11 ms·

Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga the

• moonka 9y ago
  Same here. I can't help but wonder about the ethical implications of lying to a child about something so fundamental for her entire lifetime.
  • thriftwy 9y ago
    It's not lie if everybody accepts and supports it, merely a convention. There's father-by-birth, and then father-by-adoption, and then father-by-convention.
    • kaeluka 9y ago
      The daughter doesn't support it
    • tyingq 9y ago
      Sorry, but it's just terrible. The mother is paying $200/month for a service that could disappear at any moment. The daughter thinks the rental is her real father. That's highly likely to unravel sometime in her life time. Certainly at his funeral...he is using a fake name and personna.
      • imustbeevil 9y ago
        > The mother is paying $200/month for a service that could disappear at any moment. The real father actually did disappear, after a history of abuse.
      • hrktb 9y ago
        I think the fact that the daughter or her surrounding world has troubles rooted in the lack of father representation is the terrible part. Not that someone has to be blamed, but it’s the shitty start of the story. From there if the mother can fake it until her daughter is in a better situation, I think it’s positive. Even if it doesn’t turn out that well, I am not sure it would much more devastating than having been bullied for all that time she was decieved, and it could a start for a discussion on how she deals with her father image.
      • Eliezer 9y ago
        Presumably if her mom is about to run out of money, she pays for a final session where the dad gets hit by a car and has a funeral, right?
        • danudey 9y ago
          If it costs $18,000 USD for a wedding, I wonder what it would cost for a funeral. Likely more than $200.
  • sho 9y ago
    The article specifically mentions the positive outcome of the arrangement - the young woman's confidence has improved, destructive behaviour stopped, bullying stopped, and she has the father figure she obviously needs at this critical part of her development. And from all appearances he is genuinely doing his best to be that. It's very hard for me to condemn this when the outcome seems so inarguably positive. Truthfulness is important, yes, but so is outcome. And if this woman after ten or twenty years, when she is well-adjusted with a career and family of her own, finds out the truth, would she be angry with her mother - or thank her? Ethics is not black and white. It can often be a struggle between multiple competing imperatives. This is a Trolley Problem for the human soul. O righteous crusaders for truth, if this girl was put in front of you, would you tell her?
    • Pharylon 9y ago
      It seems positive from what he says, but we only have one side of the story. How does the daughter feel about having a father she sees so infrequently? Is it hard on her? Does she wonder why he won't come help her when she calls him out of the blue over some emergency? Now that she's older, would it be easier for her to know the truth? We don't know. What I do know is eventually she'll find out, somehow. What happens then?
      • belorn 9y ago
        This question should be possible to be semi-answered by psychology studies. Do stability during the teen years outweigh a large negative event during adolescence? Seems like a question that researchers has been poking at for the last 100 years. Bullying also has its own share of research (https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/bullying/conditioninfo/Pages/health.aspx https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/bullying/conditionin...). It will not be easy to get a fair evaluation of harm vs harm mitigation.
      • dragontamer 9y ago
        Her real father left. So the real question is: is the 4-hours a week of fake fatherhood better than being a bullied, emotionally traumatized kid throughout some of the hardest moments of growing up? Its a fake, rent-a-father for 4 hours a week. But that fake fatherhood is probably way better than no fatherhood at all. Its a difficult moral question for sure.
  • geofft 9y ago
    We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband. We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child. We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability. What, really, is different about this? Just the fact that we're not lying to ourselves about what the relationship is?
    • make3 9y ago
      the difference in regards to adoption is that adoptive parents actually love you, while in this case is strictly for show. I'm not sure why you would lie about this anyways. "We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability" In this case, both of the people involved are grown adults and usually know reasonably well what's going on. The real problem here is how deep a break of trust this would be if they ever found out, and how wrong of an idea this would give ppl of relationships.
    • smitherfield 9y ago
      > We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband. I would strongly favor honesty in both those situations once the child is mature enough to understand, except, in the latter case, when it's clearly in the child's best interest not to have a relationship with her biological father. > We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child. That sounds to me like an extremely toxic relationship. > We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability. Those are at least real emotions and real decisions made honestly, not elaborate and unthinkably cruel deceptions. Imagine you learned the person you thought was your parent, or sibling, or spouse, was really another person entirely. They never loved you, they never wanted to spend time with you, and all your memories with them were a lie. They were just a hired actor the real part of your family paid $50 an hour to deceive you. It's hard to imagine anything that could be more painful. It's far worse than a death in the family. It'd be on par with learning your loved one were a murderer or rapist. It's like a particularly unsettling Twilight Zone or Black Mirror plot—I'm aghast that it's a real thing.
  • Myrmornis 9y ago
    It’s common to lie to children about religious dogma. Society is currently still accustomed to lying about fundamental issues.
    • Hoasi 9y ago
      True, and it may be unavoidable. The human species needs myths and storytelling to form cohesive societies. Make-believe is the cornerstone of money, government, social contract and so on.
