SALON

Wednesday, Jul 2, 2008 10:30 PM UTC

So it’s come to this: Sex for gas

Things sure are looking bleaker and bleaker at the pump these days.

By

Topics: U.S. Economy, Broadsheet, Sex Work, Love and Sex,

For those of you who spent countless afternoons at a grandparent’s knee, listening to stories of deprivation during the Great Depression and worried that you would never have anything similarly bleak to someday relay to your own descendants, fear not.

Now you can tell your grandchildren you lived through a time when oil prices were so high that some women resorted to trading their virtue for gas.

According to the Smoking Gun, a Kentucky woman is currently facing prostitution charges for doing just that, providing sex to a gas station customer in exchange for $100 paid on his Speedway card, or about 25 gallons’ worth of gasoline.

Living in New York City without a car, I’d been fairly insulated from the skyrocketing price of gas, until I was in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago and literally screamed out loud when I saw the total at the pump. As prices continue to climb, inflating the cost of nearly every consumer item in the country, what’s next? Will we see heavily made-up women trawling the aisles at supermarkets, offering to do “anything” for a salmon fillet and a pound of tomatoes?

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And if prices continue to skyrocket like this, perhaps we’ll see more such stories, and very well may be in for something more than a depression. How does the Great Desperation sound?

Rachel Shukert is the author of Everything is Going To Be Great and Have You No Shame. Her YA series Starstruck is forthcoming from Random House in the spring of 2013. She lives in New York City. More Rachel Shukert.

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