They told me that if I voted for John McCain, young women would be forced to sell their bodies to pay the rent….

…and they were right!

An attorney in her mid-thirties has resorted to topless dancing to make ends meet while she goes back to grad school and gets a degree.  The legal job market is a mess and will not recover for a long time; the profession is also rather overcrowded, so many JDs never even practise law.   Furthermore, attractive young women have always been well-compensated for taking their clothes off for men, should they so choose that route.

But… okay, you’re a thirty-something lawyer with nine years of experience in the field.  Surely, there are jobs out there that would pay you at least the $20/hour you get for taking your clothes off for strangers, right?  Rather than having a family who is “proud” of you for doing whatever needs to be done to make ends meet, shouldn’t that family open up a home?  (Not that I’m a fan of thirty-somethings boomeranging back home, but if it’s that or letting strangers gaze at your naked breasts for money, surely, the spare bedroom in the parents’ house is a sensible solution.)

Thoughts, dear readers?

Such a post wouldn’t be complete without a conservative feminist rant, so here it is: the government thought that it was being “compassionate” and giving everyone an “opportunity” by funding generous, virtually unlimited student loans.  Unfortunately, it didn’t repeal the law of economics at the same time, so the influx of easy cash created a bubble in the higher education market.   Economists have estimated that universities raise tuition concurrent with raises in available federal financial aid. Moreover, schools have an incentive to accept as many students as possible, training them in whatever fields they desire, even if there isn’t a market for those skills.  Thus, young people have an easy time getting loans, but the loans are for such huge amounts of money, often in very crowded or low-paying fields, that they become difficult or impossible to pay off.  So we’ve gotten to the situation in which young women’s best prospects for financial solvency involve selling their bodies – the exact situation which easy student loans and access to higher education was supposed to prevent, but one that sets women’s advancement back to the nineteenth century nonetheless.

Cross-posted at Haemet.