Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Sugarbaby Students of Minnesota






By Professor Doom



     I didn’t exactly work my way through college—I lived at home, and mowed many, many, lawns in the Florida sun, among other unpleasant jobs. They were paying the princely sum of $5 an hour for sheet metal roofing, and it only took a few weeks of that to make enough to pay the $1,000 or so yearly tuition of my late teenage years.


      Those days are long gone, of course, and now average annual tuition runs $25,000 or more (it varies wildly, of course). Most people can’t work their way through college. That said, if you’re a winsome lass with malleable morals, you can find employment of sorts, as a sugarbaby, a female whose tuition (and other expenses) are paid for by a sugardaddy, in exchange for, well, “companionship.”


      I know, this is just a variant of the oldest profession, but it’s gone from stories of “that one girl” on campus to a distinct sub-culture. NYU is most notorious for its sugarbabies, with around 1,300 students (about 5% of the female students there, to put things in perspective…many classes would have at least one such student/sugarbaby).


     Of course, 2018 tuition at NYU is over $50,000, and is a private, for-profit university with a notorious reputation for putting the screws to the students. You’re not going to scrape together that kind of money mowing lawns. I know, it’s not my business how a young woman wants to make a living but this strikes me as wrong all the same.


      What about our state schools? These are built and supported as a public benefit. Tuition at University of Minnesota is a “mere” $14,000 or so, surely they don’t have a sugarbaby community?


The bittersweet life of sugar babies at the University of Minnesota



     NYU is private, and I haven’t read their mission statement, so perhaps creating whores sugarbabies is one of their goals…but were the taxpayers of publicly funded UM told their money was going to increase the number of people in this profession?


     Again, stuff happens, so I suppose “that girl” has always existed on campus. We don’t have many of them at UM, right?


Ava is one of the 542 students at the University of Minnesota who were registered on…

--“Ava is a fake name, and I’ll avoid mentioning the several sites that specialize in supporting this profession.




     UM has the same enrollment as NYU, tuition is about 33%, and we have about 50% of the sugarbabies…that’s a surprisingly high number. Can we get a handle on how many sugarbabies we have around the country?


Approximately 3 million college students in the United States are registered on…



--that’s JUST ONE SITE.




      Perhaps not all sugarbabies are female (or identify as female, whatever, bear with me as I make a possibly false assumption about gender here), but that translates to around 15% of college students.


      Are there truly no “leaders” in higher education willing to take a look in the mirror and ask about their own responsibility for doing this?



“I found it exciting. It felt good getting paid money,” Ava said. “It was kind of fun in a weird way. I would feel hyped after using it.”




      A Minnesota sugarbaby gets about $100 for a date, which need not include much beyond dinner. I suppose one such date is harmless enough if that’s all that goes on, but…these are still formative years, I’m not so sure our young ladies’ education should include an expectation of being handed money directly from males, particularly since this expectation is far less likely to be valid as one leaves her 20s. Perhaps I’m a bit old-fashioned in this regard, I concede.


     Granted, I suspect many sugarbabies ae discarded after a few years, and then the university discards them a few years after that, perhaps…what is the only job experience they have after they receive their all too often worthless degree? Is it such a stretch to worry about what profession they’ll have no choice but to enter? It’s not like I haven’t identified a clear link between prostitution and student loans before.


      In case the gentle reader is wondering how the sites are sure they’re getting college students, well, students get free memberships by using their university-provided e-mails. Um…should our universities be in the business of validating prostitution credentials?


      I’m sorry to ask so many rhetorical questions here, I’m trying not to be judgmental as so many concerns come to mind.


Sarah Polowin, a graduate of Carleton University in Canada who wrote her doctoral thesis on [a sugarbaby site[ in 2017, found that money is the primary motivating factor for college students using the service.




      I concede I haven’t read the thesis, but I had to chuckle at the Ph.D. level conclusion there of “prostitutes do it for the money.” Yeah, no kidding. For what it’s worth, I think the article is wrong here, as it appears to be a Master’s thesis…I’ll chuckle less, conceding that kind of result is indeed Master’s level.


      I also note she writes of the phenomenon in Canada…this issue is not strictly an American problem.


      The article dances around the negative impact on the students who engage in this practice, beyond the usual “this one whacko became a stalker…” story one would expect.


      I know my blog is read by far more than the clicks I get directly from Blogspot would indicate. Anybody out there know, is, or better yet was, a sugarbaby? Please contact me, I’d love to ask a few questions about how all this works out.




www.professorconfess.blogspot.com
















6 comments:

  1. When I started college in Florida I had a little job that paid 50 cents an hour. My parents were paying my tuition and room and board. That was too much for them to handle. So, I had to come back home to work in inside sales for a few years until I the VA benefits were finally given. That helped quite a bit.

    I have a thing about calling prostitution the oldest profession. The fact is, teaching is the oldest profession. Before the first prostitute there were teachers. Even adult chimpanzees teach the younger chimps.

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    1. Well, if you define "profession" as "activity," and I'm not sure you can, then the oldest profession would be breathing, I suppose.

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  2. Really? 100$ a date? I have to find one woman who is worth anything close to that. It is so easy to get a date and more if you have half a brain.

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    1. This accomplishes three things. First, this avoids accusations of prostitution or facilitating prostitution. Second, whether the service is or is not basically an escort service, this protects the woman in case she gets into a dangerous situation. She can refuse to have sex whether it is normally expected or not. Third, this makes it perfectly clear that the woman is not getting into a sincere personal relationship like with a boyfriend, and that, even though the man may be superficially pleasant and each encounter may be enjoyable. She is just getting paid, not getting a guy to fall in love with her or acquiring whatever rights she would expect if she were his girlfriend (that he should not cheat on her, for example). I'm not saying that no guy would actually want the relationship to evolve, if there is even a relationship at all after a date or two, but he can easily back off if he's not interested or if she becomes too demanding. Instead of breaking up, he can just not hire her again.

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  3. Um, those 'dates' included the all important 'blow' job. I used to work as a professional stripper, I had a class act back in 1970. No touching allowed, everyone had to be 'gentlemen' at the club. It was very lucrative. My key talent back then was to talk about business with the guys who loved to share their life skills, making money which they then rained on me. I only did this for two months each summer, made enough for the entire year, renting my little house, my truck and some fun times, too. Today, girls do this to escape crushing debts.

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  4. is it not a wonderful thing that all the jobs went to china, and that the students cannot get jobs also due to the compound issue of illegal immigration of some 20 million illegal now permanent workers. The USA needed more cheap labor and had of course already killed off its own peoples with abortion so popular because a woman alone cannot raise a baby there are not jobs or support after all the illegal immigrants get all that extra help and they are so deserving right, God bless the stupid silent majority for the are truly stupid.

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