Perhaps predictably, the Net still plays a bigger role for people who often have to work harder to meet potential mates – the gay and lesbian community. According to the “How Couples Meet and Stay Together Survey” conducted for the paper, a whopping 61 percent of gay couples met online, compared with 21 percent of straight ones. Also better-represented: the middle-aged, and couples of different religious backgrounds.

And so, this Monday, just in time for the news that none of us ever need leave love to fate or happy hour at Houlihan’s again, eHarmony – which famously refused gay-romance seekers until settling a lawsuit earlier this year — celebrates its 10th anniversary with a new campaign of romantic promos directed by documentary great Errol Morris. Take a nostalgic moment to remember the time before eHarmony, OKCupid, Match.com, the Salon personals and whatever weird fetish service you belong to existed, when the idea of actively shopping around for love — or something considerably more casual — on the Internet still carried the taint of desperation, the implication of, “What, you can’t just go out and meet people, you social leper?” But, then again, there was probably a time you didn’t think you’d be watching “Braveheart” on your phone either. Welcome to the future!

It’s a sign of the times that the new eHarmony campaign doesn’t explain what the service does, focusing instead on playful images of real couples romping in “I found the one!” bliss, while an unseen narrator zeroes right in on the money question to ask, “What if you had your last bad date?” (Cue sound of a million wallets busting out credit cards.) As ad co-creator Lucas Donat explains to the New York Times, “People don’t want to be sold to anymore.”

And yet, what is dating itself but one big sales job? With online dating, it’s almost too easy to be both the shopper and the goods. As Lori Gottlieb pointed out in “Marry Him,” online dating can turn into a “you might also enjoy” comparison shopping experience, complete with a neatly presented array of attractive prospects. It’s like Benetton for booty! Click, click, click, add to cart. Try this one on, take that one back.

What’s good about both the Stanford study and the durability of even not-so-cool sites like eHarmony is that being proactive about connection is no longer viewed as unromantic or loserish. Somewhere along the line, enough friends and friends-of-friends started meeting cool people and even falling in love to make the “Let’s just say we met at the deli” cover story moot.

But as eHarmony’s new campaign makes clear, love — or even a really good hookup — isn’t always a simple matter of what matches up perfectly on a survey. “What if you were loved for you?” it asks. What if? What if we had a way of finding people who share our interests and like our pictures, so we could be out dancing instead of  sitting at home lonely? And what if, along with all the practicality and purposefulness and monthly fees the Internet brings, it turns out we still hope, in our hearts, for something approaching magic?

But that’s not PoW’s true raison d’etre. No, it is to feel better about one’s own relative attractiveness. Though site creators Andrew Kipple, Adam Kipple and Luke Wherry tell would-be contributors, “There is no reason to send us pictures of people that are seriously and unfortunately handicapped so don’t be an asshole,” pretty much everything else is fair game. And we are not a pretty people, America. We have a surplus of back fat and a shortage of teeth and sartorial judgment.

Sure, it’s all in good fun, and frankly if you’re traipsing around the storage solutions aisle in a hospital gown, you may be the textbook definition of “asking for it.” And seriously, nobody needs to draw on eyebrows ever. 

Yet is it possible to read the comments under a photograph of an obese person on a mobility scooter, snarking on her “rolls of Twinkie fat” and “lardass” and not feel like giving your paycheck to Greenpeace just to balance out some of the epic douchieness in the universe?

For all the ire that WalMart, evil empire, inspires, it would appear our greatest disdain is reserved not for the corporation but for those trashy, lardy, pathetic people who roam their aisles. How dare they be guilty of shopping while hideous? Of having a baby and showing off “thunder thighs”? Of being just so goddamm unself-aware? In the words of Nelson Muntz, “Ha HA!”

I’d wager that on our worst days, most of us don’t meet the extreme standards of mullet-rocking, butt-crack-showing excess it takes to earn a place on PoW. Yet it doesn’t take much perusing of the images – many with faces totally unobscured — to feel utterly mortified for the subjects, and to marvel at how easy the Web makes it to laugh at some fat loser in Texas who left her house in a tube top this morning without consulting the whole wide world on her weight, wardrobe and overall lack of comeliness. And it makes one weary, very quickly, of how very ugly we truly are.

The site is called “MouseMail.com,” and the logo is this super-cool tween mouse that looks all sassy and is holding a soccer ball, because the kids these days play soccer.

Apparently you set up your MouseMail account and then approve a contacts list for your child, to make sue that sexual predators and that harlot down the block are not emailing your child without your permission. Here is how it works: MouseMail intercepts messages “deemed inappropriate” and sends them to the parent for approval before the child receives them. It also will somehow stop “cyber bullying.”

(But the mobile service only seems to work with a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android phone — so if your kid has a regular phone, he or she may sext to his or her heart’s content.)

Bennett talked to the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, who asks if kids should even have phones, and wonders if “the Internet is a dangerous thing for families.”

It may be, but it is also a wonderful place to make money off the fears of National Review-reading parents.

The redesign is part of a broader overhaul of MySpace, as the site works to stay relevant to its current audience and draw in new users, including those who haven’t visited in years.

In setting itself apart from Facebook — which in just a couple of years dethroned MySpace as a media darling and Internet favorite — MySpace is focusing on attracting younger users and helping them discover new things.

That has been the site’s forte since its heyday, when teens flocked to MySpace to find out about new music and design their often flashy, jumbled home pages. Facebook, meanwhile has become especially popular with the over-35 crowd.

MySpace President Mike Jones said the latest changes are in preparation for a big overhaul in the fall, “so as we turn on the full relaunch it’s not a shock to the system.”

The goal is to be relevant to 13- to 34-year-olds and help them discover new people and new content.

EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson called the redesign smart, a clear departure from the MySpace of old that was a “cluttered, messy catchall.”

“Do I wish it happened sooner? Yes,” she said.

But it didn’t, and in the meantime Facebook has grown to 500 million. MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., has more than 120 million users worldwide.

“MySpace and Facebook really aren’t even competing in the same category any more,” Williamson said. “Which is good. For MySpace to be successful they need to carve out their own place.”

MySpace remains a go-to place for many new musicians who want to showcase their music and interact with their audience. If MySpace’s overhaul works, making music and entertainment front and center could help it serve the same purpose MTV did a generation ago. If it doesn’t, it could go the way of another once-dominant network, Friendster.