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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

"When a young woman is in desperate need of money and a wealthy man comes along and uses that vulnerability to get sex, that's the definition of exploitation."

Seems like you could also say: "When a man is in desperate need of sex and a young woman comes along and uses that vulnerability to get money, that's the definition of exploitation."

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You could also say, "When a young man is in desperate need of money, and a wealthy corporation comes along and uses that vulnerability to get work, that's the definition of exploitation."

Culture and society put aside, all of them are the same. They are exchanges. You get something in exchange for something else. No exploitation in all of these cases. Exploitation is when you give something, getting nothing back; because you are forced to do it.

When the girl went and connected with the sugary daddy, no body obliged her to do so. No exploitation here. She could have worked hard to make money, save, take some loans and carry on her education. She definitively picked the easiest road.

> She could have worked hard to make money, save, take some loans and carry on her education. She definitively picked the easiest road.

I don't think you can call it "the easiest road" until you've been paid $500 to sleep with an older gentleman for a month.

And working hard, taking out loans, and saving money is an option, of course - unless the economy is down, or unless you can't afford to take time off school to work, or or unless you have other expenses like children or parents, or unless you can't get approved for loans.

We geeks tend to downplay how hard physical labour can be, plus we ignore almost everybody around us routinely so this whole "sleep with some stranger for a month" business sounds at first glance to be the easiest thing in the world.

Er... not that I know anything about that.

Honestly, I think that the physical part of the ordeal would be the easiest to deal with.

wrong:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exploitation

  1. use or utilization, especially for profit

Well, in this case, the girl will be exploiting the old man. She's making profit.

I sure as hell wouldn't be sitting in this office now if I didn't need the money.

And I recall that that is something like the definition Karl Marx used...

Lack of money is a much more severe situation than lack of sex. Lack of money comes with the possibility of poverty, while lack of sex just means that you will have to wait longer for sex.

Hmm. If you asked guys whether they would rather be permanently poor but be able to have sex with attractive women whenever they wanted, or to be wealthy but have no possibility of sex, I'd expect it to be close. (Assuming of course a first world environment where poverty doesn't mean starvation).

If you asked guys whether they would rather be permanently poor but be able to have sex with attractive women whenever they wanted, or to be wealthy but have no possibility of sex, I'd expect it to be close.

I'd be very surprised if it were close. I bet almost all guys would choose the former over the latter.

Make a poll.

"I figure if I was a millionaire, I could hook that up."

The article also says "To test this proposition, make college free. If college girls were no longer desperately in need of money, I would be more than willing to bet that SeekingArrangement.com would cease to be highly profitable."

Seems to me he's saying that the women aren't doing it to survive, they're doing it to get a college education. I would submit that the drive for sex is a much more primal urge, going back a half billion years or so, than the drive for a college education.

So SeekingArrangement.com is providing value. It's enabling young girls to go to college. That is quite empowering. However if his site is bad, then it simply highlights the shitty situation these college girls are in in the first place. His site doesn't make things worse.

I doubt that the women who sign up to be sugar babies are doing it to get laid.

That's not what he was saying at all. Read the last few comments again.

Although you can get money in many more ways than you can get sex.

Yeah, that's one thing that bothered me somewhat about the article: the implied assumption that any sort of consensual arrangement where the man is getting sex is by definition exploitative. If it were a young man getting paid by an older woman for sex, is that still exploitation?

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