Following last week's WCP story on Late Night Shots, I got an invite from a fellow CP staffer. Accepting it may have been a mistake. Now, of course, I can't help but check the site once a day or so. I go in expecting to be shocked and am rarely disappointed. I'm not going to caricature LNS – it's not as though you sign in and there are dozens of threads with names like "WHY I HATE POOR PEOPLE." You do have to dig a little. But not much, and pretty quickly you find things like this:

I have been on 3 dates with a guy, he’s kind of cute and sweet. We have only slept together once so it’s not that serious, but he did something to really turn me off on saturday night. He told me he wanted to take me out to dinner, and told me we were going to Bistro du Coin. This was fine, but the entire night he was pronouncing it like “coin” as opposed to “kwa.” I was very embarrassed and I feel like it’s such a dumb mistake, particularly when we ran into one of my friends and he told her we were going to Bistro du COIN. Oh my gosh, it was awful. Does this mean he is trashy or should I just let it slide?

Oh. My. Gosh. It was awful. The girl’s LNS compatriots chime in with several helpful responses, including "way to bang him, smart move," "You are a pretentious whore,” “he is probably in his parents backyard playing with super soakers in his above ground pool right now,” and “I agree with you. If you’re over the age of 22 and taking a girl out to dinner, he should at least be able to pronounce it. He was probably wearing knock off loafers too, right?” 

By a large margin, my favorite response is: “Drop him NOW. Those king of things only get worse as the time goes on. Next thing you know he says he wants to take you to Paris and your [sic] on the plane flying to Las Vegas…” Huh? Because people who can’t properly pronounce French words can’t… read? Buy plane tickets? I’m really not sure what this girl is trying to say, but I like it! 

Which brings me to my fear. Prior to the WCP article’s publication last week, LNC was an anthropological and sociological goldmine: a closed online community of a very specific demographic with its own code of conduct and language (apparently, in LNS-speak, PT = “pound time” = sex; who said the rich weren’t classy?). Now, after the article, thousands of jackasses like me have doubtless joined, sullying the site’s formerly master race-worthy gene pool. Two weeks ago, if you saw a post like the one I pasted above, you could be pretty sure it was real, even if it did read like a caricature of old-money pretension (“Ew, he mispronounced a French word? Gross!”).

But now that the site’s been compromised by we teeming, lice-ridden masses, there’s no way to ever be sure that the most entertaining (read: most offensive) posts are genuine. It’s not that I doubt that there are girls out there who would consider nipping a romance in the bud because of a mispronounced French word (coughcough Georgetown); rather, what worries me is that there’s no way to know whether the person posting in this particular instance (or any other) isn’t just some dude like me sitting across town or across the country, reveling in the site’s ludicrousness and trying to bait other LNS members into hilarious responses. Hell, for all I know even the responders are leprosy-infected paupers.

This seed of doubt does take away from my enjoyment of the wild world of unbridled pretension that LNS offers. But not by much.