Why is it that every 21-24 year old university girl with an iPhone a whore?
This is not an attack on young girls or an endorsement of the notion that women shouldn’t have nice phones, but I suppose things could be worse; a loose army of whorific university babes with iPhones is obviously preferable to, say, a handful of politicians who have mastered the art of performative virtue while actually doing nothing or 3 million people dressed in jackboots and shooting people peacefully congregated together demanding institutionalized reforms. Still, the fact that we have so many whorific university girls is mildly unsettling and profoundly inexplicable. It is hard to wrap your mind around the motivations of a twenty-two year old plastering saliva around the ‘insemination device’ of a seventy-four year old.
According to data leaks there are more than 450,000 monthly searches featuring the phrase “selling feet”-and before you ask, yes, the target market is exactly who you think it is: loaded, fetish-driven men best known for the phrase “send another one.” There are billions of monthly views of the hashtag #GRWM (Get Ready With Me) on Instagram and TikTok, which functions less as beauty content and more as a digital storefront where “sponsors” shop for potential start-up entrepreneurs. Seasonal searches for the word “sponsor” hit approximately 134,000 per month in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya-countries where the term has become so normalized among university students that it’s essentially lost its euphemistic quality. It just means what it means now.
Consider that roughly 3 out of 10 girls in South Africa have had-or currently have-a sponsor. That’s quite an accomplishment, intervening the fact that the other 7 out of 10 haven’t figured it out yet, or they’re holding out for better terms.
It has become a matter of public record that ‘university is changing our lives,’ a platitude uttered with such exhausting frequency since 2001 that it has effectively lost all semantic meaning. However, if we look at the data-or at least the anecdotal evidence coming from every campus quad-it appears the primary achievement of this place formerly known as institution of higher learning isn’t the distribution of education or the promise of mid-level employability. Instead, university has functioned as a massive, subsidized incubator for the normalization of ‘whore culture’ as a viable, high-frequency economic strategy.
There is no rational justification for the sheer volume of digital commodification currently happening on campuses, much of which is clearly (clearly!) being motivated by something other than immediate liquidity. It’s a delayed reaction to a patriarchal ghost. We have to ask: Where were these parents sixteen years ago? While a handful of future-minded patriarchs were busy front-running the blockchain technology (bitcoin) or snagging early IPOs, a much larger contingent was busy just’chilling.’
Now, sixteen years later, their daughters have returned to the marketplace seeking the exact financial risk-profiles their fathers lacked, only we’ve collectively agreed to call this ‘mentorship.’ We’ve decided to pretend that a fifty-year age gap is a byproduct of ‘maturity’ rather than a calculated hedge against a missed 2009 black swan opportunity. But I suppose it’s easier to just sit here and blame a lack of ‘internet literacy’ than it is to admit we’ve turned the dating pool into a corrective secondary market.
My theory is that what the Internet has accomplished isn’t the democratization of pornography-it’s the professionalization of amateur pornography. It marks the shift from being a “consumer” of content to becoming a “content creator,” except we stopped putting quotes around “content creator” somewhere around 2019, which is when everyone collectively decided that filming yourself is a legitimate career path and not just something you do when you’re overwhelmed. Think of it as The OnlyFans-ification of Everything: your private life isn’t private, it’s pre-revenue.
Now, I realize ‘OnlyFans-ification’ sounds like the kind of term someone refers to when they’ve spent too much time online, and you’d be right. But it’s the best explanation for why the line between ‘having a boyfriend’ and ‘having a client’ has become so impossibly blurred. We didn’t consciously decide to turn relationships into transactions-the infrastructure made it so easy that we did it accidentally, and by the time we noticed, it was already normal. Sociological research suggests that frequent exposure to amateur pornography “normalizes” the idea that anyone can monetize their private life, but the research is missing the point-it’s not that we think we can monetize our private lives, it’s that we’ve stopped believing there’s a meaningful difference between “having a personality” and “having a product.” The camera was always running; OnlyFans just figured out how to put a paywall on it.
Here’s what I mean by that: We used to think the Internet was for information. Then we thought it was for connection. Now we understand it’s for monetization-and the thing being monetized is access to the self. The sponsor economy isn’t a corruption of the Internet’s purpose; it is the Internet’s purpose, we just didn’t know it yet.
But, it has been my experience that people who are especially obsessed with Internet technology (AI experts and vibe coders, “new media” pundits, crypto evangelists, etc.) tend to become extremely agitated when you start to talk about Internet pornography, typically because they think that it degrades the social import of the Web and insults all the bespectacled geniuses who create it. There are some perverts on computers who spend all day looking at Doja Cat’s Instagram feed, but there are just as many perverts in public libraries looking at medical journals and playing with themselves under the table. The only difference is that one group has a browser history and the other has a library card, and somehow we’ve decided the library card makes it intellectual. You wouldn’t judge the merits of literature by the actions of those losers, and it’s equally shortsighted to study the Internet through the prism of its lowest common denominator. People who obsess about Internet porn are missing the point, which is ironic because obsessing about things you’re supposed to feel guilty about is literally the entire architecture of the Internet.
