Do We Still Think Of Dating As Pay for Play?
Rachel Kramer Bussel noted the following comment which she found under a random blog post about Google Voice:
How much did you pay for Gvoice? I thought so. One must understand that one gets what one pays. Am I to expect sex from my date if I don’t even wine and dine? i.e. there is no free love, there is no free lunch. Everything has a price.
Like Rachel, I tend to ignore most asinine Internet comments. But really? Are we still thinking of relationships as negotiated transactional arrangements? Because I’m pretty sure one of the only worthwhile things to come out of wage labor is the end to family-arranged marriages in which women were treated only slightly better than cattle.
In my dating days, I never determined whether or not I’d sleep with someone on the basis of how much was spent on a date. Occasionally, this got me into trouble when the guy expected sex (or you know, at least a good night kiss) for taking me out to some expensive restaurant. I usually went dutch on first dates, but my 19- and 20-year-old selves were not about to throw down $50 to hang out with a stranger. I didn’t understand why someone would insist on an expensive restaurant (presumably to impress?) only to turn the tables on you to suggest that you, in fact, owed them something for their generosity, which of course, came with strings attached. On the other hand, there were tons of guys with whom I did hook up and with whom I never shared more than a dining hall meal. Did I “have a price”? Hardly. But I learned pretty fast that there are some men — especially those self-professed “gentlemen” — who really think I’m no better than a cow.
