That's the man for me. Both superior and self involved.

The Fountainhead is for 19-year-olds who are only just learning to grasp philosophy. Everything is overdramatized and oversymbolized. This man represents individualism. That man represents collectivism. The heroine represents the author, who longs to get nailed by the rugged individualist.

Here is the story. A man designs a building based on natural forms. He's a modernist. A committee comes along and adds old-style junk, and balconies, to the man's work. So the man blows up the building. Meanwhile, his friend, who has spent his life trying to be a people-pleaser architect with no original thoughts of his own, kills himself. At some point the heroine is raped by the individualist guy, and she likes it. Then at the end there is a big show trial, and the individualist gives a speech about how being an individual and creating stuff based on one's own ideas is the highest achievement of man.

If you see the movie version (directed by King Vidor), it ends with the man standing atop a building that looks like a giant penis.

So, if you like egocentric people and big wangs, and you want a lover who is as selfish as you are in the sack, and if you like post-coital conversations about how the world could be a utopia if only government were exchanged for anarcho-capitalism and common people were allowed to use their cars as taxicabs, then by all means, date an Objectivist.

..That's that experimental novel about the life of a pay toilet as told by the toilet itself in the first person...am I right?

It started the whole post modern toilet prose movement if I'm not mistaken.

The perfect place for Objectivists to find consolation sex amidst the flaming wreckage of laissez-faire capitalism...

Objectivists are just the most annoying people in the entire world. Back when I used to work at The Strand, I used to hide all the copies of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" so that future generations would not be contaiminated...

It's just a site where people with like minded ideas can meet. Is it really any different than eHarmony or Chemistry.com, or even gasp, the Salon personals?

Or is it just an exercise in making fun of people with unpopular ideas?

Ok, not enough of a sample to draw conclusions, but it looks like a dating service for people who don't understand why no one is as awesome as they think they are.

Losers for Losers?

You mean to tell me no one has scooped up these paragons of relationship Nirvana? How could these guys possibly be alone on a Saturday night?

(But I can think of a few regular posters here who would feel right at home ...)

An I-phone, programmed to speed dial the user's own number and reverse the charges.

I'm pretty sure this is a self-limiting problem. Ayn Rand's sex scenes mostly involve people who loathe sex and each other not having sex because they haven't attained some arbitrary goal yet. As it happens I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now (yeah, yeah... I was out of stuff to read and embarrassed because I had never read it), and the hottest thing in it is the man-love. It's like a big old shonen ai festival, except no one admits that Francisco and Rearden would really rather punt Dagny off a train terminal and make crazy money love with each other. Made funnier by the fact that Rand allegedly hated homosexuals.

But given the context money love is more appropriate.

..that "Atlas Flushed" is facinating reading.

Last summer, I was sitting outside the library at a local university; partly to have a cigarette, partly because it was a really beautiful day. Earlier on, I noticed a mentally-ill/developmentally disabled man walking around and around (and around and around and [around and around and] around) in a 10-20 foot circular pattern, half-shouting, half-mumbling the same phrase (over and over...).

He looked pretty well taken care of, like his mother had dressed him and velcro'd his shoes that morning. The phrase he kept saying over-and-over-and-over was something about an "essay contest" with a "Big Cash Prize." I sat and watched him for awhile, watched people laugh at him, make fun of him, etc. I figured there was no essay contest. Maybe one of his mom's friends was doing some sort of pyramid-scam (he was carrying a long box of business cards) or maybe it was some sort of literary scheme where no one really buys the magazine and they make their money off a submission fee, or maybe it was just that a local labor rehab center wanted to keep him busy for a day or one of the social workers' spouses was sponsoring the contest and couldn't find volunteers.

Anyway, he finally walked up to me (pretty far out of his way) and handed me one of the cards. It was for the fall essay competition being put on by the Rand Institute (in Irvine, CA). The 1st place prize was $10k and last year's winner wasn't exceptionally good.

I think that sums up anything Objectivists do. It's a pretty pathetic movement. During the primaries, a Salon writer said something about the weaselly BetaMales Hillary Clinton surrounded herself with. I don't know much about guys like Mark Penn, but it's the same way I feel about guys like Leonard Peikoff. Rand didn't want to be president, she just wanted to seduce guys like Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. It may have worked, even. She was obviously bat-shit crazy, so if it did, alcohol and a cheap motel were probably involved.

People always say her stuff is over-/melo-dramatic. Most books (and movies, and pop songs, and plays) are. Some of Camus' books (The Plague, for instance) escapes being cringe-worthy because it's "maudlin." Rand's stuff doesn't because it's ingratiating (and never funny). Kind of in the same way Atlas Shrugged (and probably some of her other stuff) is worth reading just to get perspective on how the mind of Libertarian-types work, it's almost a biography and tribute to guys like the Alpha Male architects I mentioned above.

I know next to nothing about online dating sites. I've never really had one (unless a music myspace counts), so maybe I shouldn't say this, but it (the dating service) sounds like that episode of the Chappelle show where he uses a shopping mall to show what the internet would be like if it was a real place (except it would be on SNL with a guest host Christopher Hitchens - no offense intended).

The rhetoric surrounding Ayn Rand is tired, weak, and obsolete. Less so with her other books than it is with The Fountainhead, which I liked. To phrase it in a way anyone can understand, it's about a guy who really loves his hobby and has productive and healthy relationships with like-minded people. And especially in the middle of an historically bad economy, it was about an atheist who lived by that oh-so religious concept that if one lives a good life, good things will probably happen. Even if they don't succeed, it's still a Life Well Lived.

If one really has to put it in the context of "dating" (or is really all that upset about the fact that the author deals with the suicide taboo), the arts is full of alcoholics and dreamers and people who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Most people understand that it's a difficult, humiliating, uphill lifestyle. As someone who works in the arts (and seldom outside the periphery), passionate, sensitive, smart guys who've just had their heart broken are a dime a dozen. And after a few weeks of clarity and happiness, they (and myself as well) all start to drift into that black hole of thought where they feel unhappy and think that if they just had a girl in their life, they wouldn't be; that all (or any) of their problems would be solved. When they start to believe it, they become "clinically depressed." (The common cold of mental health.)

The Roark character never seemed to fall into that trap. He just hangs out with his boys, even asks one of them if he can help him find a shit job.

As far as I can tell, it's a feminist issue because Objectivism was founded by a woman during a repressed era. She's had a long atheists' afterlife. I read this zine (Broadsheet) pretty regularly and never comment because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But it's worth mentioning that Objectivism is (like a lot of philosophical movements) lame and silly without a plot or a narrative. Crash isn't about LA, it's about racism vs. urban animosity (something there's no shortage of in LA). And one of the things I like about Broadsheet is that - whether I agree with you or not - it puts Feminism in a relatively bourgie context (something there isn't enough of). You're also more fun than the Weisberg-guy. :)'

The rape scene is stupid - like a filler track on a pretty good album. Or the orthopedist on Gray's Anatomy sobbing about building the pretzel man's bones. Aside from the fact that it goes hand-in-hand with reason and rational, compromise is a central theme of Rand's books.

Thanks for your time.

-m