Her body, her choice? Selling Virginity online

I might be late to jump on this blogging bandwagon, but I have CBC on in the mornings and all week the letters to Q have been in response to Natalie Dylan's (a pseudonym) decision to auction off her virginity.

If you haven't heard the story, here's the Reader's Digest version: She's a 22 year old grad student from California who decided to auction off her virginity at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada. Her reasoning is that she can use this money to pay for grad school and as some preliminary research for her grad school work. A quick video search turned up a clip of Natalie on the Tyra Banks show, explaining why she wants to do the:



She's even got Howard Stern to help out with the auction (quelle surprise!).

So this has brought up a storm of opinions online about whether she should or should not, whether prostitution should be legal, etc. Q wanted to know whether virginity is used as a marketing tool in pop culture. I'm hesitant to step into all that territory right now. Everyone and their dog has a blog entry on it. What really sticks in my craw is not Natalie's decision (which is problematic for so many reasons), but the response that I've been hearing on the CBC. One response that got to me was yesterday's "letter of the day" on Q where a woman from Dawson City wrote in to say that if Natalie had done something useful, like take up a trade, rather than get into Women's Studies, then maybe she wouldn't need to auction off her virginity to pay for school.

WTF?

A lot of our board members, past and present, have been enrolled in the joint Women's Studies programme (now Women and Gender Studies) at Saint Mary's, myself included. And I am all for women enrolling in trade programs or any discipline they choose, but I was a bit miffed to hear this woman say that Natalie has come to this point because she chose to do what amounts to a useless degree. But is it useless? A lot of people have asked me, "but what are you going to do with that degree?" A question that no one asked when I was enrolled in Political Science.

The thing is, I doubt many students get into Women's Studies with a specific profession in mind. Many of us are here to study the politics and theories that surround being a woman, femininity, feminism, and so much more. It's important that we do this. In an interdisplinary program like this one, we are taking traditional subjects and looking at them through a feminist lens, re-thinking the way we shape our world.

So, is Women's Studies a "useless" degree? (my degree has actually been described as this to me). Is Natalie Dylan delusional or empowered? This blog post doesn't really have a great conclusion to it, but I'd love to hear what you have to say. Just keep your blows above the belt: that means you should be respectful. Any mean or immature comments will get deleted.