Consider the recent emergence of AI tools like Grok via Elon Musk’s platform X-specifically the ‘bikini’ feature that sent the internet into its standard, 48-hour cycle of choreographed panic and excitement. The outrage was entirely predictable and almost fundamentally beside the point. The real story wasn’t that the technology existed, or even that it worked; the real story was that millions of people immediately understood its application without needing so much as a ‘Quick Start’ guide.
We’ve built a culture where the first instinct upon seeing a breakthrough in AI tech isn’t ‘How will this solve the medical crisis of cancer research?’ but rather ‘How can I use this to create pornographic content of people who didn’t consent?’ Also OpenAI is considering to roll out ‘adult content’ this year! Good luck to them.
That isn’t a technology problem. It’s a demand-side economics problem. We like to blame Silicon Valley for building the tools, but Silicon Valley is just a glorified janitor providing the infrastructure for a basement we already live in. The market had already decided what it wanted before the first line of code was ever written. Grok didn’t create a new desire; it just lowered the cost of entry for a desire that was already the primary engine of the digital economy. We are all pretending to be shocked by the arrival of a machine that does exactly what we’ve been training it to do since 1955.
Or consider Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ feature, which was originally marketed with a sort of wholesome, 2012-era naivety as a way to share ‘personal moments’ with your inner circle. It was supposed to be a digital safe house for blurry photos of late-night tacos and dirty martinis. But within months, the collective consciousness had reverse-engineered it into a high-margin subscription service.
The transaction is now as standardized as a Netflix billing cycle: If you want access to my ‘real’ life-or at least the version that requires a credit card to unlock-it’ll be fifteen dollars a month via Patreon or Stripe.
The fascinating thing isn’t that this happened; the fascinating thing is that Instagram didn’t build the feature for monetization. The users built it themselves, essentially hacking a ‘social’ tool into a ‘fiscal’ one. The platform just shrugged and let it happen, because capitalism is nothing if not adaptable. If there is a market for tiered access to someone’s curated authenticity, the infrastructure will inevitably manifest itself. We’ve turned the ‘inner circle’ into a ‘paywall,’ and we’ve done it so seamlessly that we forgot it was ever supposed to be about friendship. Close Friends lists aren’t just a monetization hack; they’re a window into what we actually value. Turns out we don’t value connection and authenticity but rather-we value access and the appearance of authenticity that can be purchased at a competitive rate.
The distinction between having a sponsor and having an OnlyFans isn’t a moral boundary-it’s a payment processor. Both involve monetizing access to your body, your time, your curated self. The only difference is whether the transaction happens via a CashApp note with a pizza emoji or through a platform that harvests 20% of your revenue for ‘security.’ We’ve convinced ourselves these are different categories of behavior, but they’re just different skins for the same economic engine: What am I willing to sell, and what’s the market rate? Ultimately, ‘sponsorship’ is just amateur pornography with better PR. It’s a decentralized version of the same impulse, rebranded for a generation that wants the check but refuses to accept the job description.
Let’s say you’re a 22-year-old woman sitting in a Java coffee shop with two options: (a) Apply to twenty entry-level marketing jobs that pay 45K and require a year of ‘experience’ you don’t have, or (b) Post three Instagram stories that take 20 minutes to create and potentially connect with someone who will cover your rent, buy you dinner, and ask for nothing you weren’t already performing for free on social media anyway. Which option would any rational economic actor choose? The fact that we pretend Option A is ‘respectable’ and Option B is ‘degrading’ says more about our discomfort with honesty than it does about the morality of either choice.
In my sophomore year i happened to know a girl who had a ‘sponsor’.She used to spoil us(her friends) with much what we asked for . When I asked her how she rationalized it, she didn’t hesitate: “He’s taking me to dinner anyway. He’s paying for the Uber anyway. He’s buying me drinks anyway. Why should I pretend I’d do this for free?” She said it the way you’d explain a business decision, because that’s what it was. I wanted to tell her she was wrong-that there was something she wasn’t accounting for, some moral variable she’d left out of the equation. But I couldn’t, because she’d simply done the math that many girls refuses to do. She’d turned subtext into a pricing model, and the only thing that made me uncomfortable was how little it seemed to bother her. Or maybe what bothered me was that her logic was airtight, and I had nothing to counter it with except a vague appeal to ‘how things used to work’-which, when you say it out loud, sounds less like morality and more like nostalgia for an economic system that never actually benefited her in the first place.
The sponsor economy works because it’s relatable. These aren’t supermodels or porn stars-they’re girls you went to high school with, girls you see at the campus library, girls whose Instagram stories feature both thirst traps and complaints about alcohol brands or house party sagas. The accessibility is the appeal. If she can do it, maybe you can too. And if you can’t do it, maybe you should consider doing it , because rent is due and your degree isn’t paying for itself.
Of course, it should go without saying that an economy where 22-year-olds monetize their bodies because it’s more profitable than their education is profoundly broken. But acknowledging something is broken and actually doing something about it are two different things. And in the meantime, people still need to eat.
So is every 21-24-year-old university girl with an iPhone a whore? No. But we’ve built an economy that rewards them for acting like one, and then we act surprised when they take the risk. The real question isn’t why they have sponsors. It’s why we’re still pretending we don’t understand the economics.
I can only assume it has something to do with not wanting to admit we’d probably make the same choice.
