Personal Advertisements Research Articles

T02-P-01 Online personal advertisements of Romanian men: differences in characteristics and preferences by Sexual Orientation

Objective Studying sexualities in Romania is interesting as it has gone through major socio-economic and political changes in the past few decades and has recently joined the European Union. In this study, we will focus on the differences in the content of personals between men seeking men and men seeking women, as sexuality in Romania is a contested issue. Design and method We collected the data from a Romanian Internet website in spring 2007. In this study, we focused only on personals posted by men living Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The final sample size is 380, with 187 men seeking men and 193 men seeking women. Results Our results show that men seeking women provided more information on themselves than men seeking men. A point worth noting is that 26 percent of the men seeking men personals included a photograph. Even though the percentage is much higher for men seeking women and that the difference is statistically significant, this 26 percent suggests that some people are willing to reveal their alternative sexualities and resist the relatively homophobic culture in Romania. Conclusions The results suggest that some people with alternative sexualities are no longer hiding in Romania. Nonetheless, the percentage of people in Romania who are out or are comfortable with their alternative sexualities is unknown. While the results show that some Romanian men are more open about expressing their sexualities than others, there are still many obstacles affecting how people choose to share and express their sexualities in Romania.

Youth transitions to urban, middle-class marriage in Indonesia: faith, family and finances

This paper examines a timely topic in international youth studies – the transition to (middle-class) marriage – in a developing country, Indonesia. While early marriage in Indonesia is still common in rural areas and marriage itself remains almost universal, these trends are moving into reverse for urban, tertiary-educated middle-class young people. Discussion of the data begins with an analysis of survey responses and ‘fictionalised’ fieldwork narratives, and then moves to a discourse analysis of classified personal advertisements in Kompas, the national daily Indonesian newspaper geared to middle-class, urban, secular interests. Some provisional claims are offered about de-traditionalisation and re-traditionalisation trends in contemporary transitions to marriage for urban middle-class Indonesian young people of both sexes. It is concluded that contemporary transitions to successful marriage in Indonesia take place in reference to the three key tenets of faith, family and finances.

Homogamy over the net: Using internet advertisements to discover who interracially dates

There is relatively scant research on who interracially dates. The propensity to interracially date may be linked to symbolic racism. It is possible that political conservatives and the highly religious have symbolically racist notions inhibiting their willingness to interracially date. The primary purpose of this research is to discover who is willing to interracially date with an emphasis upon possible religious and political factors. A national sample of internet personal advertisements indicate that political conservatism is inversely related to willingness to date regardless of race or to date Blacks while religiosity, after proper controls, is inversely related to willingness to interracially date at all. There is evidence that political ideology and religiosity both effect interracial dating but in different ways.

Homosexual Mating Preferences from an Evolutionary Perspective: Sexual Selection Theory Revisited

Studies in evolutionary psychology and sexual selection theory show that heterosexual men prefer younger mating partners than heterosexual women in order to ensure reproductive success. However, previous research has generally not examined differences in mating preferences as a function of sexual orientation or the type of relationship sought in naturalistic settings. Given that homosexual men seek partners for reasons other than procreation, they may exhibit different mating preferences than their heterosexual counterparts. Moreover, mating preferences may show important differences depending on whether an individual is seeking a long-term versus a short-term relationship. The purpose of the present study was to examine these issues by comparing partner preferences in terms of age and relationship type between homosexual and heterosexual men placing internet personal advertisements. Participants included 439 homosexual and 365 heterosexual men who placed internet ads in the U.S. or Canada. Ads were coded for the participant's age, relationship type (longer-term or short-term sexual encounter) sought, and partner age preferences. Significantly more homosexual than heterosexual men sought sexual encounters, although men (regardless of sexual orientation) seeking sexual encounters preferred a significantly wider age range of partners than men seeking longer-term relationships. These findings suggest that partner preferences are independent of evolutionary drives to procreate, since both types of men preferred similar ages in their partners. In addition, they highlight the importance of examining relationship type in evolutionary studies of mating preferences, as men's partner preferences show important differences depending upon the type of relationship sought.

"Do as I say, not as I do": Ralph Greenson, Anna Freud, and superrich patients.

Ralph Greenson's The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis acted as a bible for generations of analysts on what to do and what not to do in psychoanalysis. Yet Greenson ignored the strictures of his own textbook, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, in his treatment of a number of superrich patients and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe and Lita Annenberg Hazen. This article presents new evidence from the examination of the papers of Ralph Greenson and Anna Freud at UCLA and the Library of Congress. Although it is well known that Greenson stretched boundaries with Monroe, his practice of blurring boundaries with other patients, and helping to funnel their money to Anna Freud's Hampstead Center, is not known. Hazen was not only President of Greenson's Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis but was also, through Greenson's encouragement, a major contributor to Anna Freud's Hampstead Center. Greenson even went so far as to answer a personal advertisement on her behalf and fly to New York for a weekend to interview the suitor. These activities took place with Anna Freud's knowledge, approval, and collusion. Other cases are also discussed. If only he had taken his own advice.

