Profiles

Everyone in this section is invented.

The names, the cities, the histories and the images are ours. No profile depicts, is modelled on, or is intended to resemble a real person, living or dead. Nobody here is available for anything, because nobody here exists. Every image is generated, and every character is an adult.

That goes at the top because the section is shaped like a directory and is not one. If a reader assumes otherwise, the failure is ours and not their carelessness.

What a profile is

A short piece of fiction with a consistent shape: a name, an age, a city, a register, a handful of tags, and a few hundred words of story. The cities are real ones, taken from the City Index, so a character stands in a place with a documented scene at two in the morning instead of in a generic backdrop with the lights turned down.

Profiles are written to be read rather than browsed. The tags are there so you can find a register that suits you. The writing is the point, and the writing is where the time goes.

Why this section exists

The commercial answer is that it is the part people come back for. A score is read once. A cast is read repeatedly, and readers vote on it, which is how the World Class 100 gets built.

The honest answer is that inventing the cast is how we write about adult culture without writing about real people who never asked to be written about. A publication in this territory usually ends up doing one of two things: profiling individuals who did not agree to be profiled, or reprinting agency copy with the adjectives left in. Fiction avoids both. It also gets to be better than the source material, since nothing about it is constrained by what happened.

Rules we hold ourselves to

• Every character is an adult, and is written as one.
• No character is based on a real, identifiable individual, and none carries a real person’s name, likeness or biography.
• Nothing on a profile page is an offer, an advertisement or an introduction.
• Generated images are labelled as generated, on the page and in the file metadata.

Those four are not softened anywhere on the site, and they are not softened in the fiction either. The longer version, and what we do when we get it wrong, is in our editorial standards. If you think a particular page has got it wrong, complaints reaches the people who can change it.