A Master’s Degree In Whoredom

From a long and detailed article about the new, genteel prostitution:

And in the progressive Bay Area, with its feminist, antipatriarchal ideals, the sugar daddy phenomenon seems weirdly out of step, a march backward toward a class-stratified sexual world reminiscent of 19th-century France or Gay (18)90s San Francisco, when well-off married gentlemen installed their mistresses in swanky apartments. Yet some (a few sugar babies among them) argue that the sites are harbingers of a clear-eyed future in which women take control of their romantic, or at least their financial, lives. Given the Bay Area’s growing income disparity—one that often divides along gender lines—and the increasing cost of living here, sugar dating can be seen as a pragmatic move for women. If you’re already dating online, adding a financial filter doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Despite that, there’s something intrinsically creepy about sugar dating. It seems to turn the most basic of human needs—the desire for companionship—into a calculation in which men use money to buy intimacy, and women sell their time (and potential access to their bodies) to the highest bidder. But interviews with men and women who post profiles on sugar sites reveal individuals who are far more complex than the stereotypes suggest.

Be sure to read the quotes from a female startup founder who is also a prostitute. Now that’s what I call leaning in.

Of course, the article goes on to demonstrate that most of the stereotypes are completely accurate.

The left is unlikely to ever consider that the consequences of the sexual revolution have not been what was expected. Instead, they just re-frame the failures of their theories to hold up to reality as successes.

Women have found themselves without security, and men now find themselves without family or companionship.

What has become the marital contract has become more fraught with risk than any other agreement than a man can enter. What Dalrock calls the female ‘threat point’ in marriage has made that sacrament unappealing to some of America’s most elite (in the corporate world, at least) men. It’s easier to pay a few thousand dollars a month to a whore than it is to pay out millions in assets to an ex-wife and her legal team.

What’s interesting about these stories is what they reveal about innate impulses to the genders. In an area with the most egalitarian propaganda anywhere, the relationships are becoming less equitable than the traditional patriarchal family. Instead of having her comfort in old age guaranteed by a doting husband, young, educated women are prostituting themselves, getting support up-front, and in many cases frittering away their savings, sometimes struggling to care for their bastard children.

There’s the 25-year-old recent development economics grad, a vintage-clothes lover who would look at home on Valencia Street. There’s the 20-year-old queer Oaklander with the sides of her head shaved and a penchant for environmental justice movements. (The sites host substantial numbers of gay sugar mamas and daddies, too.) There’s the 25-year-old personal assistant who posts a Kardashian-style selfie of her rear, writing, “Yes, that is my ass, and yes, it is close to perfect,” but then adds a Northern California twist: “If you are looking for a fun girl who can go to a gala one night and fly-fishing the next afternoon, look no further.”

Then there is the startup entrepreneur I talked to over the phone: a former porn cam girl who goes by the name Ruby, holds a technical graduate degree from Berkeley, and is raking in $2,500 a month from a married tech exec. She’s also involved in sex arrangements with two other tech guys, earning $1,000 to $2,000 per session. (She claims that one is a household name in the tech world.) The money allows her to forgo a day job in favor of the startup lifestyle—she’s living with several brogrammer housemates and developing a sex-related tech company of her own. The sugar money isn’t enough to replace substantial seed funding, she admits, but “it’s sure as hell more fun.”

Were their fathers thinking that their daughters would choose to earn their livings on their backs when they sent them off to college? When daddy hugged his little girl goodbye, a lump forming in his throat, is this how he had expected that she would develop?

The original goal of educating American women to the elite male standard, as dedicated by the missions of the Seven Sisters, was to advance American and European civilization by helping women to become scholars, world-class artists, doctors, professors, engineers, and scientists. While some feminists like Sheryl Sandberg have noticed that women are coming up short from what had been hoped for them, much like Betty Friedan before her, the failings of the central plan have been blamed on male wreckers.

It seems like the skeptics may have had some good points. The widely acknowledged feminist complaint, after generations of promoting female education, is that women have failed to attain their hoped for prominence, and have needed countless legal aids and protections to attain whatever ‘gains’ that they have made in attaining similar status as men.

The co-educational experiment has not been going on for all that long. Harvard didn’t become co-ed until 1977, long after many of today’s elder baby boomers had graduated.

If girls who are graduating from college, who have opportunities in both the workforce and the marriage market, who came from relatively stable families are becoming prostitutes, what’s happening with the ones who are lower on the social totem pole?

It should be noted that the curriculum at the Litchfield Female Academy, one of the first such schools of its kind in New England, had a more rigorous curriculum targeted to young girls than Yale offers today to either gender, and at a lower price.

We should ask what happened to Republican motherhood. Can it be said that middle class women are learning values that will uphold the American republic in the future? It seems that the urgency has been forgotten.

Might we also ask that if Republican motherhood has itself been devalued by the President himself, if that Republic can have a future? It seems unlikely.