With GameCrush, guys can (theoretically) game with women who (might vaguely) resemble Felicia Day.

I’ve seen a lot of headlines about GameCrush — the service that lets guys pay women to play PC or Xbox games with them, complete with voice chat and cam feed — over the last couple of days. But it took TechStuff‘s Jonathan Strickland walking into my office to ask me about it for me to really think anything beyond, “I wonder what the Frag Dolls think of that?” (Answer: If they have an opinion, they haven’t said what it is yet in the Frag Dolls blogs or on Twitter.)

GameCrush is a service that plays into a whole bunch of stereotypes about gamers and game culture, namely the idea that gamers can’t get dates — they’d have to pay for them — and that no self-respecting woman would date a gamer — she’d have to be paid.  And that’s how GameCrush works. The guys pay. The women get paid.

The thing is, if GameCrush’s claims are true, the stereotypes are holding a lot of water. GameCrush launched yesterday, and within minutes of going live, the site crashed after getting “more than 10,000 inquiries in five minutes.” And according to IGN, 1,200 women signed up to be “PlayDates” after GameCrush put an ad on Craigslist.

Even though I’m both a gamer and a woman, I won’t be one of those 1,200-plus PlayDates. And it’s not just because I don’t have an Xbox or because my slow, methodical game play doesn’t suit multiplayer mode (especially in the FPS world, in which I die a lot and am always out of ammo). It’s because the whole enterprise feels a little like prostitution, especially since PlayDates can tag themselves as “flirty” or “dirty.” That’s doubly true considering some of the profile shots that have been making the rounds. Even if I weren’t  affronted on an ethical and personal level,  I can’t even go out to dinner with someone I turn out not to be interested in without feeling guilty about it for days. Getting paid after being ranked on my hotness and flirtiness would feel about ten times as wrong.

With a couple of exceptions, most of the coverage of GameCrush I’ve seen lately has been from men. So I’m curious — what do the other women think?