Carrying Weight for the World: Influence of Weight Descriptors on Judgments of Large‐Sized Women

Studies have used a variety of terms, often interchangeably, to describe large‐sized people. Using stigma theory as a framework, we presented participants with a personal advertisement in which the advertiser described herself, including her physical size. We manipulated the weight descriptor by including a negative, positive, or objective descriptor, or no descriptor as a control. Participants were 238 undergraduate students who rated the advertiser on 7 semantic differentials. Negative descriptors tended to generate the most negative evaluations, while positive descriptors tended to alleviate some of the stigma associated with being large‐sized. However, control targets with no weight descriptor were viewed the most positively. Implications of this study are wide ranging, including applications for research, theory, and clinical practice.

The Ultimate High: Sexual Addiction and the Bug Chasing Phenomenon

This study sought to explain the existence of a controversial subculture of gay men, a group whose main attribute is an active desire to voluntarily contract HIV. The following research reasons “bug chasing” as being symptomatic of sexual addiction. A quasi-randomized survey of personal advertisements of HIV-negative bug chasers and barebackers—gay men who intentionally eschew condom use without the desire to seroconvert—revealed that chasers were: (a) considerably different from their barebacker counterparts regarding paraphiliac activities, and (b) significantly more likely than barebackers to rank higher on behavioral and psychological measures of sexual addiction.

Naughty Versus Nice: Suggestive Pop Music Influences on Perceptions of Potential Romantic Partners

This study investigated the effect mainstream music featuring sexually suggestive lyrics may have on judgments of potential romantic partners. Respondents listened to either sexually provocative or innocuous music. Thereafter, respondents were presented with online personal advertisements featuring ambiguously described target individuals. Respondents rated each individual first on a series of personality and sexual appeal characteristics and later on overall attraction. Results indicated that sexually provocative lyrics acted as a prime, in that respondents who listened to sexually charged music evaluated the target individuals with a heavier emphasis on sexual appeal, in comparison to respondents listening to nonsexual songs. Implications regarding comprehension of lyrics, song familiarity, and Internet chat room behaviors are discussed.

Sexual Strategies Theory and Internet Personal Advertisements

Sexual Strategies Theory supposes that certain characteristics--namely, physical attractiveness in women and dominance and the ability to provide material resources in men--are highly desirable to potential mates because they are evolutionarily advantageous. However, socially based characteristics (e.g., positive personality traits, common interests) are also desirable in potential mates. It was predicted that people who are weaker on evolutionarily advantageous traits (i.e., less attractive women, less wealthy men) would emphasize alternative, socially desirable traits to compensate for these perceived deficiencies. One hundred fifty-one Internet personal advertisements were analyzed for attractiveness, income, mention of physical attributes, and mention of other positive personal characteristics. Results were generally consistent with predictions. In males, both wealth and attractiveness were related to decreased emphasis on other positive personal characteristics, while in women, emphasis on physical attributes (but not objectively rated physical attractiveness) was negatively related to emphasis on other positive personal characteristics.

O leitor frente ao texto Privê

Current article analyzes the competent reader’s role in Personal advertisement texts, whose social circulation is due to publications in newspapers. The research corpus comprises advertisements in local (Maringá, PR, Brazil), regional and national newspapers, between April and September 2004. The analyses specified characteristics of a competent reader, such as skills, strategies and management required in this particular type of text. Results show that a competent reader deploys different reading strategies and makes appropriate use of linguistic and textual knowledge, coupled to previous life experience, in a way that his/her reading needs are satisfactorily attended to.

Online Personal Ads

ABSTRACT This study samples 200 personal advertisements from the online gay and lesbian global Web portal PlanetOut. This data, along with survey responses completed by advertisers included in the sample, are used to frame a discussion on the use of online gay and lesbian spaces and communities. Despite interacting in a global space, data showed that advertisers remained aware of their local identities. Differences between advertisers were most notable between gender and whether they logged on in a small or large town. Advertisers were interested in interacting locally, eager to move from online to offline communication, oftentimes not overly concerned with maintaining anonymity, and not interested in toying with multiple identities. Users of PlanetOut personals largely did not consider themselves part of a virtual gay and lesbian community even when they recognized the existence of a local geographically-based gay and lesbian community. However, the dynamic nature of online personal advertisements did allow for a new type of interactive advertisement that does differ from previous print forums.

