Good news, parents of University of Windsor students: your kids are showing a burning interest in earning their MBA.
The bad news? We’re not talking about a business degree. No, on campus today, the abbreviation stands for Mutually Beneficial Arrangement, and it comes courtesy of the website SeekingArrangement.com.
Here’s the deal: Sugar Daddies (though there are a few Sugar Mommies, presumably strays from CougarLife.com) use the site to connect with Sugar Babies (that’s your daughter or, in rare cases, your son. How proud you must be.). In true entrepreneurial spirit, Sugar Baby A enters into a “transaction” with Sugar Daddy B, which sees B pay A a monthly allowance in return for “companionship.” Having trouble spelling that word students? Allow me to help: p-r-o-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n.
The website gets a fee to set it all up. The Sugar Babies earn up to $3,000 a month (hey, young people have been getting screwed by employers for years, so it’s about time they got paid well for it) to cover school expenses, or therapy to help them deal with the trauma of exposure to the effects of gravity on older bodies.
And the Sugar Daddy? Well, he can brag about his philanthropic support of education – something he used to have to go to a strip club, with a fistful of bills, to do.
OK, so the story of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Pays Girl isn’t exactly new. The wrinkle – and there are many, really, despite vigorous applications of Botox – here is that the University of Windsor seems to be a magnet for businesses looking to cash in on the sexuality of its students.
In the last year, UW coeds have been offered work at strip joints that dangled tuition payments as an incentive to work the pole, and a webcam chat gig with men for thousands of bucks a month.
And now SeekingArrangement.com tells us 134 UWers have signed up with its site, making the campus the country’s 10th fastest growing Sugar Baby School. (What a great slogan that would make for a student recruitment campaign — if you wanted classrooms full of dirty old men.)
Surely, Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild notoriety can’t be far behind with his cameras.
So what’s the explanation for this tendency to show off the student body, rather than just be part of it? Is it something in the Windsor water? Is it because the city promotes its “wilder side”?
Or is it simply that business owners who deal in the sex-related trade are pretty good marketers?
They know that making outlandish offers to entice university students will attract plenty of attention for their firms – and more than a few curiosity seekers who will become either customers or staff. When the stripper stunt drew national headlines (and probably filled a few more seats in the ensuing weeks on Gynecology Row), others followed suit.
Fortunately, most Windsor students are smart too. They’re not buying stilettos by the dozen in the hope of paying down student debt. They are instead sticking with the books and more traditional part-time jobs.
They are, to a degree, minding their own business. We should mind ours too, giving no more attention to “arrangements” that are little more than marketing pranks.
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