The corporate media (The Australian) are carrying stories that many female university students are turning to the sex industry to earn easy cash to pay course fees and support themselves through university.

Joshua Rubin, 4 Girls.Link courtesy of Waking Vixen

Students said they preferred the cash-in-hand wages earned as strippers, escorts or sex workers to the pay and conditions of waitressing or other casual jobs. The shorter working hours and higher pay on offer in the sex industry was the best means for acquiring the finances needed to live, yet also allowing enough time to study.

However, shame is involved as the students felt obliged to keep their sex jobs a secret from friends, thereby leaving themselves isolated and vulnerable.

It appears that the students work as paid employees rather than being independent sex workers running their own business; and that those who completed their degrees have continued to work in the sex industry.

Sarah Lantz, of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Adolescent Health, said her research exposed one of the unintended consequences of government reforms, with students squeezed to meet living expenses. Presumably though sex work is thriving in Melbourne the sex workers (Educated sluts) don't come 'out' to their family, friends, and other employers.

Over at Catallaxy Andrew Norton says that we "should not see student prostitution as a policy failure, but as a legitimate way a small minority of people choose to finance their lives." The claim that prostitution is a legitimate way to finance your life was not addressed in the comments by the libertarians, who understand themselves to be rational economic agents shaping their lives with cost benefit analysis.So no need to worry about the sex industry being exploitative.

None ventured as far as to explore the assumption of the research that sex is commodity being sought and paid for; or that prostitution is living to please others or what kind of whoring is taking place and by whom. Or that what is paid for is a relationship, and not a series of isolated hook-ups, as they assumed. If relationships are for hire, does that mean that those clients who paying for a relationship with a prostitute, see this as the only sexual relationship they are having?