It sounds like the plot to the film H.E.R – or the old school Zapp and Rogers song – but according to the Business Insider, there is a growing number of grown men, who have given up on flesh and blood women and have taken to falling in hetro love with their computers.
From the article, Thousands Of Men Are Renting Platonic Internet Girlfriends For Long-Term Relationships:
“MyGirlFund is a website for men to interact with women via text and video chat. A system is also in place for men to privately pay the women if they want to. After that, it’s rather open-ended.
Over the last six years, MyGirlFund has developed into a unique community with its own norms and economy. While there is a “sex cam” aspect to it, the more interesting phenom here is the platonic relationships that men and women form on the site. Money changes hands on the site for any of a number of reasons, even for something as innocent as a guy helping a woman pay her rent that month.
MyGirlFund is host to roughly 8,200 women from all sorts of backgrounds and sees 15,000 new male members signing up each month to chat and spend money. Members buy credits worth $1 a piece, and spend it on whatever they’re looking for within the site’s rules, which mainly prohibit exchanging personal info and meeting in person.”
It’s important to point out that the article and the owner both state this is not mail order brides or some sort of Craigslist escort listing board. All the transactions are strictly online. The article goes on to say that a woman, selling online girlfriend duties on the site stands to make anywhere between $40,000 and $55,000 a year for her services.
According to the article, most of the women, who sell girlfriend duties online, are your average “girls next doors,” who are looking for a little extra money to pay off tuition and parking tickets. The founder and CEO of MyGirlFund, whose name just appears to be Brian, says that men pay girls for either specialized content (i.e. videos and photographs) or “simply to be a nice, generous guy.” But unlike your average porn starlet, Brian asserts that these “autonomous economic agents,” or women, are more empowered because they can just be themselves online without having to take off clothing – or too many clothes. In fact, one of the autonomous economic agents named Kandidreams tells Business Insider: “I’m a stay-at-home mom with two kids (my first-born [died] in 2008),” she said. “I just run the house while the husband is at his job. Taking care of the kids, house, dog. During the day I am just your typical mom, honestly.”
The concept of renting a girlfriend is not a new one. And again, I’m not just talking about prostitution. RentAFriend.com, specializing in connecting those in need of a date for social events like weddings or class reunions or just for the purpose of impressing that one person, whose always asking why you aren’t married yet. And the site, Fake Internet Girlfriend is a service which “allows our clients to discreetly employ real women to pretend to be their girlfriend online and communicate with them as if they were dating the person on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter or in some cases in gaming communities like World of Warcraft.”
It makes you wonder why Manti Te’o had to make up a girlfriend to begin with? Then again, I too wonder about what kind of guy would opt for this kind of service? And apparently so did Chase Hoffberger of the Daily Dot, who went onto one of the girlfriend-for-hire sites, more specifically GirlfriendHire, and purchased an online love of his own. This is what he thought of his experience:
“Having a fake girlfriend is stupid. Of course, I had a feeling that would be the case. The endeavor takes all of the good things—talking, sharing, the intimacy—and turns them into texts. Instead of laughter, it’s “Lolol.” Sharing? Allison and I just met that morning. And intimacy? Fetish, feelings, and fantasies aside, the girl was 17.”
Good thing the website has strict policy about offline fraternization or else that could get really creepy (and illegal). And I think that if anything was to bother me about the service is it’s potential for sex trafficking and exploitative uses. But other than that, I really don’t see nothing wrong with it – not bad (nor hard) work if you can get it.
