The fantasy of the romance novel has always been as much about winning a life of material comfort paid for by a man as it has been about affection. Is paying for sex romantic? The readers of romance novels must find it so, for the wealth of the male hero is a constant in these fictions, as necessary to the plot as his stern good looks. No matter that the typical sugar daddy on the site is 43 rather than 28, like the fictional character: His spankings and helicopters are still desirable. The company also reports that young women are the most interested in BDSM relationships: 36 per cent of the site's female users who are between 26 and 35 say that they are looking for Mr.
Many female clients say they are "Anastasia Steele" types, and an astounding 381,000 of them now say that they are seeking a "Christian Grey" arrangement. Seeking Arrangement claims that an impressive percentage of its users are looking specifically for 50 Shades-type relationships, and that this percentage has doubled since the release of the film. (Its owner and spokespeople have denied in interviews that it facilitates prostitution.) Seeking Arrangement claims to be the world's biggest, and it presents itself as genteel it advertises that its users are beautiful and successful. There are several other similar sites with variations on "sugar daddy" in their titles. The contracts they work out are up to them. The women list their physical assets, the men their financial ones. The company, Seeking Arrangement, pairs sexually available women with wealthy men. A few days later, I received a gleeful press release from a website that facilitates a commercial kind of matchmaking, boasting that subscriptions have gone through the roof – an increase of 240 per cent – since Valentine's Day, the weekend the film opened. I saw it in a packed Imax cinema and I estimate that the audience was 70-per-cent female. The highest-earning film of the past week, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a story about prostitution: A beautiful young woman signs a contract promising sexual services in return for material luxuries.
It's strange that prostitution is enjoying a moment of mass popularity just as our government has made the purchase of sex illegal.
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