After reading that Times article about young, attractive women and older men with money meeting and mating
on SeekingArrangement.com, I thought to myself, "I could do that, if
times got hard enough (no pun intended, me)." Turns out, I couldn't.
Does that make me a hypocrite?
See, I've always had this sort
of salt-of-the-earth ideal of myself, that no job is beneath me and
that anyone who says that they "can't" barback or be a waitress is a
stuck-up brat. And if you're going to be objectified anyway at your day
job, why should the social stigma of "the oldest profession in the
world" keep you from making $10k a month and being treated like a
princess? Especially if it was a discreet arrangement and no one ever
found out, like the website touted. Didn't I once submit a set to SuicideGirls and cash that
check proudly (and a little vainly) in college? Didn't I write nasty
sex advice columns for Gavin McInnes? After my full-time job folded and
I ran out of cash, I thought, it's time to put my mouth where the money
is.
But after I signed up for the site, created a fake name
and an alias e-mail address to talk to these Sugar Daddies, I found
myself unable to go through with the actual meeting. Something just
struck me as indefinably sad about men who wanted to pay me for my
company, and trying to imagine myself boning them made me sneer. I did,
indeed, feel like I was above that. Fuck. I'm such a jerk.
And
although most women my age would breath a sigh of relief at finding out
they couldn't go through with semi-anonymous prostitution, I just got angry
at myself. Even more perplexing, I got angry at these guys who were
going to pay me money, because they were the Haves and I was a
Have-Not. And apparently I'm not the only one to feel this way:
Stephen Dent, heir to the DuPont fortune, got bilked for over $299k on SeekingArrangements
after being blackmailed three times by three separate women. Which
doesn't include the $200k he spent on women from the site who didn't
end up trying to steal his family jewels.
Both Dent and these blackmailers seem equally reprehensible, which
shows the fatal flaw in SeekingArrangement's promise of a pampered life:
In the end, the men and women you meet on these sites aren't looking
for a connection. They don't care if you like them or not, if you find
them attractive or sexy. They merely want to exchange sex for money,
but with all the formal trappings of a romantic excursion. That means
you just don't get to have sex with an old, married guy for money; you
have to go out for drinks with him first, sit there and nod, pretend to
be interested, and waste a whole night with the kind of boss you'd
usually sue for sexual harassment. That to me was 100% more distasteful than the act itself.
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