Will Spoon* For Cash And Gifts

A generational shift is occurring around the idea of sex work as a viable job opportunity. It’s the result of many factors, including lax attitudes about the connection between morality and sex and even feminist arguments that sex work can be empowering.

Throw in a difficult job market for younger Millennials, growing student loan debt and the drive to flaunt fancy clothes and belongings on social media, and performing sex acts with strangers for cash and sometimes gifts is less taboo.

Technology helps, too. “It’s not like you need a pimp anymore. You just need a computer,” one so-called “sugar baby” told Vanity Fair in the recent article “Daddies, ‘Dates,’ and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy.”

And if they’re not straight up having sex for money and gifts, they’re spooning for cash. People are even making money from training people to become professional cuddlers. In New York City, you can pay a trainer at the Cuddlist $79 for a 10-hour training course on how to be a professional cuddler. In a service economy, where anything from mailing letters to doing laundry can be outsourced, what’s a little outsourced nookie?

We call this trend UnMoney, questioning currency, capitalism and adopting new economic systems.