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In October 2007, a purported Craigslist exchange began landing in the snopes.com inbox. In the tradition of the Claire Swire embarrassment of 2000, the Peter Chung scandals of 2001, and the Jacqueline Kim infamy of 2002 came this entry in the Internet's ongoing showcase of dating scene follies: The Craigslist ad (which was posted to its New York boards) may have been on the up-and-up: in an 8 October 2007 New York Times article, a spokesperson for the online community said it does look as if the post was made sincerely. After the solicitation was publicized in the media, the anonymous poster removed it from Craigslist. A response entitled The Answer which was circulated in e-mail and on blogs and message boards along with a text copy of the Craigslist post apparently began as an e-mail rejoinder penned by another anonymous party. We saw this component attributed to four different ,em identified as working in the financial field in New York. One of them, an investment banker with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., was fingered more often than the others as the most likely author. His firm, however, denied that the banker so named (who did indeed work for that entity) did anything more than forward the message to friends, an act that inserted his signature block into the fray and caused some to take him for the originator of the piece. Women (and to a lesser extent, guys) seeking sugar daddies is certainly not a new phenomenon. While the enhanced technology of the information age may have handed such gold diggers new tools with which to track down their prey, the process itself long antedates modern history (hence ancient references to prostitution being the oldest profession). Although many readers have expressed skepticism about the veracity of the original Craigslist post (their own good hearts causing them to conclude the item must have been a send-up or a troll designed to provoke outrage), my experiences lead me not to be so skeptical: I have actually known women who genuinely believed they deserved wealthy husbands because they themselves were objects of beauty, and who could easily have penned and posted such a solicitation without their consciences offering up the slightest twinge. For them, it was all about the body and the face. There are women out there who see dating or marriage as purely financial transactions and who thus regard themselves as saleable commodities in search of well-heeled buyers. The internet has even provided them mechanisms with which to connect with their intended markets, dating sites such as seekingarrangement.com and seekingmillionaire.com.
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