Taken To Dinner
Takemetodinner.com. What is it trying to do? To the ignorant on-looker, it could be a targeted at do-gooders who want to feel better about themselves by taking hungry tramps out to dine. Or maybe a website for flouncy, single middle-class ‘foodies’ who want to build a network of potential restaurant dates who share the same love of Tesco’s finest Balsamic Vinegar and vol-au-vents. To anyone who has actually been to the site, however, it is more than clear what its ‘niche’ is.
It doesn’t really matter that the name has been changed from oxbridge-escorts.com to the rather more sedate ‘take me to dinner’. The fact is, the old website name is still emblazened across the new website and there is a good reason for that. The reason is not (as Nick Dekker would probably like to make out) that it enables them to continue to benefit from the massive publicity that the original website acquired when it opened.
Neither is it a means to preserve that golden ‘brand awareness’ that was helped so much by an appearance on Richard & Judy. The true reason is that the ‘escort’aspect of the site has to be maintained. Why? Because ‘escort’, implicit or not, means sex at a price. Dekker claims that over forty dates have taken place through the website. Fine.
But from that forty it is hard to believe that the dates consisted of anyone other than journalists (as Gretchen Lennon found out) or people looking solely for sex.
As harsh as it sounds, why would anyone pay £300 for a date with an Oxford student other than to get some kind of sexual gratification in return? Or even if that is not the case, did Gretchen Lennon seriously think that by pricing herself at £300 and saying that she ‘didn’t mind’ how far she would travel she was going to attract someone who was willing to pay the bill and shake hands on the way out? She may have done, but if she did it was incredibly naive. Takemetodinner.
om is a site that coudl easily facilitate prostitution via the legal loop hole that allows escort agencies to exist. Everyone who uses the site either knows this, or soon will.
9th Jun 2005