For the hell of it I had a blog running on the dark web. I posted to it once or twice a day. I had become disillusioned with it and the dark web in general after finding that much of the content out there was washing up on the open web, or light web, or whatever the hell you call this WWW thing.
As I should have anticipated the dark web hosting service, which was free, got hacked and all the 6,000 or so accounts were deleted. No backup, reason, no idea who or why, so the beat goes on. Nothing I said there meant anything much except that I was talking about things I didn’t want to talk about where anyone could identify me. Of course I used a one-off login and password, and since it all goes through the Tor browser I assume there’s no way to know my IP address or anything else. I only speculate about the motives, and whether the hacker didn’t just delete but saved the content of all those blogs. I don’t know, don’t care, and guess it’s just another whiff of needless clutter ephemerally washed away in the slipstream of the Internet.
The dark web remains somewhat interesting to me but so much of the talk that surrounds it is ridiculous hype. I suspect much of the alleged salacious content and services offered are put out there as a trap, just like the early days of the WWW. In 1994 or maybe 1995 I received an email from someone identifying themselves as a 13-year old girl who just loved my websites. She said she’d read every page and followed every link. But then she proceeded to ask a series of questions almost all of which would have been answered had she actually read anything on those pages. What city was I in, do I play a musical instrument, am I married? I responded but in a way I remember as guarded, implicitly suggesting that if this was a setup then I was not going to fall for it. I would hear later about FBI trolls going around the WWW on fishing expeditions, trying to lure single men into traps that started with correspondences that very much resembled the one I received. I wouldn’t think the FBI has time for that kind of shit today but the single man remains vulnerable and, I think, stigmatized.
On the other hand if she really was a 13-year old girl that would align with the fact that I dated a woman 13 years later who was 26 and said she had been following my websites since she was a little kid. Yikes.
There was an incident a few months ago where someone had a bunch of men on Tinder thinking they were going to have a date with a bombshell beautiful woman. Dozens of men showed up to find it was some kind of prank, and that if someone wanted to date this woman they had to compete for her affection. Most men just left the scene but a few stuck around, jousting or fistfighting each other for her love.
It made me think that I might have connected with someone else attempting something of this sort. There was a woman, or rather there was a photo of a woman that showed up on all the dating apps and sites I accessed. I think this was about a year ago. She was a cute Asian wearing very short shorts and not a whole lot else. When it appeared we matched on Tinder she instantly started messaging me with meaningless blips that were clearly automated. She asked if I was married. I said no. She responded “Same”. She asked where I lived. I said Astoria. She said “Same”. Anything I said the response was “Same”, and after three or four volleys the “conversation” ended.
A few days later this account started messaging again. I think it was 10pm on a Sunday. This time she sounded a little more real, or at least not fully bot-o-mated. She said I should come meet her at Columbus Circle. Immediately. If I could not come meet her within the hour she would block me. I asked her how much money she made doing whatever the hell she was doing, and what were her real intentions. To the first question about how much money was being made she, or he, or s/he replied “None of your business.” I received no answer to the second question. Whatever that was I think it was something in the spirit of the above-mentioned Tinder scam, and it seems to confirm that these sort of things happen all the time but go unreported because the men who were taken advantage of are embarrassed or lack the social media clout to garner anyone’s interest.
I don’t know if the “single man” is haunted by the stigma that he was as I was growing up. I remember my mother emailing me an essay or an excerpt from a talk which started with something like “Beware the single man.” It proceeded to list suspicious qualities of men who were unattached, not even implying but stating right out that being single meant you were idle and had nothing to do and that you simply had nothing of value to contribute to society. There were no social rewards for the single man, which is something I do fundamentally believe rings true today.
Oh how I wish I could find that e-mail but it seems to have been lost in the byte bucket of early Internet email accounts where I was not able to download messages to my computers. I remember it well because an hour after she sent it my mother followed up with something of an apology, saying that she just thought it was a funny little essay and that it wasn’t any kind of comment on my own singularity at the time.
But I thought of it again years later, in North Dakota. A woman was giving me a tour of the Lawrence Welk Homestead when she led me to a small replica of the house that had been made entirely out of Popsicle® sticks. She said, with clear and heaping disdain, that “This was made by a single man.” The emphasis on “single” was unmistakable, and said to me that in her estimation the individual who made this little Popsicle® stick replica of Lawrence Welk’s house would have been more honorably occupied if he had a woman in his life. Is the stigma against single men still a thing? I don’t know, but it’s the sort of shit I was talking about on my dark web blog, which is now gone and almost certainly never coming back. Whoosh.
