The Sugar Babies of Stanford University
piratewires.com
piratewires.com
"But David worked the night shift at a car manufacturing plant, and he was always broke. He could only pay the girls on Fridays when he got his paycheck. Despite this, he consistently spent quite a bit of money for Lainey to send feet pics (only the bottom of the feet!), and — crucially — to tell him he was a loser, his dick was small, and “send me money.” The mismatch between his income and his spending worried the girls enough that they considered intervening, but ultimately decided there was not much they could do to help."
It's great when you read an article so obviously ill-founded that the author has to admit they're wrong at the end. This is a cycle that has existed for hundreds of years, it's asinine to me that people are still trying to make some kind of 'moral play' here. It's a free country; these free people are creating enterprise based on their likeness. I'm sure that riles up HN users who spend their lives building thankless, exploitative SaaS products that get cursed by their users under their breath, the same as this site seems to hate 'influencer culture' and social media as a whole. At the end of the day, though, they're living a life they're happy with. They can advocate for themselves and aren't being pimped out by someone who doesn't care about their wellbeing. Other jobs and careers are completely attainable still, if not completely possible to have alongside whatever OnlyFans account you run.
> "...our societal precedent for freedom overrides whatever personal harm it might cause"
You've just appealed to a relativistic moral standard. Essentially, because we have a precedent for "freedom" in regards to possession of certain substances or items we as a society are justified in ignoring the detrimental effects of the mentioned items.
By that same train of logic, societal reform of any kind is actually a bad thing because you are overturning the existing precedent 0f that society. Its absurd.
The best good-faith criticisms of this arrangement of dating have nothing to do with puritanism, misogyny, envy, or selfishness but instead are criticisms that the dating market involved is dissatisfying to most or all involved compared to what it could be.
According to who? You? I know this site's demographics and prejudices, the middle-class heterosexual white male perspective on dating should be worse than it was 50 years ago! Especially here in the US, the notion of the man courting multiple women has been flipped on it's head. Women are getting more cautious, thinking long-term instead of throwing their hopes and dreams into Joe Shmoe with his Bachelors degree and $50,000 of college debt. I'll listen to people whine about morals until the cows come home, but I think Occam's razor would suggest that men simply have less authority in the dating scene now, leading to greater dissatisfaction and mounting resentment towards sex work. It's a childish thing to complain about.
A sugar baby is a mistress, which is a girlfriend that is financially supported. A sugar daddy is a rich boyfriend, usually married. The relationship is real. The sex is real. The friendship is real. The laughs are real. The squabbles are real. For most of these couples, they know the relationship will come to an end when it starts, but for that time in their lives, it can be perfect.
A young woman who is busy with school or starting her career, doesn't want the drama and endless obligations of a "normal" boyfriend, would like regular intimacy with a regular partner anyway, and could use financial or career help can find having a sugar daddy as a boyfriend can be fantastic.
> Only this complete upheaval of traditional gender dynamics could allow high-achieving women to “sugar baby” for working class men, and without any tangible consequence to the women.
The author advocates a social-regulatory framework to preserve market relations. I can't see how increasing regulation can do anything but distort the market, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. The whole piece comes across as a "I'm more interested in a return to regulatory capture than I am interested in competing in an evolving and dynamic environment." Sorry, but in any market there's winners and losers. What are we going to do, start getting rid of free markets?
You're saying it like distorting the market is always wrong.
> What are we going to do, start getting rid of free markets?
Free market is an abstraction, which doesn't exist in reality.
Marriage. Unequal rules for participants based on financial success would be another. Arbitrary age limits.
I am generally a supporter of these concepts and this kind of meddling.
This is a standard response to markets societies wants to apply boundaries to, yes. Obviously for illegal ones (slaves, child porn, hard drugs) and also regulated ones (medical advice, nuclear weapons).
> in any market there's winners and losers.
