Adult Friends Forever

With more than 30 million users, Adult FriendFinder is the Web's No. 1 meat market. But what kinds of kinksters actually use the site? Radar signed up to find out

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In the past week, I have seen hundreds of vaginas—shaven and hirsute, flowering out like Georgia O'Keeffe paintings and as demure as habited nuns; scores of aggressively turgid, rhizomatically-veined penises; breasts of varying degrees of authenticity, proportion, and symmetry; and an emotionally scarring amount of anuses.

For I have entered the seamy world of Adult FriendFinder, the closest thing on the Web to an amalgam of Studio 54 and Times Square circa '77.

Adultfriendfinder.com (there are spin-off FriendFinders for different ethnicities, religions, and seniors, and even a PG-rated friendfinder.com) is currently the 25th most-visited website in the United States and the 43rd in the world; no other stand-alone dating site has cracked either top 100.

The casual-sex mediator boasts more than 30 million members and maintains that only half are heterosexual men (a figure not borne out by either informal studies or a quick glance in one of its chat rooms, where the male-to-female ratio is 30:1 or greater). It advertises widely on the Web to snare the curious and susceptible, usually with small pictures of comely young females and text indicating that these nubile women in your town all want to have sex—with you.

In other words, it's sort of like Ladies' Night at the sleaziest club in the world.

I scoured the Internet for attractive amateur nude photos and signed up as a straight male (with an interest in transgenders/transvestites/transsexuals) named Clientele9, a bisexual female (LovelyRita1985), and a gay male (JohnQHolmes1983). The site's company, Various, Inc., was sold last December for $500 million to Penthouse Media Group, which also owns online-dating behemoth Spring Street Networks, so the AFF interface is reassuringly conventional.

Filling out a profile, though, is a bit different. In lieu of expressing a desire for, say, short- or long-term relationships, the AFF user can check off interests in "1-on-1 Sex, Bondage & Discipline, Cross-Dressing, Discreet Relationship, Erotic Chat/E-mail/Phone Fantasies, Exhibitionism & Voyeurism, Group Sex (3 or More), Miscellaneous Fetishes, Other 'Alternative' Activities, Sadism & Masochism."

More nuanced optional questions include "What STDs are you comfortable with your partner having," "What bondage-type gear do you enjoy using during sex play," and the deathless "What are your thoughts on anal sex?"

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CHOICES, CHOICES Adult FriendFinder's profile offerings go beyond "It's Complicated"
The profiles run the gamut from the subliterate (most of the men) to the cleverly crafted (a few of the women). About two-thirds of the men put their phalluses front and center in their photos, while the females occasionally aim for the faintly artistic, with spread-eagled or over-the-shoulder cheek shots predominating. A few exhibitionists upload their amateur sex videos, some of which draw upwards of half a million views.

Many of the more attractive photos—especially of women—are clearly as fake and plucked from Google image searches as mine, but the majority look genuine and are supported by additional photos. Nearly all the males unabashedly state their goal of casual sex, though a few indicate that they would be amenable to a relationship with the right person; more of the women take this tack of looking for love in, quite possibly, the wrongest place of all time. Transgenders/transvestites and swingers have healthy representation as well.

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Adult Friends Forever
With more than 30 million users, Adult FriendFinder is the Web's No. 1 meat market. But what kinds of kinksters actually use the site? Radar signed up to find out

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