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Reason people go through Couchsurfing? Sexuality and Spam

Snezana (Zhana) Vrangalova says she had the approval of a “CS administrators.” to spam? all the groups on couchsurfing with her survey on couchsurfing, safety, and sexuality. Does the approval of one person make it right ?

Also do you consider this spam ?

is an inappropriate attempt to use email, or another networked communications facility by sending the same message to numerous people who didn’t ask for it.

www.nrw.qld.gov.au/about/policy/documents/2976/definitions.html

Some of the questions from the survey

Q Have you ever had sex with a guest you didn’t know before? This includes, but is NOT limited to intercourse, and can refer to oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation, and other sexual behaviors.

Q If you answered “Yes” to the above questions, with how many different guests have you had sexual encounters with?

Q If you had more than one sexual experience with a guest while hosting, please describe up to two of the most memorable ones (using the same prompts as above).

Q In your past experiences, how often have you expected/hoped that a guest would have sex with you during their stay?

Q In your past experiences, how often have you felt that your guest was expecting/hoping to have sex with you?

Snezana Vrangalova grad, whose research delves into the world of casual relationships, explained that while a person uses a website for the sole purpose of finding sex, many other people that are on the website are looking for the same.

The main reason people go through these websites is simply for pleasure. Women much more often engage in casual sex with the intention that it will lead to a relationship. Men do it to increase or maintain their status in their peer group.”

http://cornellsun.com/node/27866

How straight are straight people exactly? ppt file

Wow !! Couchsurfing with the hope to have sex? Humm guess cultural exchange was just the smoke screen?

CS quarterly questionnaire?

Just to satisfy my curiosity; did any of the regular readers/posters of OCS receive this mysterious ‘quarterly questionnaire‘ about CS QoS? Not trying to prove a conspiracy (yet, lol), but since no information about this is given on CS, it would be interesting to reconstruct the user pool it was sent to.

Growing ambassador discontent

http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=7219&post=892839

couchsurfing.com removed from archive.org!

Ermonnezza writes

Interesting… a more obvious attempt to cover one’s *ss would be hard to conceive.

CS now blocked on archive.org

“Blocked Site Error. http://couchsurfing.com/ is not available in the Wayback Machine.”

A survey?

I was wondering whether anyone would think it a good idea to start a survey / series of surveys on aspect(s) of Couchsurfing.com. Surveymonkey and other websites offer easy-enough tools for that; it may be a constructive effort that we can make quite easily.

Since my personal biggest frustration with CS is the communication, I guess that would be as good a place to start as any. A good question format for this purpose may be to give statements and ask people to rate whether or not they agree with them; anyone is welcome to contribute statements (would be nice if you could keep them somewhat serious, lol), or give me other feedback regarding this idea.

Actually, do HospEx Networks really facilitate ‘Intercultural Understanding’ successfully?

As it seems interesting to set the things here in a wider frame (see, a.o., “Is travelling noble? Or: “The Emperor’s New Clorths” by PickWick), and some thoughts around this theme come up a couple of times recently (e.g. we vs. them), I would like to continue with this and publish more thoughts in this direction. I hope that this post is appreciated and will, hopefully, function as an opening to an interesting discussion and to new insights. And maybe even more people do so in future. Those lines have been first published, by me, on the HospEx Ne>>t Wiki under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

 

 

 

 

Prejudice and Discrimination will always be with us.’
Hospitality Exchange Travel Networks a respond to this?

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

 

After a short introduction to Hospitality Exchange Networks, prejudice and discrimination and their relationship to each other, this essay will examine two widely known psychological theories that can be relevant in the reduction of prejudice. At the end, the relevance to Hospitality Exchange Networks will be evaluated.

 

Read the whole essay on HospEx Ne>>t Wiki.

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Interesting Further Reading

y this discrimination

y my profile–dr harpal singh; harrysmalhotra was deleted ???????

had 60 friends/ equal numb of referances

2 vouches

verified user

just by personal baseless complaints of few fools!?????

CS outages on the increase?

Is it just me, or has the number and duration of CS outages increased significantly over the last six weeks or so?

I log into CS several times a day, or at least I try to do so to keep up to speed with my surf requests, but lately the system seems to be failing even more than usual. Was wondering; is disclosing uptime and downtime something the CS ‘management’ has to decide on, or is there another service/website/individual/organisation keeping track of that?

Is travelling noble? Or: “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

There’s a school of thought, today as in the past, that sees travelling as noble: The more you travel, the better you are as a person. It broadens the mind. It gives you an understanding of other cultures, enhances your emotional, intellectual, and social skills. It’s good for you, and for others, if you travel. Is this true? I would like to suggest a debate. I have many questions, even more doubts, and almost no answers.

Is travelling the new colonialism? Isn’t “travelling” just a luxury concept, restricted to the small percentage of the world population that own the large percentage of the world wealth?

Is it morally justifiable at all to travel for fun, especially to fly, in the face of global warming?

Do we have a duty to “offset” the emissions caused by our travelling, by making a corresponding donation? Or is it cynical to establish a “right to pollute” for those who can afford an offset payment?

When we encounter poverty and suffering where we go, does that give us responsibilities?

Do we change the places we go to? For better, for worse? Can this mean it would be better not to go? At least not to certain places, or in certain ways?

Isn’t hospitality networking ultimately just a way of extending the privileges of those already better off, by making their money go even further? Is the world really going to be “better” because of millions of white, male, heterosexual, not gainfully employed, under 25s, middle class, with higher education, from North America or Europe, visiting the rest of the globe, without spending much money there? Isn’t it really just an exclusive golf club type thing?

Why are 80% of signed up Couchsurfing users from North America or Europe? Why are so many active Couchsurfing users in the rest of the world expatriates from North America or Europe?

What would be necessary to make hospitality networking equally interesting to people from other continents? What are the cross cultural borders that prevent people from other cultures to become equally involved? Can it be that people from other cultures don’t like to talk about themselves that much in their profiles? Can the positive and negative feedback options be contrary to what they are used to? Can the dominance of traditional colonial nations and races just be scary?

What does travelling to the 1st or 2nd world mean for people from the 3rd world (and what about these numbers)? What does it mean to go to a rich place where the legal minimum hourly wage is what you make in a day or week?

I’ll stop here, and open the field for others, to come up with answers, or more questions. In the middle of all political controversy about how to run a show like Couchsurfing, I would really love to have an open debate about the underlying concept of travelling as such. Just one more question:

Is Opencouchsurfing usership possibly even less diverse than Couchsurfing?

;-]