The Luxury Rental Girlfriend

Jack is in his 30s. He’s good-looking, makes money and has a nice apartment, and in this city, what all that gets you is almost everything. He meets me on Greenwich Street one morning for black coffee. Two girls he knows come walking by. He smiles, and his blue eyes are warm, but on one girl’s face you can see that whole wringing week she waited for a call.

You’re Jack, and you take a girl out to dinner at Blue Ribbon, and she spends three hours deciding if you’re the kind of guy who will like her more if she sleeps with you or if she doesn’t. If you like her enough, it will mean East Hampton on Memorial Day and Nantucket on Labor Day and New Canaan for life. And God help her, there will be golden retrievers.

Jack can have any girl he wants. A blond event planner who wears heels on Sunday mornings. A former fit model who looks great in Hanes white. A yoga instructor who makes him spicy tempeh wraps with steamed kale on the side. There are girls who make great Bloody Marys and there are good girls who go to church on Sunday with their families, but last night they were at Jack’s. There are girls who ride horses and lawyers and designers and tall ones and short ones, stacking their needs up across his walls and then saying those are not needs, they are shadows.

So why does Jack prefer escorts?

One night Jack comes over to my apartment. He brings over a girl named Kimberly (her fake name) who says she’s 24 (her fake age). She’s wearing jeans, a black scoop-neck shirt and tall black suede boots. She looks like the part of Florida she’s from, sun-pressed and squeezed out into a glass.

She and Jack have this easy back-and-forth, sitting side by side at the kitchen table. They’ve known each other for about a year. He found her on Backpage.com, which is where people like Jack have gone since Craigslist shut down its Adult Services section.

The first time, she gave him oral sex. She came over to his big apartment, and it was a blinder date than usual because Jack was looking for a quick fix. Normally he does his homework, using Eros.com, which is an escort directory, and The Erotic Review, or TER, which is Yelp for the sex trade, where johns trade information about the escorts and offer specific statistics. Hair length? Photo accurate? Shaved? More than one guy at a time? Full, no-rush session?

Created a decade ago by a john who was tired of being misled, TER sees about 350,000 visitors a day, men between the ages of 35 and 55 with a median income of $80,000. They wax nostalgic about Mistress Natalie and Emma of New York, and if you pay for a membership, you too can read about how WkndWhacker found VIP Daisy’s breasts even fuller in the flesh than they looked on her website, and how the way she kissed was like “honey warming in his mouth.”

At first it seems like a niche thing, and then one night a bunch of guys have four Coors Lights and one general counsel says to another, “Wait, so what’s your TER handle?”

The guys refer to themselves as hobbyists. The hobby is sleeping with beautiful women and then reviewing and categorizing them. It’s as routine as Zagat, clinical in its ratings, exuberant in its quotables and so much a part of a hobbyist’s daily throttle that a group of escorts recently offered a holiday discount to johns who make donations to the K.I.D.S. Hurricane Sandy relief fund.

Many of the girls provide the Girlfriend Experience, or GFE. They rub your back and you take them to dinner, and they are in tune with politics, so you can say how you feel about Obamacare. You share some Kumamotos and Sancerre and then you cab back to the Waldorf.

There’s Venezuelan Goddess, who has long black hair and D-cup breasts in a lace demi and ankle cowboy boots. There is Bai Xi, who always pops up in the top 10; she’s small and Asian and replies to emails promptly. There is Jessica, with her Farrah Fawcett waves and Eastern Bloc lips. She says, “I have very long blonde hair & soft skin with amazing eyes & great smile. My outgoing personality will have you feeling very comfortable from the moment we meet, as if we have known each other for years.”

And that’s the main ticket. That’s why guys like Jack hire Jessicas for $1,000 a night instead of paying $200 for dinner with the lawyer who’s got a CrossFit addiction. The Bai Xis give you the same thing. Why go out with a Wife in Training when you can go out with the Perpetual Girlfriend? She puts out every time like she’s bucking for a rating, while the Wife in Training wants to know why you didn’t walk the four flights of her walk-up to collect her for dinner. She wants your mornings. The Girlfriend only needs your nights.

by Lisa Taddeo, New York Observer  |  Read more:

Illustration by Thomas Pitilli