Sex for World Series Tickets?

Let’s say that you’re a woman, and you’re a die hard fan of the home team. And let’s further stipulate that you’re not a season ticket holder, and you don’t have hundreds of dollars to buy a pair of tickets for yourself and your spouse, even for the cheap seats at the local stadium. What to do, what to do? How about placing an advertisement on Craig’s List, and hope that a sympathetic person who has a couple of spare tickets will help you out?

So, you’re writing the ad. After all, you’re the assistant director of communications at a local medical facility, and like any good ad copy writer, you know one thing for sure: “sexy” sells, and gets attention (particularly on Craig’s List). You settle on the following, and hit the submit button:

DESPERATE BLONDE NEEDS WS TIX!
Diehard Phillies fan - gorgeous tall buxom blonde - in desperate need of two World Series Tickets. Price negotiable. I’m the creative type! Maybe we can help each other!

Flirtatious? Perhaps. Solicitation? Hardly. But that’s what a vice cop in Bensalem, Pa. apparently thought when he read Susan Finkelstein’s advertisement in the ticket section of Philadelphia Craig’s List.

The cop responded to the ad, and set up a meeting with Finkelstein at a local bar. And busted her for prostitution.

Allegedly, Finkelstein crossed some type of arbitrary line, and offered (or implied) that she’d be willing to perform sex acts on the cop and his brother in exchange for two tickets. She was cuffed, booked, and her mug shot is now popping up all over the web.

Several thoughts come to mind, the easiest (and path of least resistance in writing about this story) being that women have been trading sex for favors since, well, about the time that Eve offered Adam an apple. Another thought is that perhaps she was naive in assuming that she could post an ad on Craig’s List, and that an altruistic guy would respond, show up at a bar, chat her up for a bit, and hand over two tickets to a World Series game just because she’s a sexy goddess.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer story, the vice cop was assigned to a unit that trolls internet forums for “crime”, and the officer “pursued the Craigslist ad to protect minors”. It would seem to be fairly obvious that Finkelstein wasn’t pursuing a 16 year old boy, if indeed she was willing to trade access to her body for access to a super box. With all of the true crime happening in Philly, it’s hard to believe that police would set up a sting operation on Ms. Finkelstein on the assumption that she might be looking to do a Mrs. Robinson on an underage male. But they did.

In any case, let’s hope that police decide to drop the charges. There’s little to be gained in prosecuting case, and most certainly Ms. Finkelstein is not a prostitute. The notoriety she’s gained from the publicity around her actions almost automatically guarantees that she’ll lose her job, and (perhaps most importantly to her) that someone who supports her will come up with two tickets to the game.

Play ball, and let’s be careful out there!