It is said that prostitution is the oldest business in history, and women have been trading sex for goods or services as long as it can be remembered. This phenomenon goes through periods of decrease and increase depending on the social situations of the particular place and time in history, but it tends to increase with times of hardship. Noting these facts it is of interest that CNBC reports there is distinct increase in landlords asking female tenants who cannot pay to “pay” them with a visit to their room.
Some landlords are taking advantage of the coronavirus outbreak, soliciting sexual favors in lieu of rent payments from economically vulnerable tenants, according to advocates.
Khara Jabola-Carolus, executive director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women, said her office has received more reports of landlords sexually harassing their tenants in the last two weeks than it had in the two years since she started working there, including cases of landlords offering to move in with tenants and sending sexually explicit photos to them after they communicated concerns about paying April rent.
While the number of cases wasn’t necessarily astronomical — the commission received 10 reports about nine landlords — Jabola-Carolus said they were especially notable given such cases go “vastly underreported.” (source)
This phenomenon has been noted on 4Chan months ago, and as a result some people started taking meme characters from the site and making their own videos with them to discuss the problem.
Prostitution as a phenomenon at large is also going to see a large increase. The most common form of this has been “camming”, which is just women doing lewd acts on an Internet website for money, and this has seen an increase consistently, and likely will continue to do so because of the virus.
These things are, for those who may remember, what Russia looked like in the last days of the Soviet Union. A depressed, tired, broke society where one made more money either on welfare, in prostitution, or selling drugs than doing a real day’s worth of labor because intentional policies destroyed the value of labor
But this isn’t the end of the USSR. This is the beginning of a new America, where socialism is the norm and the anger of the people is just beginning to stir.