The Daily Beast has put up an interesting if somewhat depressing interview with a Mistress Snow. If that name is familiar, you might have seen an article she wrote last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That detailed her experience of working in academia as an adjunct professor while earning money as a pro-domme and what happened when she told her academic mentor about her sex work side gig. In short, her mentor reacted with horror and vindictively withdrew critical letters of recommendation. The Daily Beast article is a follow-up that provides more details on what happened and why a professor would need to earn money swinging a whip.
I initially described it as interesting but depressing, and re-reading it again only deepens that impression. It costs a ridiculous amount to go to college in the US and as a result there’s a terrible student debt problem. Yet adjunct professors, who make up over 50% of all US college professors, are earning an average of a little less than $24K a year. That’s less than a Starbucks barista and with much worse benefits. Yet when Mistress Snow supplements her income with a pro-domme gig, the tenured academic world reacts with horror and tries to screw her career. It takes a really special kind of system to rip-off both students and their teachers while punishing anyone who won’t conform to it. I think this quote from the article really highlights the craziness…
I make way more money per hour playing a professor in the dungeon than being one in real life.
Note this image is not of Mistress Snow. I don’t have an attribution, but I’d suspect it’s from one of the UK School Mistress themed sites.
Also I should point out that Mistress Snow of academia (twitter here) is not the same as Goddess Alexandra Snow (twitter and pro-site) or Snow Mercy (twitter and pro-site).
This is, as you say, very depressing.
Curiously, there was a much more benign reaction in the UK (of all places) when the identity of the sex blogger Belle de Jour was revealed to be a cancer epidemiologist who had helped to fund her PhD studies by working as a London call girl. You can find out more about her on Wikipedia.
Search under Brooke Magnanti
Yes, I read Belle’s blog back in the day and followed the articles after her identity came out. Although I never got around to watching the series with Billy Piper.
I tend to think that the UK is somewhat more relaxed about these things than the US. Religion has a smaller influence on politics and there’s less in the way of culture wars. Plus, of course sex work is legal to some extent. Not to say that the UK isn’t screwed up in its own special ways of course! But when it comes to both education and sex work it seems to be somewhat less crazy than the US, while still being more crazy than it ever should be.
Thanks for stopping by!
-paltego
I scheduled a session quite a number of years ago with a well known Domme in Boston, well known enough to have her own board on Maxfisch. When I arrived at her space, it was half packed and almost ready to close down. The session went well and we had a few minutes to chat after. It turned out she had just finished her Ph.D. in the same specialty field of engineering I had done graduate work in. She had already gotten an appointment as an Assistant Professor and was shutting down her Domme business.
I never knew her real name so don’t know where she went or how she did. I also don’t know if anyone in her Ph.D. program knew about her “other activities”. Probably not.
I’d guess that we’d all be surprised if we knew the percentage of women post-grads had done some form of sex work. It has flexible hours, relatively high pay per hour and the option to stop/start as needed. I’ve also known a few dommes who got their post-grad qualifications, but decided to concentrate on the domme work, given the challenges of getting a good position in academia.
Hopefully the domme you played with went on to a long and successful career!
Cheers,
-paltego