Social Enterprise Escorts?

This week's Village Voice features a fascinating article on Austen's Janes Agency, a New York City entrepreneurial venture in which three women--its founders--charge $60 an hour to go on chaste dates with men. No sex, no touching--just pleasant conversation in a public space.

The Voice article points to several points of intersection with the social benefit world. The venture started with the women, recently unemployed, looking for jobs in the Craigslist nonprofit & arts sections. While looking through Craigslist they noticed the number of men looking for companionship and wondered, joking at first, if they couldn't make money by charging men to take them out to dinner, since so many dates turned out to be laborious anyway. This blossomed into a sustainable business that the women now contemplate expanding to other cities.

But the do-gooder vibe didn't disappear. The service provides a number of men with a way to find companionship--as transcending "naked loneliness" is a basic human need--without any possibility or expectation of sex. Indeed, reducing the relation of exchange to an hourly charge also frees the client from the more complex web of exchange in an open-ended budding friendship. As the Voice observes, the Austen's Janes sites includes a reference to opposing human trafficking, and one of the founders now has a full-time job with a nonprofit. Moreover, the Voice reporter, who researched her article by taking on a client herself, followed a Janes co-founder's suggestion and donated her proceeds to a local charity for mentoring girls.

The objectification issue tends to be noted in discussing such ventures, as it should. It's one we'll discuss more at length later, but for now let it suffice to say that framing the question as paid-company-as-objectification vs. mainstream occupations begs the question of extent to which the norm in our current system is to make us something less than fully human.

As I've noted before, this is the thing we tend to lose by limiting social enterprise to ventures with a quantified social metric. The human experience is far more nuanced, and if the ultimate aim is to promote social good we hurt only ourselves by defining social enterprise as a Procrustean bed.