By far my most successful ad was Marianne Dashwood. It was on Backpage, which looks like a craigslist knockoff, but only the escort section has any activity. You can get just about anything for any price, including the girl from Taken, or so hysterical articles proclaim. Most of the headlines are written in a mutating escalation of caps lock and symbols, so lowercase letters stand out graphically, an easy class indicator. I’m sure it will be shut down in a few years, at which point a visually identical html site will be thrown up, and a different entrepreneur will make a few hundred million dollars. Or perhaps all Backpage’s punters will sigh deeply and never pay for sex again, take up stamp collecting or model trains.
Marianne Dashwood proclaimed herself to be nerdy and geeky, slim and tall and blue-eyed. Backpage allows a very short descriptive paragraph, so one thinks in buzzwords, in social codes. Were there any literate men who would be interested in lil ol’ her? The photos were taken from the back. Rate was not included, which meant that each time it posted I had a wall of emails to reply to, most of which responded to the “donation” amount (very slightly more than average, and still less than most women on the closest other advertising site) with shocked hostility and stern talkings to. Charging that much was an outrage. Marianne was a real whore asking that much, a money-hungry filthy prostitute, but one that would never make any money in exchange for sex, because she was too expensive. It was conjectured that she thought she was better than a disgusting cumdumpster, which she wasn’t, and that she was riddled with disease, or would be, once she lowered her rates to acceptable levels. Some went with a light at the end of the tunnel, pointing out that if she charged half as much she would be sure to get twice as much business. Lowering her rates was only logical! Backpage has a lot of men with MBAs from Hooker U. They want to help.
At least one man would always ask Marianne out. A lonely girl like her needed someone who truly cared about her as a person. They generally provided no information about themselves, but knew there was a deep connection, one that could hardly be explained, and that she would feel the same. They wanted the first date to be at their apartment, and more than once mentioned music, candlelight, taking it slow, which they knew were sadly lacking in her life. When Marianne rejected their offers, they seemed genuinely startled. They warned her that money wasn’t everything, that she would see the error of her ways, that when she was all alone she would be sorry she had turned a nice guy down.