Oz Dating

Of course it's possible that these claims by Aussie porn star Chloe Conrad that she slept with Shane Warne are false. Still, they are hardly surprising.

And if they are true, then clearly Warne has learned little from his experiences. His texting has been the cause of so much trouble for him in the past. Yet he's alleged to have set up this tryst with Conrad by text. And Conrad claims one of them read:

``Ps just want to check something with you Chloe, hope you don't mind It can be our secret yeah? Between us? X.''

Whoever wrote something like that to a porn star would have to be very naive indeed!

Australia has long been comparatively low key when it comes to interest in celebrities. Of course, famous people from this country and abroad often receive media attention, some of it unwanted. But the pursuit of them has never been anywhere near as intense or invasive as it is in the USA, or even Britain.

This seems to be changing now, though, with the media hounding of Shane Warne and Liz Hurley. Reporters and photographers have been following them around for days, even waiting outside his house and filing regular reports.

You can't really feel sorry for the pair, though. They certainly court media attention.

Still, considering what happened to Princess Diana, there's something a little bit ominous about these tweets from Warnie:

"Apologies to anyone driving on the rd & witnessing the ridiculous behavior by irresponsible photographers trying to get a pic !!!!!"

"Ps I'm not complaining by the way, but I fear that someone could seriously get hurt on the rd as the photographers are so irresponsible."

Google, Facebook and other giants of the digital age continue to bring enormous changes to the way we live our lives. Googling people's names to get an idea of their character is common practice for businesses, real estate agents and other organizations. It's also increasingly being used by single people to check out their prospective dates.

Some specific data on this, as well as related information about how people in (or looking for) relationships interact in the digital age can be found in the results of the latest Zagat Dating and Dumping survey. This press release about it says that "52% of surveyors confessed to 'Googling' a prospective date, and 41% said they used Facebook to snoop around their date's information and check out photos".

So, it's obviously a good idea to Google yourself from time to time. The nature of your online presence clearly has ramifications for both your career prospects and your love life.

There has been a lot of concern about privacy on Facebook lately. And a recent story won't make users of that site feel any more secure about it.

A media artist and a media critic scraped 250,000 profiles form the giant social networking site and used them to create a fake "dating site". They say that it's a kind of experiment to expose the perils of joining such a site.

That sounds dubious. It seems much more like a calculated ploy to lift their respective profiles, then avoid punishment by pleading "artistic" motivations.

It's interesting that the fake project was a "dating site". It could easily have been another social networking site. But that wouldn't have been quite so attention-grabbing. So they spiced up the stunt a little. That ploy seems to have worked.

Here's another sad case of a dating scam that resulted in a woman being financially and emotionally devastated. It's yet more evidence that these lowlifes have responded to people's greater caution about the threat and are making their deceptions more involved and seductive.

In this latest case, a British woman called Kate Roberts was deceived into thinking she was being wooed by a handsome and charming American soldier. The ruse was very involved. It went on for quite some time and involved the use of many photos of the man, which clearly made it all the more convincing.

The fact that it was so effective reveals the powerful influence that sexual archetypes have in people's hearts and minds. There's that cliche about women loving men in uniform, after all.
As much as we like to think otherwise, these beliefs still have great emotional power. Ruthless people know this very well, which is why they keep using them in their scams.

I just saw a funny ad on the TV. It started out looking like a slick promotion for a new dating site, with the camera closing in - from behind - on what looked exactly like a long-haired blonde woman sitting on a sofa. Eventually the woman was revealed to be a very well groomed Afghan hound.

The ad continued, still parodying dating sites, but revealing itself to be a pet and owner matchmaking service run by the RSPCA. The site is here.

The commercial, as well as the website itself, show not only how effective the whole dating site concept is, since it can be used for this purpose, but also also how deeply entrenched in our popular culture it is now.

For a long time people have been campaigning against the institution of marriage on various grounds - for example that it's inherently oppressive to women. Yet despite all the bad press about it, people just keep tying the knot!

It seems that most people still believe that marriage holds the key to happiness. Cynics would argue that it's a fasle dream. But one thing seems certain: it can confer many powerful health benefits.

There's a widely held belief in our society that a man doesn't have to be young and handsome to win the heart of a beautiful young woman; he can do it if he's older, rich and powerful. A lot of people don't like this idea, since it puts a big hole in their theories about equality between the sexes.

Still, there does seem to be a lot of evidence for the belief - the latest being the engagement of Aussie celebrity Sophie Monk to the much older French millionaire Jimmy Esebag. While she describes him as being her soul mate, and there seems to be clear and genuine affection between them, it's fair to say that his substantial wealth and influence probably had more than a little to do with her attraction to him!

Many of the social changes that have occurred in Western society over the last few decades have been initiated in the belief that men and women are pretty much the same psychologically and that any seeming differences are mainly due to socialization. Women have been encouraged to value work outside the home as much as men do, and there have been many affirmative action policies put in place to ensure equality of outcome in this area.

So now we have a situation in which most women have to work whether they like it or not. Yet there's more and more evidence to show that most of them don't like it. It's all quite ironic when you think about it.

Turning back the clock on four decades of feminism, a study has found nearly two-thirds of women would love to find a husband with a bigger pay packet than theirs so they can care for their children full-time.

EHarmony reveals some more specific demographic information of interest to single people. This time it's about Aussie women looking for love.

Their data says that suburbs such as Alexandria in Sydney's eastern suburbs had the nation's highest concentrations of such women.