Salon Personals date at the Film Forum for an early showing of Shampoo...

And on your favorite website, Nerve.com.

I met my Nerve Personals date at the Film Forum for an early showing of Shampoo...

You should have known the evil hand of Nerve.com was at work here. "Yeah, it's true what they say," it says on another testimonial. "People really do win on The Onion Personals." Yeah, I think my roommate told me that once. How very personal indeed.

The Onion is apparently flailing around for cash. That's why their ad department has given their new collection the un-Onionishly obvious title "Dispatches From The Ninth Circle," and it's why they're printing orgy advice from Nerve's "Em & Lo," a pair of harpies desperately bent on creating the illusion of being funny, sexy and/or not coked out of their minds.

Sleazy advertising is no more a newcomer to the Onion than is unchecked smut. But there's something different about the Onion Personals. Just as maps.yahoo.com is an intrinsic part of Yahoo and no mere Mapquest featurette, personals.theonion.com has burrowed permanently into the same green menu bar where you have clicked "merchandise" to buy an Area Man shirt, and perhaps even "jobs" during a passing daydream of joining these cynics.

This time, however, you ask your friends at the Onion for a date and they introduce you to a bunch of Nerve.com members. The Onion has not only missed an opportunity to offer a service as cool as its "You Are Dumb" mugs — it has sold a little part of its soul to the tiresome forces it really should be mocking.

Writers of the Onion, you have a new mission. Insult the people in the personals.

They are a ripe harvest for satire. You can start with the guy who wants a woman who is a "culture generator," and the creepy 30-year-old "professional obfuscator" who writes, "I'm a talented, unabashed purveyor of tongue-lashings...and I'm not alluding to verbal abuse here." Ewwwwwwww.

As for me, I've got to catch a taxi and meet my Flak Personals date. They're showing this movie Shampoo, have you seen it?

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)