THIS MANY College Students Pay for Sex?!

Every time I think I have a decent understanding of college students, I come across something like this: 

 

When the price of loving grows dear

 

For singles, apparently, the price of sex is going up, and not just for men who share Eliot Spitzer’s taste. Ordinary people legally exchange valuable items for sex all the time, says Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan.Kruger’s claim had me flashing back a few days, when I let my fiance fill my gas tank. Was this generous and gentlemanly behavior or a sex-for-fuel exchange?  

It might seem obvious to most regular people but to scientists who study such things, there’s no clear line between gift-getting and prostitution.

In a paper published in this month’s issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Kruger interviewed 475 college students and found that 27 percent of the men and 14 percent of the women reported trying to trade something to get sex. “Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was funding voice lessons, and sometimes it was giving tickets to the Ohio State versus Michigan game,” he said. “There’s a black market for those tickets – they’re quite sought after.”

Conversely, about 5 percent of men and 9 percent of women reported offering sex in the hope of getting some kind of freebie.

It’s not surprising that men are the ones more likely to give gifts or money or fuel, and women are more likely to receive such bonuses. That happens among penguins (nest-building rocks for sex), as well as monkeys and even insects (food for sex).

But now the economy is bad, how’s a guy to get some action if he can’t afford those coveted football tickets or even a tank of gas? “Some of them did laundry,” Kruger said, or they cleaned up a woman’s room.

 

More than 1 in 4 men trades something to get sex? Look, I realize this always goes on, but 1 in 4? And even harder to believe is that 14% of college women feel the need to trade something for sex. What kind of sad, messed up world do we live in where a WOMAN IN COLLEGE can’t find someone to have sex for free?! 

A few thoughts:

1) 475 college students isn’t much of a sample. I’d be more convinced of these stats if the sample was in the thousands. I’d like to believe these numbers are high. I’m also tempted to say something about the research being done at the University of Michigan, but I’ll exercise self-control. 

2) I tend to agree that trading material possessions or favors for sex is a form of prostitution. A little harder to define, maybe, and perfectly legal in many cases, but still prostitution. 

3) Our society’s view of sex and sexuality has become seriously warped. Even if you don’t buy into cultural declensionist narratives, you have to agree that commodifying sex to this degree is tragic and dysfunctional. To those who argued that “Friends with benefits” and “just hooking up” weren’t a big deal, have you changed your tune at all? And with evidence that the “just hooking up” culture is wreaking havoc on girls’ self-image (read Unhooked, by Laura Sessions Stepp) do you think that prostitution in its various forms is a “victimless crime”? 

College students reading this, do these numbers ring true with what you’ve seen and heard? Help me out here!

This story ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, by Faye Flam.