Sunday, July 23, 2017

Wanna Be My Friend?

I need to figure out how to be gayer.

It's been years and years and years since I've been out of the closet. Even so I keep getting 'friend' requests from young and very buxom women who urge me, in no uncertain terms, to admire their beauty and hint at the availability of much closer contact.

To say that I'm spectacularly not interested is a massive understatement. Kinsey developed a 6 point scale between exclusively heterosexual and fabulously 'to the last drop' homosexual, and on that scale I'm all musicals, muscles and moisturisers. People often say that I don't look gay, and I always think, well you don't look ignorant. Let me assure you I look at the world through a gay lens, and my world is pretty.

Enough of that.

From the outset these 'friend invitations' bothered me. The girls are all so young, well, young to a 64 year old man. They, none of them, look fragile, but I think that may be hidden behind the makeup and the costumes they wear to entice males to click the button connecting them. I wonder if they worry about who might be clicking 'friend' I hope they are worried about who is clicking 'friend'.

They all look so young.

I never accept the friend request, I always indicate that the request was 'spam' when asked by Facebook, and I worry that I might be making moral judgements and that I should just leave it at a declined friendship. Yikes, why is my natural reaction to think about the ramifications of what I'm doing. But, whatever, I consider the requests spam and wish I wouldn't get any more.

Not because they mistake me for a potential much more than friend.

But because they are so freaking young.

Some of them look like they've just left the playground and now are on very dangerous ground. If there are trolls on the Internet there are the truly dangerous in the real world.

Do any of the rest of you get these and what do you do in response to those requests?

6 comments:

painting with fire said...

I get the inverse - friend requests from guys I don't know - who are generally not young but I wouldn't expect male friend requests from young guys as a woman of a certain age - if they're playing the game you and I both think they are. I just delete - if no friends in common will flag as spam too.

Unknown said...

not on FB very much..but it sounds like the FB version of internet spam/scams.
disturbing and scary when the person is real..but i wonder if many of them are "fake" accounts on FB that are structured to elude the screening of accounts...and their 'friends' are subjected to ads and private messages that are designed to exploit the 'friend' in some way..

love your self rating, by the way!

clairesmum

The Shorter Bloggess said...

I get these, but I get the male version.

If it's any comfort to you Dave, I believe very few of the invitations you get will actually be from the women pictured. They have probably had their pictures stolen from their own Facebook pages and may be completely unaware of what is happening.

Most likely the people messaging you are scammers, who may be of any age from or gender, seeking to part you from your well earned cash. They pretend to be the women in the pictures, earn a persons trust and friendship and then ask for money. It's much easier to make these fake accounts look real these days because some younger people upload hundreds of pictures to their social media accounts every week. It's easy for a scammer to take just a few of those pictures and create a profile to look like a real person.

Shannon said...

I get friend requests from people I don't know (both men and women). When I look at their profile there is very little on it. I think they are scammers or spammers.

L said...

They are probably targeting you to buy live webcam sex shows from them...

Karen said...

I'm a female moderator for several local (Canadian) nostalgia Facebook sites. Lately I've been getting friend requests from men wanting me to help them get into this country from far off countries. The requests are ALWAYS worded the same, even the grammar and spelling mistakes, but the names and faces change. Lots of scamming going on...