Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
At M4M4Sex, "hooking up" is easier than ever before.
Sep 26, 2000 | It's a "peer-to-peer" networking application, of sorts, that makes music file-swapping on Napster look pretty tame. It taps into a passionate community that meets both on- and off-line. It serves five major urban areas -- New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Toronto -- and the company behind it plans to expand to nine other U.S. cities by the end of the year. It's everything the Internet ever promised, a service that is personalized, customized and real-time, bringing new efficiency to an essential human need.
So why aren't venture capitalists rushing to pour tens of millions of start-up capital into this seeming online gold mine? Maybe because the action at this cyber center is a little bit too raw for the average Silicon Valley financier. Then again, raw is how they like it at M4M4Sex, the virtual home of "Billybareass" and "HotBlackTop," an online meat market for gay men where members need not bother with the sly pleasantries of online chat or other time-wasting forms of beating around the bush. At M4M4Sex, there's only one goal: "Sex now!"
"We're cutting to the chase. It's definitely not a dating site," says David Halpern, the content manager for M4M4Sex. "We're making it exactly what it is. It's about a hookup."
It's also about exploiting what's great about the Net. Just try to name a buzzword that can't be applied to M4M4Sex. It brings to bear the personalization of MyYahoo, the real-time action of Etrade and the instant gratification of Kozmo.com on the most intimate of human exchanges.
From AOL chat rooms to Gay.com, there are plenty of places to cruise for sex partners on the Net, but M4M4Sex takes specifically targeting and tailoring your next encounter to an extreme. Members of the site can search for other members by neighborhood and fetish, as if ordering a partner off a menu: "One Castro-dwelling top, please." It's all about finding the piece of ass you want as conveniently as possible. "You can indicate if you're looking to have someone come over to your place, looking to come over to their place or if you want to meet outside," explains Halpern.
Where you want it, and when you want it, too. At M4M4Sex it is easy to see who else is online, so you can go check out their pics and profiles, see if their interests match yours and e-mail them to see if they're in the mood. The site is adding instant-messaging capabilities to make this preliminary exchange more efficient. Or, you can place your own photo and description in the "Sex now!" section for four hours at a time, indicating that you'd like to have sex today between 6 and 10 p.m., 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., and so on. Halpern says the site is also investing in wireless capabilities, so you could arrange an encounter on the road, as well as tourist features, so your photo and profile can travel with you to different cities you visit.
Ain't the Net great? Although one might wonder if it's all that healthy to make the process of "hooking up" gay men even more efficient at a time when unprotected gay sex is reportedly on the rise again. Isn't the sex distribution system already efficient enough? But a survey of community health leaders suggests that they aren't too alarmed at this new way to find partners online. New technology is always exploited, first and foremost, for sexual purposes. M4M4Sex is just the latest in a long line of breakthroughs.
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