Gentlemen For Hire

A while back I wrote a series of posts about my adventures in Online Dating. My OKCupid account is currently deactivated because I am seeing someone in an exclusive not-hooking-up-with-random-weirdos-from-the-internet way. Which is fine and lovely, obviously, but you know, I do sometimes miss the weirdos.

And the "sexy" aquatic images that for some reason accompanied all my dating posts.
(Yes, I did crop the picture above. You're welcome.)

Incidentally, when you deactivate your account, OKCupid asks you to provide your reason for doing so from a list of options which include things like "because Online dating turned out to be terrifying and weird" and "I got fed up with all the axe-murdery types sending me badly spelled messages." I imagine when someone actually ticks the first option "Because I met someone through OKCupid", everyone in the OKC offices gets very excited and starts high-fiving one another. I like to think I made them happy, anyway.

Fun as it was, I don't think I can reactivate my Online Profile just for the purposes of poking the nutters with a stick. If you're not actively looking then you don't get to play. Online Dating is not a spectator sport.

If only there were another source of weirdos on the web...

Well, happily enough there is! There's the utterly baffling (and horribly fascinating) Male Escort site Gentlemen4Hire.com. These men aren't going to be doing any chasing. They want women to come to them. And to pay handsomely for the privilege.

Gentlemen4Hire does exactly what it says on the tin. It provides a selection of gentlemen of all shapes, sizes, nationalities and ages and the hourly rate for which you can avail yourself of their services.

All manner of gentlemen can be found on these pages, from slick Italian 'ex-model', Matteo here:

Matteo (£90 p/h): "If you ask, my best quality is that I am a great listener and have the gift to deeply understand women."

To the slightly more rumpled-looking Mohit. To be fair, Mohit recognises that he might not be to everyone's taste and has priced himself accordingly. It costs a mere £10 an hour to hang out with young Mohit, there. That's a ninth of the price of smooth, chin-fondling Matteo.

Mohit (£10 p/h): "I like nice women who like me for who I am"

What services are you buying here, you may ask? Well, emphatically NOT SEX according to Gentlemen4Hire's FAQ page. "Our escorts are straight male escorts offering companionship only, they do not offer sexual services". Oddly, this information doesn't seem to have been communicated to the escorts themselves. Most of the profiles seem to be all about assuring their potential clients of their sexy sex prowess. This is achieved with varying degrees of subtlety.

Tom (£40 p/h) claims to be "well-dressed" on his profile.
You're not very dressed at all here, mate.

Luke (£100 p/h): "il be anything you want me to be."
Um, how about clothed?

Not all the gentlemen for hire are quite so brazenly up for it though. Ashok (who expects a whopping £180 for each hour of his company) is very clear that he is not going to put out. Like he says on his profile, he "love[s] cuddles, holding hands, but on NO SEX basis."

No sex with Ashok. Just STOP ASKING, all of you.

The quality of photos on this site varies a hell of a lot. For every good-quality decently shot set of pictures, there's at least one person who was clearly happy to bung up whatever picture they just happened to have on their phone regardless of whether it was blurry, or the size of a thumbnail or was clearly cropped out of their own wedding picture.

And apparently 'cropping' may be a skill to far for some of these gentlemen. Er, was that your wife, next you there, squire? That's ... disturbing.

James (£65 p/h): "No calls will be ansered [sic] without previous contact, I repeat I will not answer calls without prior contact."
Why? Because the missus might find out what you're up to?

Far worse are the pictures where children have been partially cropped out or covered up. Seriously, you're pimping yourself as a straight male escort and you couldn't find a single fucking picture of yourself without your children in it? I am not linking to any of those pictures. I have no idea what those men were thinking. I presume they weren't thinking at all. If there was any amount of thought involved, that makes it all rather worse.

There are plenty of other baffling images to choose from, though. 'Can' here seems to enjoy a particularly close relationship with his dog. So much so that he included this picture four times in his profile. Four identical pictures. One after another. Just in case you accidentally scrolled through the first three. Is what you're doing there even legal, mate?

Can (£100 p/h): "I'm 25 years old I'm Turkish I like sex. I can make you happy."

Like on every online dating site ever, many of the men here have no idea how to sell themselves. Which is odd because this time there is actual, literal selling going on.

I wonder how much business any of these gentlemen for hire actually get? Is there a lot of demand for this sort of thing from women, do you think? The website's Become An Escort page tells us that "there is currently overwhelming demand for male escorts". But, you know what, lads? I think the site owners may be bulshitting you.

All the gentlemen on this site are paying £9.99 a month to have their profiles displayed. It's a small enough sum for plenty of blokes to presumably think "Oh sod it. I might as well. Could be a laugh." and given that the site owners don't need to do a thing other than host all the profiles (all bookings are made directly with the escorts), I imagine, there's a tidy little profit to be made from deluded souls who somehow think that offering their social and sexual services to lonely ladies will equal ££££££££.

I would love to know how many bookings these men get as a result of being on here. Because who wouldn't want to shell out three hundred quid (plus all expenses) for the pleasure of spending the evening with a unkempt, unfit middle-aged man with poor spelling and grammar skills? Goodness knows, it's not like Plenty of Fish and OKCupid aren't already teeming with such prime specimens offering to "fuk u evrey way u liek" for no fee whatsoever.

Not that I think all the gentlemen on Gentlemen4Hire are on a hiding to nothing. Take Dale from Bradford (£100 p/h).

"The experience of a lifetime which is sure to have you back for more."

Dale takes this shit seriously. He's got a YouTube account and everything. He's got dozens of photo montages set to cheesy music which allow the viewer to virtually enjoy Dale Meeting You After Work, A Dinner Date With Dale and my personal favourite, Dale Visiting You At Your Place.

This particular video a bit long, mind. 

If you're pushed for time, may I suggest skipping to 1:44 ("Dale takes his shirt off") or 3:40 ("Dale moves into the bedroom")

If you couldn't afford to hire Dale, you could pretend you were on a date with him by watching one of his "Dinner Date" videos while forking microwaved Marks & Spencer Spaghetti Carbonara into your mouth and sobbing quietly into your Pinot Grigio.

Delightful as Dale's videos are (and they are delightful. I can't stop watching them), that's not the reason I think that - unlike 90% of men on Gentlemen4Hire - Dale might actually be making a reasonable income as a Male Escort.

Dale, you see, advertises on numerous Male Escort sites. This includes Gay sites. If there are any men reading this who do want to make a living from having sex with people, I think having sex with other men is probably the most profitable way to go about it.