A couple of Texas coeds have struck gold by delivering the goods to an eager-but-under-served market for erotica.

New Yorker cover, November 8, 2004.

Elyse Moody offers a literary alternative to Missed Connections.

ve been asking myself some basic questions: What do I like? Reading. What am I looking for in a date? Someone who enjoys books and talking about them, and who can strike up good conversations with strangers. An idea started to gel. Maybe if I’m choosy about what I read on my longish interborough commute, the right guy—one with superlative taste who’s curious enough to make a move—will be drawn to me by the tractor beam the open book in my hands emits.

I ran this idea by my therapist, and she started nodding excitedly. “Books are such a great crutch,” she said. “I think of them like props.”

Exactly.

So this strategy’s been clinically endorsed. I’ve reviewed my journals, made a list of the most attractive qualities of potential soul mates past (setting aside their less desirable traits—e.g., substance addiction, monomaniacal narcissism, commitment phobia), and distilled it into archetypes of the charming men I hope to meet, if fate wills it, somewhere in the New York City public transit system.

Her choice of lures, however, struck me as far from the most interesting or effective, especially if you desire to strike up an acquaintance with “Ivy League smart” males. I think of Saul Bellow myself as an over-rated, excessively promoted ethnic writer. If I saw a girl reading Tom Robbins, I would shudder and walk quietly away. Eudora Welty is a representative of the grotesque-and-invariably-depressing school of Southern writing, and the sight of her dustjackets will probably work on most men in a decidedly anaphrodisaical manner.

The latest and greatest Internet service: your own Fake Internet Girlfriend.

The company explains that renting an imaginary Internet Girlfriend has multiple uses and is much less complicated than the real thing.

Sometimes people need to rent a fake girlfriend for their job. Some employers are biased towards single folks. Often times employers give preference to people in more serious relationships so it can benefit a person to have a fake online girlfriend they can say they are in a long distance relationship with.

Sometimes people hire a fake internet girlfriend to make an ex-girlfriend jealous. In fact, we get a lot of clients for this reason.

Sometimes people don’t want to hear it from their family, they want to avoid the drama all together of the never ending questions about dating so they simply employ a fake internet girlfriend so their family will stop hounding them about finding the right girl.

Sometimes people want to keep certain aspects of their personal life, well personal and private. The one way to do this is to hire a fake internet girlfriend for appearances sake. It avoids all the pesky little questions about why you’ve never been seen dating a girl before.

It isn’t cheap, however. A Fake Internet Girlfriend costs $250 a month, with a minimum three month commitment. Her utility is seriously limited as well since she will never meet you in real life, and will not do sexting.

Hat tip to Victoria Ordin.