The parents of 15-year-old Rachel M. say that “being married is the only career” their daughter is interested in. They are seeking a man willing to pay $19,995 for her hand in marriage.

Kristin J., 16, has a wild streak but recently decided “it was time she settled down with a man who could meet her needs and help her fulfill her dreams of being an actor or singer.” Her parents are trying to sell their “fiery” daughter into matrimony for $49,995.

Or so go the personal ad listings on MarryOurDaughter.com, an outrageous Web site that purports to blithely sell underage girls to older husbands for large dowries.

The site is a prank. Thank goodness.

But not everyone is in on the joke. The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and now elicits around a thousand, mostly angry, emails a day. In the last few days, the site’s “publicity director” has also appeared on at least half a dozen talk radio shows around the country, including on Las Vegas (MIX-FM), Houston (KRBE-FM) and Philadelphia (WYSP-FM) and mixed it up with belligerent on-air-personalities and hostile listeners, whom he neglected to let in on the ruse.

“People get angry so fast they don’t stop to question whether its real,” says the creator of MarryOurDaughter.com, John Ordover, who masqueraded as the site’s fictional publicity director, the unlikely surnamed Roger Mandervan.

Mr. Ordover is a science-fiction editor with a prankish history and an interest in urban nudism.

Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.

“As far as I can tell, in every state but Oregon, parents can marry off their children,” Mr. Ordover said, pointing to this Cornell University Web site which tracks the various state marriage laws. Texas has a particularly ridiculous legal discrepancy, he says. Kids as young as 14 need parental permission to get married – unless, the law says, they have already been married before.

Mr. Ordover is no stranger to controversy, or to media attention. Mr. Ordover runs events for nudists and recently organized a Sheepshead Bay nude cruise, covered by the Times in July.

In 2000, he was also the co-creator of the now defunct humor site Technicalvirgin.com, in which a young actress described the creative ways in which she maintained her honor. Last year, when those videos enjoyed a resurgence on YouTube the actress who appeared in them, Melanie Martinez, was fired from a job hosting “The Good Night Show” on the PBS KIDS Sprout network – another Mr. Ordover-inspired saga covered by the paper.

Mr. Ordover was planning on coming clean next week as the creator of the site and has a full slate of radio interviews scheduled this week. He said he avoided spinning his fiction to print journalists who might get fired for falling for the scheme, but reasoned that radio shock jocks had looser leashes.

“We were trying to get people a little stirred up about this,” Mr. Ordover said.