Era will sell a few newspapers today with this story, front and center. And it’s a good story, about how “dozens” of area women are advertising “erotic services” on Craigslist, which even we here in Lancaster County can now use.
A good story and an amusing one, because Jack Brubaker had to call a few of these women and ask, uh, so what it is exactly you do. And no one really owned up to anything explicit; but then, they wouldn’t, would they?
There’s been a spate of what we might call “sin” stories in the news of late. Here we’ve got sex; a few weeks ago it was drugs, with a front-page bit on a Millersville party where students were ingesting hallucinigenic mushrooms - or “shrooming,” as you’d call it if you actually ever attended a Grateful Dead concert. And then we had the stories about a couple local restaurants seeking liquor licenses.
While the Craiglist story - while all these stories - are legitimate stories, good stories, they are of such interest to local readers because there’s still a sort of naivete in Lancaster County, I think, a sense that these things don’t happen here. But of course they do, and they always have; people here have always ingested the demon rum, and it really isn’t so shocking that some restaurants, even long-time “family friendly” ones, should want to cater to that. People have long ingested ’shrooms and every other drug under the sun, even right here in Lancaster County. And sex? Hell, we’re up to half a million people now. And not all of them came here from New Jersey.
We have this idea of Lancaster County as an exceptional place in a lot of different ways. We’re exceptional in terms of our agricultural heritage, which must be preserved. We’re exceptional for our architectural history, and ditto. And those things are exceptional.
But part of living in an exceptional place is that you begin to think that you are exceptional, that the people of Lancaster County are somehow exceptional. That manifests itself into this belief that people in Lancaster County are somehow more moral than people elsewhere.
I have never seen any evidence of this. And I don’t believe it to be true.
Human nature in Lancaster County is as it is anywhere else. We may be latecomers to the possibilities unleashed, in this case, by technology; but of course people in Lancaster County will use the Internet to solicit for sex, because people all over the country use the Internet to solicit for sex, and we’re not immune from that - no matter how high church attendance may be, no matter how rural we may remain. Lancaster County is of the greater world. And for a long time I think people have believed we weren’t.
And the shattering of this illusion is big news, indeed.






