Sex Pays For College: A Duke Student’s Sad Choice

Poor Joe Francis. Last week, the “Girls Gone Wild” founder was in US Bankruptcy Court settling with a woman whose breasts were filmed without her consent on one of his videos. She will get at least $100,000 and perhaps as much as $5.3 million more.

Maybe Francis was ahead of his time. If he’d waited a few years longer to start his video enterprise, he could’ve gotten top college freshmen to do a lot more than bare their breasts: A Duke University student using the pseudonym “Lauren” made news last week when it was learned she was participating in “rough-sex” porn to pay her $60,000 tuition, room and board.

Lauren makes the topless co-eds on the beaches of Cancun seem like something out of a Jane Austen novel. But she does much more than that. She offers intellectual cover for young women prostituting themselves.

It begins with an economic comparison between doing porn and working in a service job at the mall. As Lauren told the website Real Clear Education, “Any job I would’ve gotten as a minimum wage worker would’ve been exploitative, degrading to me, and not provided the money I needed to make, which was $4,000 a month. So why would I work 80 hours a week, struggle with school, barely get any sleep and be treated like a second-class citizen, when I can do porn for 14 hours a day, make thousands, set my own hours, and have a ton of fun doing it?”

Makes sense, right? Why sell hamburgers when you can just sell your body? What have women throughout history been thinking by trying to avoid prostitution? Clearly the notion that selling sex is something one does as a last resort was a ploy of the patriarchy to make sure that women’s sexuality was controlled by men (and that there were an adequate number of cashiers at McDonald’s).

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