Via McArdle, this ad on Craigslist:
One very attractive male is offering his bedroom to an attractive female for the summer. No pressure or anything creepy. We can meet for drinks to discuss and make sure there’s mutual attraction.
I am fit, attractive, and under 30. Contact me for details, serious offer here.
No pressure, but mutual attraction required. Ooookay.
I think what’s particularly disconcerting – creepy – about this is not that he’s asking for sex in exchange for housing. Prostitution is nothing new, for sure. Rather, it’s the sort of passive-aggressive appeal. I mean passive-aggressive in the sense that it is passive and aggressive and not so much because it’s passive-aggressive in the snippy sort of way we think of the word. I mean, if he just came out and said what he was after, that would be one thing. Instead, he sort of wants to passively force it to happen. Of course, that’s one way to avoid going to jail for solicitation, I suppose. Whatever the utilitarian reasons for the tone of his appeal, it sort of feels like the guy that can’t quite ask the girl out and so keeps making “joking” comments to do so as indirectly as absolutely possible. Except that instead of avoiding the cops he would be trying to avoid rejection. Meanwhile, everyone in the room cringes every time he speaks.
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6 Responses to No Pressure Or Anything Creepy
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For all anyone knows the ad could have been intended as a joke.
I seem to recall reading about a similar thing in reverse where a woman offered to trade sex for housing, or perhaps a discount on housing, in some expensive city. Probably New York.
Can’t recall exactly where I read that, though..
Are we sure he was really proposing sex for housing? Or was it really just a cutesy personal looking for a summer fling? People do hook up via Craigslist …
I’ve seen ads a lot more explicit than that on Craig’s List. There was some fellow in New York years ago who I think owned more than one apartment, and he offered free rent for months at a time to women he found suitable, in exchange for he being able to occasionally (or regularly, I forget) have his way with them. I remember he talked up the arrangement by mentioning that some of his ‘alumni’ included artists, etc.
I remember thinking that that fellow’s offer was old school in that (as I learned in college in “Legal Foundations of Urban Planning”) the rights of property owners used to include Prima Nocta. The other time I remembered that bit about Prima Nocta was when I read about those ludicrous alcohol free New Year’s Eve celebrations called “First Night” (which would be a stupid name for it anyway, since New Year’s Eve is the last night of the year).
Peter, Killjoy.
Sheila, I don’t think he’s looking for marriage. But it certainly does seem to me that sex is implicitly part of the equation. In a sorta I-don’t-wanna-say-so sort of way.
Dave, I think it’s the inexplicitness that makes it so creepy-seeming. It would be less creepy, if also less legal, if he just came out with it.
Sheila called it: an ad for a short-term sexual fling. Actually, I thought it had a refreshing directness to it. I wonder what class of women responded.