A reader sent an AP story in the Miami Herald: “Websites connect college students with ‘sugar daddies’ willing to pay the bill”. What I found most interesting is that a woman was willing to go on record with a name (changed here to “Joyce Carefree” in case she someday changes her mind) that potential employers might be Googling:
[Joyce Carefree] graduated from law school debt-free this spring, thanks to a modern twist on an age-old arrangement.
During her first year, she faced tuition and expenses that ran nearly $50,000, even after a scholarship. So she decided to check out a dating website that connected women looking for financial help with men willing to provide it, in exchange for companionship and sex — a “sugar daddy” relationship as they are known.
Now, almost three years and several sugar daddies later, [Carefree] is set to graduate from Villanova University free and clear, while some of her peers are burdened with six-digit debts.
The domestic violence angle is also interesting:
Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center says that violence is common any time money is exchanged for sex. “You need to pay attention that there is a power imbalance,” she said.
The same organization says in a factsheet that “one in five women … will be raped” and “46.4% lesbians, 74.9% bisexual women and 43.3% heterosexual women reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes.” Unless the organization also thinks that a substantial percentage of women are sex workers, it would seem that sexual violence is also “common” for women who engage in unpaid interactions with men. So the choice for a woman is really between paid versus unpaid rape and “sexual violence other than rape”?
Readers: Does the fact that [Joyce Carefree] is willing to go public with this at the beginning of her career as an attorney indicate that there has been a significant shift in mores?
Related:
Maybe it is a fake name. A lot of sex workers use fake names.
Is she putting the experience on her bar assn application?
With several sugar daddies, I doubt that she suffered a power imbalance.
She has a linkedin page….
To answer your question about “significant shift in mores?” : no. I remember a lengthy New York Times feature on Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babes from 2009, complete with names of some mentors and their mentorees(?).
Given that most state bar associations will refuse to accept a person for “character and fitness” requirements, such as criminal records. I really hope that she supplied a fake name.
Two observations.
If the National Sexual Violence Resource Center is correct, rape is the most under-punished crime in the US.
Indeed, o tempora o mores, a female student has to prostitute herself to pay tuition at a university ran by the Augustinans.
Meh, she isn’t all that.
At least she is staying in the same line of work.
Daughter: “Dad, I’ve decided to become a prostitute…”
Dad: “a what?!!”
Daughter: “a prostitute”
Dad: “oh thank god, I thought you said ‘a politician'”
almost three years and several sugar daddies later
Might we assume that’s also several sex partners in almost three years.
I suspect that [Joyce Carefree] will never work as a lawyer nor wants to. She’ll use the sugar daddy publicity to further some role for herself in the media.
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Around the time of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, newspapers would often repeat the rule of thumb that a good call girl charges about the same hourly rates as a good lawyer. She could have spared herself the tuition.
life imitates (questionable) art: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girlfriend_Experience_(TV_series)
We now have a generation stupid enough to use its real names. Who else pays $9000 to unlock a software feature that allows their Teslas to go another 40 miles?
I think she will just change her name!
I think she will just change her name!
For the third time.
Smartest Woman, now you’re blinding us with your smarts. AGAIN.
Re: my #3 above: I searched the HDD for the article I mentioned, found this:
• 12 April 2009 in the New York Times Magazine “Keeping Up with Being Kept” by Ruth Padawer (quoted Sugar Babies’ initials only; full names that I remembered in some other article that I must’ve conflated with this one). Paywalled, so can not simply reread it.
• 19 Sept 2012 in the New York Magazine (independent weekly, not aliased with NYTM): “Sugar daddies! Where to find one?”
… which also links to previous attempts of the reporter-looking-for-a-sugar-daddy-in-order-to-expose-the-racket type.
As for this recent NYT full-frontal-name article signifying changes in sexual/ moral/ social mores, let us not forget the discrepancy between what people say they espouse, and what they really do. The editorial position of the Gray Lady is that, together with its core readers, it doesn’t want the “European” legalized prostitution in the USA; their factual stand is that they can but observe and report the many forms of sexual and other interactions between consenting adults… especially if legal third-party adults are called in for “arbitration” and condemnation of such ungodly arrangements.
