Andrew Worsdale
Between 100 000 and 120 000 hits a day, and between 80 000 and 100 000 visitors a month makes Josephines at www.personals.co.za one of the most popular South African websites and without doubt the most popular dating service and adult “friend finder” in the country. You can meet people for coffee, make friends or get raunchy and go for the full monty.
There are numerous categories: male seeks female, female seeks male, female seeks female, male seeks male, swinging solos, swinging couples, HIV-positive, and – in the dating section designed for relationships – a Christian, Jewish and other religions service. There is also a fantasy factory, adult services, photographers, a travel club, accommodation and employment.
The site makes for a feast of reading of the pornographic and non-pornographic kind. One advert in the adult section for males seeking females reads: “I will crawl under your skin, steal your heart, drive you up walls, get you addicted to me, boil your blood and sizzle your brain.” An ad for females looking for males reads: “Can’t you see we want real guys, not freaks. You don’t have to be Superman. Give us your stats, we don’t mind age, give us your age, length, weight – then your member – thickness, length, cut or not.”
The most fascinating aspect about Josephines personals though, is that the eponymous Josephine is a man – the 43-year- old Doug Meaker who came up with the idea.
Dressed in jeans with cowboy boots, Meaker hardly sits down during our meeting, constantly pacing the room and intermittently taking calls on his cellphone, including one from a woman selling swinging cruise tours to Europe who wants to advertise on the site.
Meaker started out his working life as a second lieutenant in what he quaintly claims was “the height of the Rhodesian war. I mean I didn’t agree with Ian Smith’s policies, but what are you going to do – just duck?” After that he went to the University of Cape Town to study for a BCom, but would volunteer to go back to Rhodesia as an army volunteer over the Christmas vacation. “I was given a troop and ended up exploring the nicer parts of the country,” he says.
After varsity Meaker set up business and started selling fitted carpets and security installation door-to-door in Mitchells Plain. “I had the distinction of selling a family a whole replacement lounge carpet from under their feet while they were watching Dallas.”
After that his life went “spectacularly bang” and he was declared insolvent, lost his sports car, his townhouse in Llandudno, and was forced to drive to Johannesburg during 1981’s infamous snow storm. He found work as an account executive for an advertising agency, saved up the finance to buy cameras and then set up his own photographic studio, which he ran successfully for several years in Sandton City.
Then at the end of 1994 Meaker helped set up pix.internet, South Africa’s first Internet service provider. “I had access to all the stats and saw 90% of the search engine inquiries were about sex,” he says. And so he started sex.co.za, and ended up servicing South African Web surfers with adult porno galleries mainly gleaned off Internet newsgroups.
In mid-conversation he takes a call from someone selling pool tables. “I need a couple of tables for the chicks to play on and my part of the deal still stands – you can come check out the chicks for free,” he says.
After the site’s relative success, Meaker brought on a partner whom he describes as “an absolute nightmare” and after a fall-out sold him sex.co.za with the proviso that the site set up a link to Josephines. And so the biggest adult dating service in the southern hemisphere was born.
“I borrowed R200 000 and we wrote the software,” Meaker says. “I think the greatest work of art is that the site provides absolute anonymity.
“I wanted to get out of hard-core porn. I think the Internet is changing. People are trying to realise their fantasies and not through thumbnail porn galleries or one-hand typing jerking-off stories, but through actually meeting people online. I mean when you log on to Josephines and see an ad, you know this person has just typed in his or her ad five minutes ago. So you’re looking at meeting the person a click away. What’s more, there’s no profile set-ups like various international dating sites, the person has written it themselves so there’s a certain amount of creativity there.”
But Meaker’s proudest contribution to adult dating on the Internet is the recently created section for HIV-positive people. “I once saw an ad from a son whose father had just died from Aids expressing sorrow and solidarity with HIV- positive people – it almost broke my heart.”
He says the other beauty is “that you can pose, but you can also be truthful. You can write I’m divorced, I’ve got 10 kids, a paunch and I’m broke, I’m your basic anti-hero, but this is my head, honestly. Then within five minutes this geezer has made contact with 10 people who want to meet him, and that would’ve taken him 10 years of walking in and out of pubs trying to meet the right person.”
Meaker insists that Josephines offers people anonymity and is a safe dating service – “even just for coffee, I mean there are a lot of lonely people out there who don’t necessarily just want a one-night stand”.
Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of Internet research and consulting house Media Africa, says “as far as I know sex.co.za and Josephines are the only local sex sites with a serious business model and strategy behind them, as opposed to merely shovelling porn at the user. As for other local sex sites, you can check out
@.co.za, hardcore.co.za and smut.co.za, which were among the top four sites on the Liveaudit traffic counter at the end of last year – beaten only by Leon Perlman’s cellular.co.za cellphone information portal.”
As for Josephines, it’s growing from strength to strength. Just two weeks ago, a Sunday newspaper reported that a couple had met and married through the service. In the meantime, Meaker intends expanding and is franchising the notion and the site to other countries. Australia and India have already been set up and the offer is open for other territories worldwide, with the idea that a franchisee can operate the site from his home base in South Africa and vicariously earn offshore money through date-line subscribers. Either way this Rhodesian-born man, who comes across as a photo-comic hero with his lanky jeans, blonde hair and toughened looks, is making it easier for people to meet each other – even if it’s only for a quick roll in the proverbial hay.