Action: A Book About Sex by Amy Rose Spiegel Page A

body in the space occupied by your phone are usually thus: at least one photo and a truncated description of yourself, both of which communicate that you fuck like you’re tryna earn a degree for it. Here’s how to achieve that:
• Include your face and the upper half of your body.
• Wear something that makes you feel like a sexual comet.
• That’s pretty much it! (I find that the less background and more PERSON in the picture, the more attention-locking it is.)
    Visual motifs to avoid:
    • If you are genuinely interested in internet liaisons, why would you decide that a picture of your pet hanging out by itself makes a great default? It’s cool if there’s a fur-face IN the picture (although you might alienate those with allergies… but who wants to have that conversation re: casual sex anyway?). Reconsider offering up your pet when asked to provide documentation of your sweet face, because no one wants to have sex with your cat (I truly hope).
    • Bottles of alcohol, especially in “club”-lookin’ environs. It’s cool—I love getting plastered, too. But making this the MAIN ELEMENT that you highlight in a photo—that you are not only of legal drinking age, but that you intend to show it off!!!—comes off like you might not have that much of a personality otherwise, or might not have the presence of mind to remember that you do.
    • Pick a profile photo that is free of not only elderly family members and domesticated animals, but of other people in general, so that a person doesn’t message you under the misunderstanding that you are your photo-mate; geriatric or not. Even if you think it’s fairly obvioso to tell just who is whom, it’s also considerate not to put your close ones’ pictures online for scoring-based purposes. Crop if you have to.
    • Do not post pictures where there is any kind of visible mess or clutter in the background. I get that not everybody has a design-magazine-level home (unlike me, a person whose bedroom definitely doesn’t have one of those weird fake “office” ceilings, a three-layer wallpaper palimpsest, and a cat door). That’s okay, as long as you keep it off the internet: Detectable untidiness in profile photos distracts from your dreamy face and tempers it with messiness. You are too good-looking for that, I think.
    • Any materials that find you itching to prove that you are a Good Person ™ , such as the likenesses of the patients you treat in illness-stricken foreign nations. No one needs to see your self-righteousnessquite that clearly, dude. Ew. I was trying to bone, not spend a half hour talking about how you “really felt like a part of their community” and then having to ask you to leave.
    • Babies. It’s great if parents want to use the internet to enjoy themselves! But to draw the link between sex and children so overtly feels like a bit much. So, too, does the judgment of a parent showcasing their child as part of their hunt for sexual escapades.
    • Guns. No guns, please. I cannot believe I even have to write this. Actually, you know what? Go ahead. If you are a person of the opinion that firearms are not only a worthy but essential element to your profile picture, please go right ahead and keep the gun in the picture, so that the rest of us can stay the heck away from you, ya lunatic.
    How to write and respond to messages: Everyone hates a form letter. Isn’t it even more enraging when some creditor, insurance company, or whatever entity is mailing you what used to be a tree but is now garbage tries to make their effort look “homemade” or personalized by using a font that’s supposed to resemble handwriting or pretending they know your life based on where you live? YOU’RE A BANK , asshole. You are not my friend, Capital One, so do not address me as such in your spamvelopes.
    Getting a copied-and-pasted missive on a dating site is similarly insulting and tone-deaf, as far as I’ve heard. This makes good sense to me, especially if