‘You never know if they’re acting’: My interview with the man who spent £50,000 renting out his girlfriends | documentary

‘FFrom the beginning, T was incredibly transparent about the fact that he wanted a completely submissive woman that he could control. He didn’t necessarily know that what he was saying was offensive. Ben Zand is a 35-year-old documentary filmmaker who is in the eye of millennials who see the contours of the manosphere, take it seriously, but understand its logic for what it is: neo-fascism’s misogyny. Through his independent production company, Zandland, he has made films about “incels”, QAnon and lookingmaxxing – along with spin-offs such as what a Mexican drug kingpin eats for breakfast (in the BAFTA-nominated film he made for Channel 4, Kingpin Cribs).

Inside the Incels Who Rent Girlfriends is an intense first-hand interview with T, a 27-year-old Brit with a good job who, over the past eight years, has spent £50,000 renting girlfriends. In the film, his voice is convincing and he wears an anonymous mask, which does nothing to offset the seriousness of the whole picture. He’s, Zand says, quite open about what he wants: a girlfriend who always says yes. I talk to him with his camera off but he uses his normal voice, so he sounds — well, obviously — more human and more vulnerable.

Your first feeling towards him may be pity for how unlucky he is, believing that he is able to get his feelings across the bargain. “You can really like some rental girlfriends. I did that sometimes, and they just disappeared. And that was bad. I just stopped doing the girlfriend experience and never knew why.” Or you might notice how lost he or she is, in someone else’s uncharted territory: “With hired girlfriends, you never know if they’re acting or really meaning what they’re doing. It’s very confusing and exhausting sometimes.”

Zand says at the beginning of the film that he expected it to be about sex, but by the end he found something much darker. I expected it to be about inadequacy and loneliness, and I had the same experience: I found it much darker.

T estimates that over the years, 80% of his interactions have been online, and 20% of those have been in real life. He has experimented with an AI girlfriend: “I wondered if it would help me process my feelings of loneliness and need for companionship. But – don’t laugh – I wanted a girlfriend for the sexual side too.” But whether sex is on the table with rented girlfriends in real life is case-by-case. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, “but those relationships don’t last long.”

You can rent a girlfriend online for a week or a month, whereas “in real life, because it’s more interactive, you won’t have time for a whole week, so you’ll more likely rent for a day or two.” They were doing normal things: going out to lunch, coming back to her house, watching a movie. He has involved sex workers as well, concluding: “I think if you look at it at different levels, you’ll find that you have the real partner, who is obviously upper class. Then at the bottom you have the sex worker, who you just know is just doing it for the money. And in the middle is the hired girlfriend, who you’re not quite sure about sometimes.”

You can think what you like about the commodification of sex, the commodification of companionship, that gray area where T escapes into the fantasy that his hired girlfriend is really feeling the feelings he’s paid her to act out. But the more T talks, the more it becomes clear that what he really wants is a girlfriend who has no independence at all.

It starts out quite mildly: He describes hiring a girlfriend as “like being on vacation: they’ll always be happy, they’ll always be in a good mood.” He says he’s had problems with online rentals in the US or Asia, because the time zone means they don’t respond fast enough. He tells Zand directly that he wants a girlfriend who never says no. But there’s an even more telling moment when Zand brings in three real-life women to talk to T, and try to get to the bottom of why a real-life partner eludes him. He says that he wants them to respond to him immediately, and one of the women asks: What if she is busy? He replies, “Okay, within reason. You might need to go to the toilet, or drink water.” The woman in this fantasy is no more complex than the crying Tiny Tears doll; You put water and water comes out, and this is the scope of its permitted agency.

It’s quite the shuddering realization that this man, who seems so dapper and shy, and who might remind you of an article you recently read about rejection-sensitive dysphoria, is actually pathologically controlling—which leaves you with two possible conclusions. Either he’s not a good person – coercive, controlling, and a psychological danger to women – or he’s a good person, and his online presence has led him so deep into a world where you can buy fake things that you no longer fit in the world of the real thing. If it is the first, then it is dark; But if it’s the second, it’s incredibly dark and sad.

Zand, navigating the same interpretations, is struck by a different moment in the film. He introduces T to one of the three women and T “slaps his legs and motions for the woman to sit on his knee. This embodies the whole thing — that there’s a rule book he read on the Internet about what it means to be an attractive man in the world. He’s trying to play the completely wrong role.” Of the three women T speaks to, two choose to sit as far away from T as possible while remaining on the same couch. One looks as if she is actually hiding.

Since this isn’t his first rodeo, Zand isn’t surprised by a lot of its rules, which seem ridiculous to me (T, as he wonders aloud why he can’t get a girlfriend in real life, says he has “no height issues,” as if women were walking around doing a constant vertical analysis of their surroundings, weeding out anything shorter than a small tree). “A lot of men in these spaces have a standard for what they think an acceptable man is: someone who’s over 6 feet 2 inches tall, looks a certain way, and has a certain amount of money. One of the things T said to me a few times is that he was confused because he met all of those criteria — 6 feet tall, or almost; he has a good job, gets paid well, and he can’t understand why he doesn’t get what he deserves.” Why can’t I reach friends?“

The nagging feeling of being deprived of what one deserves, on a dating level, certainly predates the Internet. What’s different now, says Zand, is: “There are so many subreddits or Discord forums, where all these people with similar problems are convincing each other of some sort of science in everything. Get the right math, tick the right boxes, make the right amount of money and something will open up. And then everything will be fine.” There’s a player mentality, and a lot of mutual reinforcement, with no real-life interactions where your views can be tested or verified. “A man of a certain age, who might have a hard time getting into school, as a lot of people do, now spends an inordinate amount of time on Discord, goes to bed ridiculously late, and ends up not being able to get out and spend time with people, and if they do, they’re not able to be transparent about their perspective and what they’re feeling. So they have a kind of double life.”

For the first time last year, T had a real girlfriend. I ask him how that compares to an employee; There must be some way in which it is superior, other than being cheaper. “Probably one of the nice, amazing things is when you date someone who’s real, who has their family and friends and you become a part of their lives. My girlfriend had a nephew who’s almost three years old. She’d send me stuff about having a happy time with family, and a hired girlfriend wouldn’t really do that. They’re happy to show it to you, but they don’t want you to see outside of that.” She broke up with him when she found him controlling too.

At the end of the documentary, T decides to stop renting girlfriends. While he believes that having a real girlfriend may have begun to change his perspective, he sees being involved in the show as essential: “I don’t feel that without the documentary happening, I would have had the strength or courage to take that step.”

“I think him coming to meet us shows that he’s redeemable,” Zand says. “There are very few people I meet who I think are irredeemable. I don’t like the idea in general, but also the way they explain what it means to be like them, they often seem like they know they have a problem they don’t want other people to have.”