Mate selection criteria among Muslims living in America

There is a lively literature on sex differences in mate preferences primarily in Western cultures. The few cross-cultural studies that exist are limited, as they ignore the role of religion on mate preferences. In this article, we randomly selected 500 personal advertisements placed by Muslims who live in the United States. Content analysis revealed that there were no significant sex differences in seeking a physically attractive mate. However, women mentioned their physical attractiveness more than men did, while men, more than women, sought mates younger than themselves. Women preferred financially secure partners and placed a higher value on finding partners who were emotionally sensitive and sincere than did the men. Furthermore, women significantly, more than men, advertised their religiosity and sought religious partners.

The Language of Love: Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Language Use in Online Personal Advertisements

Stereotypes and biological theories suggest that psychological gender differences found in predominantly heterosexual samples are smaller or reversed among gay men and lesbians. Computerized text analysis that compares people’s language style on a wide range of dimensions from pronoun use to body references offers a multivariate personality marker to test such assumptions. Analysis of over 1,500 internet personal advertisements placed by heterosexual men, heterosexual women, gay men, and lesbians found little evidence that orientation alters the impact of gender on linguistic behaviors. Previously reported gender differences were replicated in the gay as well as the heterosexual advertisements studied. Main effects of sexual orientation indicated that gay people of both sexes apparently felt less need to differentiate themselves from potential mates than did heterosexual people. Virtually no crossover sexual orientation by sex interactions emerged indicating that several popular models of sexual orientation are not supported on a linguistic level.

From Libertinism to Marital Commitment: The Economics of Marital Search with Heterogeneous Agents

The actual characteristics and desires of candidates or marriage cannot be clearly identified without careful examination (Anderson & Hamori 2000). Accordingly, the classified advertisement system looks like a ‘market or lemons’ (Akerlof 1970), which sharply contrasts with the matchmaking agency system. The continued existence of classified advertisement system just proves it furthers the goals of certain singles—namely, libertine females and libertine males. The present paper uses two databases: the first database consists of a sample of personal advertisements extracted from a specialized publication; the second database is the customer file of a matchmaking agency. This paper predicts which variables will determine the commitment level desired by individuals and why matchmaking agencies’ customers are more sincere than advertisers.

Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Small corpus studies and ELT: Theory and practice ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy, Alex Henry, Robert L. Roseberry Niladri Sekhar Dash Small corpus studies and ELT: Theory and practice. Ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy, Alex Henry, and Robert L. Roseberry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 420. ISBN 1588110354. $125 (Hb). The preface of this volume defines issues related to the size of the corpus while the introduction justifies its publication in the present context of corpus research and application. In Section 1, Ch. 1 refers to the use of language in some real situations and shows how analysis of corpora can reveal some important linguistic issues that can alter understanding of language and discourse. In Section 2, Ch. 2 demonstrates how using language processing tools on small corpora can generate new output to be used in second-language classroom teaching as well as for evaluating learner’s vocabulary. Ch. 3 argues that using text analysis software on small corpora can extract a great deal of new information required to enhance the comprehensibility of a literary text. In Section 3, Ch. 4 shows that applying concordances to specialized text corpora can bring out examples of linguistic patterns useful for designing course books and learning materials. Ch. 5 argues that linguistic information obtained from a corpus belonging to a single genre can be effective for preparing useful language-teaching materials. Ch. 6 argues that information about the use of various functional units in specific lexico-grammatical patterns in certain small corpora can help in examining language variation across genres within a given discourse area. Ch. 7 demonstrates how analysis of the textual genre of personal advertisements can provide important clues for making comparisons between the languages preferred by men and women as well as for identifying cultural backgrounds that may help in shaping their preferred linguistic choices. In Section 4, Ch. 8 shows how classroom investigation of small corpora annotated with features of discourse and wording have been useful in improving language proficiency as well as in promoting language awareness among ESL students. Ch. 9 examines a corpus of definition sentences, points out the limitations of functional grammar, and advocates local grammars devised from specialized corpora. In Section 5, Ch. 10 describes the theoretical background and practical experience of creating a multilingual corpus as well as its application in translation and discourse analysis. Ch. 11 proposes a crosslinguistic comparative analysis on some parallel corpora that might help learners explore the ways language is used for achieving particular communicative goals. Ch. 12 uses parallel corpora to compare thematic organization in source and target languages to find the degree of correlation between the two, which may help in teaching, translating, and identifying text-types across languages. In Section 6, Ch. 13 shows how findings of collocational patterns, pragmatic appropriateness, and discourse features from learner corpora can be coupled with expert corpora to design teaching methodology and materials. Ch. 14 argues that both teacher and learner require knowledge of content, writing process, context, and language system for writing a text and advocates comparative analysis of corpus methodologies as a strategy for developing such capacity. In sum, the volume highlights the relevance of small corpora in both language learning and teaching. In addition to the description of basic corpus analysis tools, it covers various issues (compilation and use of learner corpus, comparison of genres, crosslinguistic comparison, teaching-materials design, description of local and functional grammars) important for language education and research. [End Page 346] Niladri Sekhar Dash Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Bareback sex and the quest for HIV: assessing the relationship in internet personal advertisements of men who have sex with men

