Craigslist Files #56: Hookers, Hookers Everywhere

I honestly believe that craigslist will be the subject of an in-depth future study of Internet trends and human social behavior. By then the site will be defunct, as I frequently insist that we are indeed living in the age of craigslist's slow but inevitable decline. See, there's a difference between living and thriving. Craigslist is active, it's alive, but it's no more thriving than a potted plant in a college dorm room. The site's bad habits and unhealthy developments are slowly killing it, or at least setting the stage for whatever does eventually kill it. It's like your old uncle who drinks too much, smokes cigars and lives on fast food, and not mainstream fast food, but the cut-rate local burger stands with depressingly ramshackle facades. The booze, tobacco and Bubba Burgers aren't exactly killing Uncle Jake, but they're slowly fostering a wide variety of nasty conditions that will one day claim his life. On craigslist, the Bubba Burger is prostitution.

It's not that the very existence of hookers on craigslist makes the place worse, it's that the site doesn't contain them. After last year's utterly meaningless fiasco surrounding the Erotic Services section and its subsequent change to Adult Services, the craigslist whores have migrated throughout the site completely unchecked. Observe:

COME RELAX.....  .... HEALING HANDS

Have you been looking for a therapist who instinctively knows how to relax your body?!?
Let your body & mind take a much needed mini vacation. Listen to the waves crash against the shore while you slip into a trance!! Clean linens, relaxing environment, hot oils, aromatherapy, soothing music & soft-firm, warm hands. I am trained in many modalities; including, Swedish, Deep tissue, Reflexology, Reiki, & Sensual Massages. Call ... perhaps you've finally found the one!

Incall
$70= 30 mins relation ****SPECIAL***
$120= 60 mins relaxation
$160=90 mins relaxation***SPECIAL***
$210=120 mins relaxation

(Outcalls +$30)

GEORGIA
Call Me @ (number) if you're ready to relax.
take advantage of my relaxing & rejuvenating hands while you have the opportunity

You can find beauties like this in the Therapeutic Services section. Sure, it looks reasonably enough like an ad for a freelance masseuse, except for the questionable prices, use of standard hooker lingo and the scary attached pic suggesting that you can expect GEORGIA to be both naked and caked in makeup for your encounter.

Similar posts have started to pop up in the Beauty Services section which, as of today, has yet to be completely overrun with veiled ads for prostitutes. It'll be a little harder for the hookers to dominate Beauty than it was for them to ransack Therapeutic because, let's face it, massage parlors and prostitution are age-old companions. Seriously, last year I had to go to a massage therapist for carpal tunnel issues and everyone who found out, including my immediate family, made Happy Ending jokes. As far as I can tell hair stylists don't suffer from the same association, but craigslist is on its way to fixing that.

The bleeding over of prostitution posts from Adult Services into other sections could easily be avoided if craigslist didn't have to pay lip service to the increasingly anachronistic laws of the land. Ironically, the only thing that can save craigslist from being consumed by electronic hooker cancer is to just create a Prostitutes section and be done with it. Seriously, society won't collapse if we openly accept the existence of people who exchange sex for money. For now, craigslist is in a race for its life against United States law reform.