While rereading the related earlier posting “Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution”
Phil: “interesting that Americans, or at least Times readers, imagine that it would be straightforward to choose the best and then import a complex bureaucratic system such as government-run health care…”
… I couldn’t help thinking of the (Guardian review of, have yet to see it) latest Michael Moore’s filmed polemic “Where To Invade Next.” Apparently it takes this very concept to the extremes, MM invading EU countries in search of selected progressive ideas to be imported to the USA / juxtaposed with present American ways of doing the same things (probably not Europe’s in places liberal approach to prostitution though).
I don’t know how related this might be, but at an art-house showing of the Israeli film “Or (My Treasure)” billed as powerful dialectic against street prostitution, and attended by the director (early 20s), I asked her WHAT—other than near-deterministic inevitability of prostitution being every woman’s ultimate fate—was the MESSAGE of her supposedly educational film… in which somehow it was the society’s sole fault for the heroines sex-work. I missed whatever upbeat life lesson(?) for girls that she may have tried to convey.
Yedaya’s command of English wasn’t stellar, but it was enough to counter that by admonishing me to not be buying any more women (kid you not). Apparently paying for viewing a movie with ZERO prospects for females escaping having to prostitute themselves was A–OK, however.
Villanova is ostensibly still a Catholic institution. Not even 25 years ago they would have explored every avenue to strip her of her diploma.
So now we have established that education in this country is such an expensive habit (one that is more expensive than a drug addiction!), that some women are turning to prostitution just to feed this addiction.
If we legalize prostitution in the USA, we can finally break the racket that women are running in this country.
Here is what you can get in Europe, at roughly 130 euros/hour:
http://www.residenz-tpb.at/babes
Compared to Nevada, the price is probably cheaper, and the ladies are better looking than anything you’d find in the Bunny Ranch.
The more I read about [Joyce Carefree]’s choice to out herself as a recurrent serial beneficiary of some SugarDaddies’ ehmm… largesse, the more it reminds me of two literary figures, one imaginary, one real, which may have inspired her resolve to go public:
Imaginary: Laurie, “The West Wing presidential adviser Sam Seaborn’s” one-night-stand who turned out to be supporting herself through law school as a call-girl, and as such won offer of a future job from, and approval of “President Bartlett” with the words “It’s nice when we can do something for prostitutes once in a while.” Told you, a fantasy. Enough said.
Real: look no further than to the career of Dr. Brooke Magnanti, one time Belle de Jour £300/hr-escort and anonymous blogger of like-named blog, later turned into a series of “Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl” books, a multi-season TV series, and Brooke herself eking out a career as an author of—lately—a modern-day thriller. That besides continuing her career as a bona-fide medical researcher, which did not stop when, anticipating being outed by unfriendly press, she elected to go public first.
By doing so, and standing up to the initial sanctimonious press barrage of moral outrage—after all, there’s no proscription on the number of sexual partners, and charging for one’s time by the hour is OK as long as one is paying taxes—Magnanti quickly weathered out the manufactured press-storm-in-a-cup, and took charge of the overall narrative in her case: a hard-up mature American doctoral student turns to turning tricks for cash with well pre-screened and condomed middle-aged Johns in posh hotels – what could be less threatening to public morals than that? Probably more of an object of envy to many women who recognized the pattern, yet don’t get paid for like services to their drunken yobos.
Obviously, she was well aware of the risk, that the moment she starts to blog about it, she will be inching closer to being outed by someone… a client or a competitor (as it happened, it was an old BF). Yet she went along with her blabbing resolve, and in the end managed to parlay it into a profitable sideline business to her (then) main line of work: getting a PhD and a job in her narrow field of science.
I don’t expect [Joyce Carefree] to have studied Brooke Magnanti’s path to fame for instructions, but, as her fellow Floridaite Smartest Woman said, she may have figured out that being a junior lawyer among hordes of junior lawyers in some office isn’t exactly the Yellow Brick Road to cushy life. Not when you’ve grown a pair of hybrid cushions for the highest bidders ;-))
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