Dollars and Sex Read Free

underprivileged neighborhood. But while every other girl in her class went off to university (in search of husbands and degrees), Jane chose another path.
    In the year that Jane lived this way, she spent her time with female companions whose perspective on life was very different from hers. Unlike her, they had grown up in poverty. Some were sex workers, having entered the trade in their early teens, following the path of their sex-worker mothers. A few had migrated from different parts of the country to be near their boyfriends, who were incarcerated locally. Others had fallen off the precipice at a very early age and had never been able to climb their way back up.
    As it turns out, Jane’s friends (even the ones who were not sex workers) were extremely promiscuous; they had sexual relations with a variety of men, some of whom treated them well and others who did not. Their promiscuity was not the result of a lack of moral fortitude. The economic forces at work made it so their answer to “Should I have sex with him tonight?” was almost always “Why not?”
    What are those economic forces?
    Well, first of all, education. Starting in the early 1980s and up to the present, workers hoping to be economically successful have needed a college education. This has been true not only because educated workers’ earnings are climbing, but also because the wages of workers with lowest education levels are falling. In fact, Jane’s one year in the ghetto was near the beginning of a thirty-year decline in real earnings for those with a high school education or less, a decline that would turn the gap between educated and noneducated worker’s wages from a narrow crack to a yawning fissure.
    While these women may have not known that their earning opportunities were becoming increasingly limited due to their lack of education, there was a second economic factor that they were painfully aware of: The marriage prospects of underprivileged women had become bleak. Incarceration rates were on the rise and, in fact, no less than three of Jane’s friends had boyfriends who were in prison. Even without a criminal record, the lifetime earning prospects for low-income men were insufficient to make sustaining a family possible. In a time in which more successful men started to seek out wives who would make equal contributions to the household income, higher-income men were out of reach as a possible marriage partner for uneducated and underemployed women.
    So, while most women might have feared that promiscuity would affect their lifetime earnings and their prospects for marriage, Jane’s new friends figured they had little to look forward to, regardless of their sexual histories. They lived in a culture of despair where a mistimed pregnancy or “fast” reputation made very little difference to their standard of living—then and into the future.
    And so, the answer to “Should I sleep with him tonight?” was fated. “Yes, why not?” They really had nothing to lose.
    Part two of Jane’s story begins with a particularly frightening confrontation with a local pimp who had been trying to recruit her. This was about the same time Jane realized that her decision to diverge from the traditional path might have serious repercussions. So, Jane grabbed her purse (and nothing else) and headed to the airport where a kind airline representative took pity on her, handed her a ticket, and allowed her to fly across the country to a sister who gave her both shelter and a second chance.
    We will return to the details of that stage of Jane’s life in chapter 6 , but right now I want to skip to the third part of Jane’s life. This is the stage of her life in which she finds herself, coincidentally, sitting in the same lunchtime seminar as I am, wondering how lemons make good contraceptives.
    The days of waking up to find her roommate’s latest conquest passed out on the living room floor