In Atlanta, an online ad offers a room in
exchange for “sex and light office duty.” In Los Angeles, a one-bedroom
pool house is free “to a girl that is skilled and willing.” And in New
York City, a $700-a-month room is available at a discount to a fit
female willing to provide sex.

On the widely used Web site Craigslist.org, some landlords and
apartment dwellers looking for roommates are offering to accept sex in
lieu of rent.

“They
have to be attractive. I don’t let just anybody come into my house,”
said Mike, a man who answered the phone at the New York City listing
but declined to give his last name — and refused to say whether he has,
in fact, collected the rent under the sheets.

The offering of shelter for sex is older than, well, real estate itself.

But
the online come-ons are franker than anything you might see in the
newspaper classifieds, because they are not edited by Craigslist, and
perhaps also because the anonymity of the Internet often causes people
to shed their inhibitions.

Trading housing for sex is a form of prostitution. But the police aren’t kicking down doors.

‘Little more than a form of voyeurism’
Paul
J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner in New York, said investigators
have found that the Craigslist ads are frequently “little more than a
form of voyeurism that didn’t result in an actual exchange of sex for
rent.”

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