Most examples I gave above all have one thing in common: there is a moral objection to the free market due to the vulnerability of one of the parties.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed, and particularly so by proponents of free markets, in a more convincing way than "tough luck". Otherwise the "losers" have no reason to accept that free markets are desirable.
https://stanfordreview.org/stanford-future-gop/
> Then the president began a legal fight for the election. Countless numbers of his supporters have rallied around him, with 70% of Republicans suspecting fraud. But many who claimed to support the President were more than happy to roll over and hand the presidency to Biden without a fight. Since election night, many prominent Republicans have hesitated to support the president. Senator Mitt Romney and former President George W. Bush have even called on Trump to concede the election. Many more, in their silence, have failed to give the President their support in his hour of greatest need.
At this juncture, claims of 2020 election theft are akin to being a Flat Earther. Do you, dear reader, desire to get advice, a hot take on sugar babies, or have anything to do with such a person?
It's at least nice to be aware and have the information.
So, with that being said, I'd say it absolutely compromises their argument here. If the author is gullible enough to fall for garden-variety conspiracy theories, why should I trust their authority on morality? Their rhetorical triangle is broken. They have no credibility, they make no appeals to logic (and contradict themselves) which leaves them only with pathos - the ability to outrage and incense their audience based on emotional appeals.
Further, claiming there may have been issues with or that you personally take issue with the logistics of the last United States presidential election is hardly akin to being a flat earther. The former represents a broad range of perspectives some of which are contrary to the facts and some of which are of a more philosophical or pragmatic nature and are worthy of discussion. The latter is a school of thought which hasn't held any real ground for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. This kind of tattletale rhetoric is contrary to the spirit of serious discussion and debate which HN is known for. If it had not become so common, I would simply write it off as trolling or perhaps your confusion as to the purpose of this site. At this point, however, I think I speak for many when I say that you ought to save that kind of foolishness for either Reddit or Twitter where it will be applauded.
Unsolicited feedback for you, sir, madame, or they @powerslacker: Characterizing things as "absurd" is detrimental to discussion quality in every case across the board. The label is arbitrary and uncurious, making it a poor choice of starting place if your goal is to inform and persuade.
Best wishes, MD.
Absurd: wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.
It's not detrimental to discussion to point out an absurd statement. I'm not saying absurd in order to be rude, but pointing out that it's a logical error. It's not a poor starting place if my goal is to inform others that the addressed statement is in fact absurd. Since that is exactly what I was attempting to do I'd call it a very reasonable starting place.
I don't care what you assert is "logical." Because you can't even modus ponens correctly.
Help me see your point of view.
I'm just comparing the scenario here to what was shown in the movie. Sure, we have all these apps these days that allow you to do whatever, but at the cost of everyone having mental issues and anxiety.
I don't personally care, I've had my own share of problems that I deal with. My goal is to be in the 20% who won't engage in such behavior, and will be totally fine regardless of what other people do. But that's still 80% who will be wasting their money, potential, resources in these short term flukes and need a bail out from society.
This is one of those “…but on the Internet” stories.
The very idea of doing anything like this myself makes me shudder, but hey, if they're having fun and not scamming their customers, who cares, except this classmate who has hit upon the surest respectable way for an attractive young woman to get money out of many rich old men: decry, in lurid detail, the whoredom of your fellow young women.
She gets bonus points for insinuating that the gains we've made over the past century might not actually be that great, and that we gave something up when we got the legal system and economy to (mostly*) treat us like rational actors. My best childhood friend and I once mused that it's shame that we didn't had had the chutzpah to fall back on our Southern Baptist upbringing to do this when we were pretty young things; once you're over 40, it really doesn't work anymore. The role of "semi-attractive young mom in a moral panic" in that media ecosystem is well-filled.
* the unfortunate legal event of this summer excepted, which has already led to both horror stories that you can look up yourselves, and thousands of small tragedies that you'll never hear about. I dread the next few months (at best) for my fellow young American women.
This tired kids-these-days complaint was a dead horse before the movie left theatres.