  • grkvlt 9y ago
    We do that sort of thing already - see Santa Claus for example, where children are continually lied to about the identity of the person who brings them presents.
    • ugfgibcvg 9y ago
      Children are not stupid. They know.
      • logfromblammo 9y ago
        And yet grown-ass adults can believe that an alien overlord flew their souls to Earth millions of years ago in space-faring DC-10s and blew them up in volcanoes, or that you can baptize the idea of a person long after they have died, or that the strongest wolf is held down by chains made by dwarves from widows' sighs and morning mist, or that the Earth is flat, or that putting money in a brass dish will spread your values around the world. Smart children know. Very smart children hide it from you, so the loot keeps coming. Children that are too smart for their own good denounce all the cargo-culting rituals, introduce a cleaner, less obfuscated, and more efficient process, and end up getting socks, underwear, and mechanical pencils. But obviously some kids never figure out the tricks, even long after they are grown. I am thankful that if I did have a kid that thick, I could hire a Japanese man at $50/hour for the express purpose of spoiling it for them and telling them to grow up, even as I insisted that yes, kid, there really is a Santa Claus. I guess you never know for sure that they are on board with the program until you're a grandparent.
• donquichotte 9y ago
  The TV Series "Dollhouse" also explores this, although there the actors can only be rented on a day-to-day basis and their memory is wiped (OR IS IT?) after every assignment.
  • tyingq 9y ago
    That seems like a wiser operating plan. Avoids any long term deception.
    • Yizahi 9y ago
      You should check how Dollhouse ends then :) .
      • cableshaft 9y ago
        Suddenly and without resolution? :)
        • smnrchrds 9y ago
          Like every other Fox sci-fi series. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me five times, shame on me.
        • jandrese 9y ago
          I thought they destroyed society by the end? All of the nuanced ethical considerations replaced by straight up supervillainy with mind reprogramming noise being broadcast over the radio to everybody in the world and turning them into crazed murderers.
  • emidln 9y ago
    Gibson's Neuromancer touches on this with the backstory for how Molly Millions paid for her cybernetic enhancements as a "meat puppet".
• gt2 9y ago
  Truman Show yes, but even more like The Wedding Ringer.
• avar 9y ago
  Now imagine a future technology where you could undergo some hypnosis / gaslighting treatment to forget you even hired this person. I.e. pay a lot of money in advance, it's invested and the actor gets paid from the interest. You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor you hired years back because your actual mother died.
  • thatcat 9y ago
    >You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor Sounds like a sort of reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; things could get really awkward and confusing when you end up having partial memories. But also, possibly a brilliant way to fund nursing homes/increase visitation.
    • microcolonel 9y ago
      > things could get really awkward and confusing when you end up having partial memories. All memories are partial.
      • megous 9y ago
        Memories are modified on retrieval and colored by current emotional state and ideas (and vice versa :)). So they're not even partial. They're messy re-imaginations of past re-imaginations.
        • woodrowbarlow 9y ago
          read-modify-write
    • malloryerik 9y ago
      Yes, I was thinking that this should be a Charlie Kaufman movie, or that it's like a Charlie Kaufman movie come to life. And it's like the opposite of Darth Vader. "Luke, I'm not you true father, I'm a member of the Family Romance corporation."
• AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  We all create our own version of reality, and this is just an intentional, multi person extension of that. That's what most "entourages" are anyway - basically rent a friends. I see nothing wrong with living in a more advanced fantasy land if you can afford it.
• blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  It's a remarkable piece. But plenty of 'real' relationships are maintained partly by paying for them, too - think of the friend who always picks up the tab, the boyfriend or suitor who pays for dinner and buys gifts for his lover. A Marxian could even claim that traditional families aren't so different... The temporary nature and upfront pricetag though are distinctive.
• freeflight 9y ago
  > Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. But it's not really that surprising, as much as I love Japan, the way they've commoditized casual social interactions has always been downright scary to me. Hostess club culture might be the most obvious example, but it's only the most well known atop a whole mountain of service industry which revolves around people paying for casual social interactions, which imho belong among basic human needs. The notoriously strict Japanese social hierarchy probably played a part in the widespread establishment of such practices: Can't show any weakness among social peers, so people rather isolate themselves and even keep their casual social interactions on a "professional level". This also removes the need to keep up with peer pressure in a very dense and very socially competitive environment, just outsource all the venting to a service worker. I fear in a not so far-flung future this will become more common outside of Japan because high population density probably also played a role in the establishment of these strict social hierarchies and all their resulting woes.
  • pagnol 9y ago
    There's a great documentary about host clubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pW0RV2nSg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pW0RV2nSg0
    • freeflight 9y ago
      Thanks for sharing, it's really very well made! I always wondered what kind of women would earn enough money to visit host clubs, the answer is quite depressing, just like pretty much everything about these social dynamics, lonely broken people lying to other lonely broken people. The tragic thing being that we are all just lonely broken people but nobody likes to admit it, so we just keep on playing games of pretend with each other.
• deleted 9y ago
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