The week that Joe Biden sideswiped the idea of federal student loan forgiveness, calling it “socialism,” was the same week that Matt Gaetz’ wingman and party pal Joel Greenberg pleaded guilty to six felonies including sex trafficking of a child. The two stories might seem unrelated, but they’re not. Both of them concern broke students.
According to a draft confession letter Greenberg wrote, and the accounts of several of the women, he and Gaetz met up and had sex with young women he found on Seeking.com, a dating site for “sugaring,” or dating where one person compensates the other with cash or gifts. (The site had been called Seeking Arrangement, but rebranded itself as just Seeking in 2018.) Whether or not sugaring is sex work has been hotly debated, but in any case it’s close to ubiquitous on college campuses. Venmo records show that Gaetz sent money to Greenberg, who’d then send money to college-aged women (and one 17-year-old girl) annotated “Tuition” and “School.”
The case rings awful to me not because of what Gaetz—who has has denied any wrongdoing and said that he “never, ever paid women for sex”—allegedly did, but because his political career and the political party he supports, which once claimed to care about “family values,” helped create the economic circumstances in which the decision to fuck men like him for tuition, or to cover the rent, is rational.
Minimum wage increases, subsidized child-care programs, and more state and federal funding for college would all decrease desperation—and that is what the Gaetzes of the world don’t want, politically or personally. Life is better for such men when there are lots of struggling women. Some of them need $1,200 in “Tuition” enough to take a drug-fueled trip to the Bahamas with men they don’t like and who treat women viciously. Some will consider a sex party in a Florida condo if they can keep going to school.
I’ve been a sex worker for 10 years, which means people think I think about sex all the time. In reality I think about money all the time. I think it’s obvious that more people are selling sex now. Some argue that it’s because the internet has lowered the barriers to entry, but it’s hard to get good data to say for sure as stigma, criminalization, and politicization make sample populations and study methodologies suspect. The other obvious reason that more people are going into sex work is because the rent, and sometimes the loan payments, are too damn high. It wouldn’t be the first time.
As poverty exploded after World War I in Weimer-era Berlin, sex work was everywhere. In typical German fashion there were names and designations for all the different types of workers, from state-sanctioned Kontroll-girls to gangs of homeless Wild-boys. Half-Silks, perhaps the rough equivalent of “sugar babies” today, were often factory or shop girls, women with full-time jobs who worked Friday nights. They couldn’t quite live on their wages, and saw one or two clients a week to scrape by.
It was disingenuous then, and remains so now with Seeking, to say that these quasi-amateurs were doing sex work for reasons other than economic need. Seeking can call it sugaring, with its implications of frivolity and decadence, but it’s hard to attribute the site’s popularity to anything but financial hardship.
Seeking puts the wandering hand of the market all over women’s bodies but it’s also where people with few resources can get paid and be able to afford tuition, or rent, or diapers. No one loves that you have to fuck a man older than your dad to do so, but: Tuition. Rent. Diapers. Seeking has a relatively low barrier for entry. Unlike escorting, which requires social media savvy and often a website, Seeking feels like Tinder: Take some pics of your body and face, barf up some words about hypergamy, and you’re in business.
The connection between higher ed and Seeking isn’t a bug. The site courts students. Sign up with a college email and verify your student ID and your free account becomes Premium. Seeking lists which colleges have the most sugar babies on their promotional materials, along with info about rising college costs. The site took out billboards targeting prospective babies: Happy 18th Birthday, Meet Your New Daddy.
Seeking doesn’t have to work hard to sell the idea that you need money for school. College costs have ballooned out of control. I know two sex workers who took up the job after racking up $250,000 in debt, with minimum monthly payments high enough to swallow a life whole—debt that can keep you up at night, or give you a reason to ingratiate yourself to powerful men.