A man in his late twenties recently enquired about booking me with an unusual request. He wanted to hire me for an hour for a very specific, non-sexual roleplay. Basically, he had played a prank on his two housemates—women he only knew through living with them—and they had responded badly and wanted him to move out. He had panicked when confronted and said that he wasn’t responsible for the prank; the girl he was dating had done it. His housemates insisted on a sincere apology from the girl, so he wanted me to pretend to be her and to apologise to them both in person. When I asked him what the prank was, he baulked, but I explained there was no way I could apologise for something without knowing what it was. He then admitted he had put a bottle of lube in one of their bedrooms. He had thought it would be funny, whereas they found it not only in poor taste but felt it was an invasion of their privacy and safety to have a near-stranger in their space.
I told him I could do it, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to double down on a lie. I also had moral reservations about lying to two women, so in the end I put him in touch with an actress friend who I thought would be better at the improvisation required and had fewer qualms. She negotiated a doubled rate and then agreed.
In the process of lining her up for it, I spoke to some other friends about the situation. One told me a story about a girl who had had an affair with a guy in a relationship and, when his girlfriend had found incriminating texts between them, had been paid $5,000 by the guy to tell the girlfriend that the relationship was completely platonic. The girlfriend believed it and they remain together to this day, though she is oblivious to the money and the web of lies that hold her there.
All of this made me think of behaviour I have noticed from some of my very rich clients, which is an outsourcing of tasks or responsibility to people they pay. One of my best regulars is an affluent bachelor. He outsources every possible task or need in his life to women—he has a cleaner, a personal trainer, a stylist, an interior designer and me, the woman who meets his sexual needs. Every relationship in his life is transactional, everyone that interacts with him intimately is on his payroll, and I do think this warps his attitude to people.
I can see how, money can taint almost everything, possibly influencing the outcome and responsibility in even the most tragic accidents. For example, consider the case of British singer songwriter Kirsty MacColl, who died in 2000 while on a diving trip in Mexico, when she was run over by a powerboat owned by a Mexican multimillionaire family. Jose Cen Yam, an employee of the family, took responsibility for the accident amid contradictory evidence as to where the boat was, its speed and who was in charge.
I’ve interacted with many men who, on different levels, use money to evade responsibility and accountability. The prankster who wanted to hire an escort to continue his lie, and the cheating boyfriend who paid his lover to lie to his partner have the same problem-solving instinct as gangsters or dodgy businessmen. They are all men who cannot only afford to pay someone else to take the blame for their mistakes, but who see it as acceptable. That’s something I feel uncomfortable with consciously enabling.
