The other day, while reading The Onion – my only source for news and cogent analysis of the… The other day, while reading The Onion – my only source for news and cogent analysis of the issues of the day – I stumbled upon The Onion Personals. By “stumbled upon” I mean, “sought out.”

If you’ve never read the personal ads, imagine a used car dealership, with people hawking not cars, but themselves, “for friendship, dating or best offer.” Mileages vary, but everyone has their special emptiness. In the darkest light, it seems a Sargasso Sea of lonely souls – a great mass of congealed yearning. Their fumbling toward contentment may be alien to us, yet, if, as Gabe Hudson put it, “we are all probably a lot more sad and vulnerable than we’d like to admit.” We are all connected in some small way in the dull chord struck by ache – it’s impossible not to identify with lives lacking, to be touched by so many variations on the theme of loneliness.

That’s not to suggest anyone knows what I’m talking about. Of course, only other people take out personal ads. Only other people do such silly things in the pursuit of happiness. Here we can laugh; here we are all well-adjusted and content.

But wait! So are the people who take out these ads! In the land of the fill-in-the-blank people with their paint-by-number personalities, the most powerful incantation is the most common: “I’m just doing this for fun.” With a shrug, we banish the specter of naked longing, returning to the safety of emotional detachment.

Fantasy is life’s most vital safety net – no one is ever written up as “Bad personality, 45. Living with parents. No prospects. Looking for wallet with legs.” Online personal ads – a hazy conjunction between dating and the Internet, the most fake situation and the most anonymous medium – are all about persona management. Appearances are polished, gleaming chrome, wit calibrated to redlining, and those little personality quirks puttied over with powerful nonsense like, “I love to laugh.” (How awkward it would be to date someone who hates to laugh. You’d make a joke and then have to apologize, and probably buy flowers).

If only it were this easy to browse for people in real life. That girl at the Dollar Store who shoots down your awkward advances every time you buy toilet paper – you could double-click on her and find out she’s a struggling stage actress just trying to make it in the big city. On the bus, that girl with the haunting eyes – in the blank reserved for favorite book she replies, “I don’t read.” You could wonder what that means and marvel at the enigma of her being. We could choose our own reflections, exorcise our less desirable traits and reassemble the trivia of our lives into recognizable, even lovable forms.

If the mind is the most powerful erogenous zone, as many eunuchs suggest, then personal ads are a new kind of titillation: arousal with intimate details about the lives of strangers while preserving emotional distance. You’ll never have to meet any of these people unless you choose. You’ll never have to care, only be curious, in the same way you might be curious what happens when seven people stop being polite and start being “real.” Just as reality television has made it possible to look down from any height, to swoop and dive through real-life car chases and game-show weddings, personal ads promise a real connection without all the sticky mystery of real life.

Were you to be really callous, you could call it “look at all the lonely people.” You could discount them as people too socially inept to find love in the real world, who resort to cold technology. Explained that way, the personals are an ego-boost – like those people you see on Jerry Springer; aren’t you glad you’re not like them? In the voyeur nation, it’s most important to be a spectator; we always look down on the actors – the people who put themselves out there for our amusement. But life, even lived in front of a camera or distilled in a personal ad, is more real than watching. Who is more alive: the person who recognizes the extent of his own loneliness and acts upon it, even in a way that is alien to most people, or the person sitting at home in the dark, alone, watching?

Jesse Hicks is Jason Castro’s dominatrix. Point counter-point victory.