Technological changes have led to the development of numerous niche markets for personal ads. Included is the market of men seeking men for bareback (i.e., unprotected) sex. Both common assumptions and the scant literature suggest these men are actively seeking HIV infection. This research assesses a sample of Internet personal ads in order to identify a profile of barebackers and to determine whether barebackers are actively seeking HIV infection. Results suggest Internet personal ads are more explicitly sexual than traditional personal ads, and, although despite large numbers of such personal ads there is little evidence of a direct link between a preference for bareback sex and an active quest for HIV infection.

Comparison between primary and secondary mate markets: an analysis of data from lonely hearts columns

Abstract Personal advertisements placed in newspapers can be a good source of information on the dynamics of the human mate market. From an analysis of 1587 (776 female and 811 male) advertisements placed in the local Lower Silesian (Poland) newspaper, we were able to compare primary (never married) (PMM) and secondary (divorced/separated) (SMM) mate markets. When controlling for place of residence, it was revealed that the mean time span between the end of education and the age at which females resort to personal advertisement (7–8 years) is very similar in the three education categories. Men who graduated from high school or university were over-represented on the SMM. There were no differences in the residuals of height, weight or BMI between PMM and SMM for females and significant difference only for men's height with relatively taller men on the SMM for the combined two lower levels of education. We also compared PMM and SMM separately for men and women in terms of the rates of offering and seeking resources, attractiveness, commitment and social skills. PMM and SMM differ in three such categories for men and in four for women. However when controlling for advertiser's age, there were only two differences for women (resources were sought for and attractiveness offered more often on the SMM) and one for men (commitment was sought more frequently on the SMM). This indicates that the difference in preferences should be attributed mainly to the age of subjects and only to a smaller extent to the type of mate market (PMM vs SMM).

Higher male educational hypergamy: evidence from Portugal.

Studies of human mate choice have been based almost exclusively on stated preferences and personal advertisements, and the external validity of such studies has therefore been questioned. In the present study, real-life matings based on a large representative sample of newly wed couples in 1998 (n=66,598) were analysed according to educational assortative mating. The results demonstrate a strong educational homogamy in this national Portuguese sample. However, men tend to marry women who are slightly more educated than themselves. The results are compared with those of a modern society (US, 1940-87) and a traditional society (Kipsigis, 1952-91). Since educational attainment is strongly associated with social status and intelligence, these results are discussed in an evolutionary perspective.

Sex and Sexuality in Men's Personal Advertisements

In this article, the author examines 2,400 men's personal advertisements from the Internet to explore gender role and sex role preferences in mate selection. Using content analysis, the author examines how men define their gender roles and sex roles, and how they express role preferences in their mate. The results show that when compared with gay men, straight men are less concerned about gender roles and sex roles. Gay men's personal advertisements are the real analytic lens here because they are the ones faced with the ambiguities that need to be negotiated, whereas straight men may have taken gender-typical roles for granted. The author also discusses how men knowingly or unknowingly express and reproduce cultural norms of heterosexuality and gender-typical behavior, and how they may perpetuate forms of heterosexism and sexism.

Sex differences in mate selection strategies: Content analyses and responses to personal advertisements in Brazil

We studied mate selection strategies as revealed in heterosexual personal advertisements published in a Brazilian newspaper, analyzing both the ads' content, with respect to the attributes that men and women offered and sought, and predictors of the number of responses that each ad received. Demands made for a prospective partner changed as a function of the age of the advertiser in predictable sex-differentiated ways: women became less demanding as they aged, whereas men became more demanding. The number of responses received by men and women as a function of age followed a similarly sex-differentiated pattern, with older women receiving fewer responses than younger women, and older men receiving more responses than younger men. In general, results of the present study provided support for our predictions. People who used personal advertisements, a relatively recent unconventional way for selecting mates, expressed conventional preferences, suggestive of evolved psychological mechanisms.