Is This Personal Ad Prostitute-y, Or Is It Me?

I’m a huge fan of personal ads, particularly in print.

Actually, I love small ads of any kind: I spent a very happy half-hour perusing the rifles, ammo and spinning wheels on offer in Woomera, South Australia, while I adore the ads in Ubud library (“Yoga studio share! Suit single female! Must LOVE cats!!!”… “Native American shaman! Excited to experience the spiritual energies of this incredible island. Available for personal readings…”)

But it’s the personals that I truly adore.

Tragically, they’re the first thing I turn to in the New York Review of Books, replete as they are with all kinds of emotions, from rampant egomania whose efforts at restraint make matters so, so, so much worse:

“Slender, passionate and undeniably graceful but humbled by writing this ad…. ”

To the late-in-life realisation that talent and creativity don’t actually pay the bills:

“Seeking verbal, secure man …. values generosity…”

Ah, the wonders of generosity.

It is “generosity” that is at the heart of the over-exposed MissTravel.com, an online “dating” service started by a chap who apparently turns over $10million per year on sites that include SeekingMillionaire.com (tagline: Find Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women).

MissTravel introduces “generous members” (the default assumption is that these are men) to “attractive” members (women), so that they can, ahem, travel together at the generous member’s expense.

Platonically, of course.

Because no rich man likes anything more than fronting up for a second hotel room or a spare bedroom for that hot blonde they met on the prostitute-y site….

Mind you, looking at the number of male members looking to meet women in their local area and providing alternative means of contacting them than MissTravel.com, it would appear that by no means all “generous” members have the generosity, or indeed the cash, to front up $50 a pop to chat to some woman who might or might not be an Estonian hooker…

But I digress.

Private Eye, the oh-so-English satirical magazine, has its personals down pat. Most of them offer discreet “encounters” of one kind or another, often with customisations tailored to the public schoolboy of a certain age.

But the IHT personals are a very special case.

Precisely because they are non-geographic, so cast their net wide to EuroTrash, MidEastTrash, and, in fact, jetsetters, or wannabe jetsetters, of every kind.

There are the marriage brokers, their introductions cast in the kind of delightfully fractured English that positively oozes a French accent and must take the copywriter hours, if not days, to achieve, and transport you to a magical world where women still (seriously!) go to finishing schools: “Zee perfect wife for a vairry successful man… eez flawless!”

And then there are the personals.

“Extremely attractive high fashion model. Enjoys socialising with UHNWs. Looking for summer position in Marbella, Nice…”

Even for the dedicated personals addict, UHNW is an unusual acronym, one more often found in the luxury marketing trade press or Forbes.

It stands for Ultra-High Net Worth.

AKA: “Model seeks billionaire, optimally with yacht.”

I peruse this ad a couple of times. Is it prostitute-y, I wonder?

Without getting all rad-fem on your ass, most exchanges of looks and money feel a little prostitute-y to me, whether that’s older Western men with young Thai women or, as here in Sinai, older Western women (and, albeit on the DL, men too) with young Egyptian guys.

But then I think, no. Not exactly.

She’s a very beautiful girl who wants a very rich man, and she’s happy to put it out there in the Herald Trib for all to read.

Good on her, I think.

Although I do wonder how many restaurant and nightclub managers read the ad and jumped for joy at the thought of their new, and highly focused, door hostess, who would IN NO FASHION WHATSOEVER be off like a shot at the first sniff of a shopping trip.

My all-time favourite personals ad, though, was in the Saturday Guardian.

It read, from memory, in its entirety: “Look! I just want to have sex.”

And, hot damn, I bet he got a lot of calls.