It takes a woman about a thousand words and a condom to get laid on Craigslist. We are both middle-aged women who have spent the past eleven months sleeping around Craigslist. At an age when most women were sending their firstborns off to college, we found ourselves β through chance and circumstance β single, tumescent, and ripe for adventures. Those adventures have spanned ten counties and four states, and involved roughly 45, e-mailed words, 27 phone calls, 36 face-to-face initial dates, 13 actual lovers, and re-aggravated our carpal tunnel syndrome from all the typing.
Years before embarking on Craigslist, both of us had experienced sexual abandonment. We were both hungry for intimacy and physical touch after years of wandering in the desert. Our lives were on similar trajectories. Lily Penza, 46, had been overweight since her teens and suffered from dangerously low self-esteem.
At age 28, she moved in with the first man who looked her way. It was a virtually sexless union for ten years before a therapist helped her come to her senses and move on. Lily never married and spent most of her life caring for an ill parent who died recently. So she lost forty pounds and decided she would make up for lost time. Anna Reed is a fifty-year-old who, as a young woman, had been raped and pressured into sex during the so-called sexual revolution. Not one of these authors could tell her as much about sexuality as her own inner life did.
Emerging from a stale and sexless marriage, she would do things her way this time around. She started answering ads last July. She was open to every person and every experience β even Republicans, as long as they could kiss. Anna decided to try Craigslist because she found other online dating sites too silly. Lily and Anna are not our real names, but then you probably knew that was coming.
Virtually everyone on Craigslist lies about something: their name, their age, their weight, their marital status, maybe even their penis or bra size. Before anybody actually met face-to-face, Lily dumped Scott and canceled the threesome, but she became e-mail pals with her would-have-been sex partner, Anna. Once we met, we realized we had a lot in common, and began sharing our respective experiences. Our adventures have included the hot, the not-so-hot, and some potential hook-ups that never even got off the ground.
