I came across some disturbing news the other day, but I should have seen it coming.
Online dating companies are sending out bogus e-mails, making bogus profiles, and even setting up bogus dates, all with the aim of ensuring men renew their subscriptions with the personals service.
Although the linked article doesn’t mention which sex is targeted in these types of scams, my educated guess is that these types of practices are aimed at men. After all, men are more likely to use personals services, and are “increasingly lonely” (read “desperate”).
It’s bad enough that intimate relations between sexes look ever more like commercial arrangements, we can now worry that our relationship is an entirely commercial transaction.
What kind of monster have we created that takes our insecurities, our loneliness; our cultural atomism and turns it into a dollar sign?
Prostitution, as Marx said, is simply a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer. In a sense then, we are all prostitutes. But today are we also all johns?