The age gate is the confirmation standing before this site opens, and it marks a line held everywhere in the house: clients and therapists alike are twenty-one or older.
The age gate is the short screen a visitor meets before any page of this site appears, asking each visitor to affirm an age of at least twenty-one. It takes a moment to pass, and in a single line it states a rule that runs through every other part of the house.
The house deals only with adults of twenty-one and over, on both sides of every booking. No one younger is booked as a client, and no one younger appears among the forty-five therapists; the ages printed on the therapist profiles all begin at twenty-one. The line sits deliberately higher than the age at which a person is ordinarily counted an adult. Those three further years bring a steadier sense of what an evening like this involves, for the people who book and for the women who are booked, and the house would sooner lose an occasional request than blur the line.
The gate is merely the first place the rule appears. The office reads each request with it in mind, and a message suggesting that the sender is younger, or that a booking is being made on behalf of someone who might be, is declined without discussion. A therapist who arrives and has reason to doubt a client's age may ask, and may leave if the doubt remains.
Passing the gate does not record who a visitor is. The confirmation is remembered on the device so that it need not be repeated on every page, and the privacy notice explains what, if anything, is kept and for how long. The gate itself, with its exact wording, can be reached at any time on the age verification page.