Sexy Beast: The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man. Stan Cattermole

notes. The forum features, as you might expect, some genuine knuckle-scraping neanderthals, and frankly, some bona fide bad eggs to boot. But then that’s probably true of most online communities. I decided to give them a chance to show me more than that and I started a thread entitled: ‘Any advice for a freaky-looking fat fella?’

      This was my opener:

      So, the thing is, I’m ugly. Really ugly. Thanks to a combination of a misshapen skull, bad hair, and eczema scars, I’m actually fairly freakish. Plus, I’m obese. I’m so ugly that drunken girls dare each other to kiss me, then run away screaming and laughing like they’ve just licked an iguana. Even so, simply because I don’t want to die alone, I have to put myself out there. So I still go to parties occasionally and suffer the stares, the stifled giggles, and the shifting away as I move close to converse. And once in a while I plunge myself into the icy humiliation of ‘the move’. And it never, ever works. So this is how I ended up reading The Game.

      Now, even if I say so myself, I do have one thing on my side. That thing is that I am rather witty. I’m sharp, and funny, and bright. But, sadly, fine words butter no parsnips. If you’re a cross between the Elephant Man and Jabba the Hutt, you could have the pithiest bon mot this side of Cyrano de Bergerac cascading from your mouth and women are still going to recoil from you like you’re a giant cockroach.

       I’ve been rejected in some pretty cold ways over the years. Women have laughed in my face openly when I’ve said hello. One woman told me she only went out with human beings. Another told me she’d be sick if she had to kiss me.

       These words stick with you by the way. They become embedded in your heart like poison darts and float around in your system for the rest of your life.

      So, seeking guidance, I read The Game. Then I came here. And what I’d like to know—bearing all of the above in mind—is what kind of advice you would give to a guy like me. And are there any openers you’d recommend for freaky-looking geezers like myself? I look forward to your responses with excitement and glee.

      So, I have to say, while I am very impressed, on the whole, by the level of humanity which is coming across in the answers, I’m astonished at the amount of talk of hats. Fancy hats at that. I never knew the humble hat was such an integral part of seduction. For example, Gigabel suggests, ‘Hide your freaky head in a fancy hat’. I’m not entirely sure what he has in mind, but I’m imagining some kind of Panama. ‘Clothes are important,’ he continues, ‘and whatever you do, make sure you drop some weight. Eat healthy, do exercise, maybe even lap-banding…’ I had to look online to find out what lap-banding is. It’s not pleasant. In fact, I think I’ll stick to peas and bananas for now or, as Muff Daddy helpfully suggests, I’ll ‘loose’ a few pounds and find myself a blind girl (‘there are some scorching hot blind chicks out there!’).

      That makes me laugh. Not just the ‘loosing’ of the pounds but the seeking of a blind girl. It’s almost as if he knew. Meanwhile, Whipcrack tells it like it is. ‘Get fit,’ he says simply. ‘No need to be fat and nasty.’

      Then we have The Wizard, who thinks, along the same lines as Gigabel, that I might consider ‘bariatric surgery’, otherwise known as the gastric bypass. ‘You’d be surprised what loosing weight can do for your overall look,’ he continues. ‘You might also consider a stylish hat and some radical sunglasses…’

      What is this obsession with ‘loosing weight’? I’m beginning to think maybe it’s not just lazy spelling. Maybe it’s something Americans do in the bathroom.

      Hat alert! This one from Captain Shaft, for whom the solution is very simple: ‘Get some standard peacocking shit. Start with a wicked-awesome hat.’ OK, thanks, Captain Shaft.

      Of course, not everyone can be a fountain of insight and charm. There is, for example, the inappropriately-named sweetdickwilly, whose response is both hilarious and highly, horribly disturbing.

      ‘When a girl says something like that either punch the bitch in the mouth or put gum in her hair and she will have to cut it like a lesbo and no guy will want her.’

      Well, there’s always at least one proper psycho in every online community. This one is special though. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing this guy on the news one day. They’ll call him the Spearmint Killer.

      Happily, the rest of the community was quick to pounce on him, making it very clear that Spearmint was on his own.

      This next one—again from Muff Daddy—is very interesting, and makes me realise the genuine advantages of belonging to a community:

       Everybody here has decided to change their lives and we want to help you succeed. We want you to make other men jealous so they say, ‘How the fuck did he get with a woman like that?’ We want love to fill the hole in your existence that you’re currently stuffing up with food. We don’t want you to give up and grow old with your cat, surrounded by porno and video games. We don’t want you to fall down dead from a heart attack while jerking yourself off…We are your real friends. We already care deeply about you, more than anybody you’ve ever met before in your life. All we ask is that you push yourself, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. You’re going to have to fight to get what you want, and make no mistake, it’s going to be tough. Physical and spiritual ecstasy is within your grasp! You are no longer alone. We are with you.