The tenth man this month asked me my rates and I am done being polite

Ten this month. Some of them were courteous and one was extremely angry when I said no, which I found instructive. This city has an enormous, visible professional world, and I understand why a man who has only ever seen that assumes every woman who leads is part of it. But I am not, and I have never been, and the assumption arrives in my messages about a hundred times a year.

So: no rates, because there is no service. No tribute, no gift that buys a reply, no allowance, no expenses, no figure of any kind in any direction. There is nothing here to purchase. What there is, is a woman with a job, an apartment and a life, who leads in her own private relationships for nothing, because that is what she is.

Forty, Brooklyn, fourteen years of this, two arrangements, the longer one six years.

What I want is a man in my ordinary week. Duties that genuinely need doing. A structure that holds through months where neither of us has any energy. Somebody who is useful and easy to have in a house and who does not require an occasion.

If money appears in your first message, even generously, even framed as respect for my time, I will not answer. It is not an insult, it is a category error, and the category is the entire point of this board.