Most of us writers like getting paid for what we do. And at the opening stages of the game, it almost doesn’t matter what that work is, be it word problems for math textbooks, sports reports from the world shuffleboard championships, or obituaries. If someone’s rewarding your wordsmithing with cash, then bully for you.
But some lucres are filthier than others. I recently answered a promising call to write humor for a startup social networking website aimed at college students. The hourly rate wasn’t bad and writing jokes sounded fun. What the hell.
A couple of writing samples later I was given my first assignment to write for the website’s dating game. It functioned like an online version of television’s old Dating Game, and my job was to write clever questions that the inquisitor could use to elicit revealing or witty responses from the field of potential dates. Okay, I thought, I’m helping web surfers break the ice, what’s wrong with that?
The head writer sent me some sample questions to get me started. Here’s where I sensed trouble: “If I were a latte, would you add milk and sugar to me? Or would you just drink me down straight and hot?â€
It occurred to me then that the cardigan of Love Connection had been stripped off television’s hard, eager body years ago. The age demographic for romance game shows had shifted downward, and in Chuck Woolery’s Old Spice-scented vacuum arose cultural travesties like Elimidate, where a group of camera-hungry college girls make out with a glazed dude in progressive single-elimination rounds of clothing removal until one so-called love interest remains.
I considered my moral position. Not all the sample questions were racy and obvious. Most were innocent and even a little clever. But I couldn’t avoid the sobering fact that this website seemed to be in the trampled, sodden field of the VH1 generation cash cow. Had I thrown my literary lot in with the MTV mindset that everyone’s okay as long as everyone is under thirty and hot, sexuality should be worn outside your pants at all times (“So we can check,†to quote Bananas), and irony is best left to steel mills? Surely not. This website just wanted to connect people with a few jokes, right? Either way, I’d been given a job, and the call of paid publication was strong. I let it lead me.
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