A reader emails:

This article, about young women prostituting themselves, quotes Colorado Univ professor Joanne Belnap:

“I don’t want to blame the women because I feel like it is a way to get a college education, which I feel really strongly about,” she said. “We live in a culture where women are paid so unfairly compared to men. It’s not surprising that women would do this when you think of the level of sexual harassment women have to put up with at their jobs that pay a lot less. It’s a sad state of where we’re investing money in this society.”

Prostitution is an extremely old profession, yet none of the women that I know have ever felt so repressed by society that they have felt the need to do this.  Having been a college student myself, and having watched how my peers sometimes mismanage money, I don’t really buy into the “poor college student” stereotype. These are women whose “parents and scholarships are paying for tuition”- per the article. I am sure if there were other needs, parents would be happier to help than to have prostitutes for children. If all the young women were after were wants, well, that they won’t forego those desires until they are more financially stable is probably more problematic than any imagined societal repression of women.  And, I’m not sure who is being repressed. I mean, there is the other unexplored topic of men being seen as only useful for their money.

Am I just old fashioned in thinking this way?

Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m just amazed – and by “amazed”, I mean “not really amazed, but getting cynical and sarcastic about the endless Orwellian doublespeak” – that a college professor is telling people women are paid less than men for any reasons other than personal and lifestyle choices.