A 19 year old American model just “auctioned off” her virginity for nearly $3 million online. News of this petty event is going viral. If you understand the culture of money and how it has a stranglehold on the generation currently coming of age however, you might see this fairly petty headline as a sign of the times.

She goes by the name of “Giselle,” and she sold her body through Cinderella Escorts, a website based in Germany.

According to Cinderella Escorts, a businessman from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (where Dubai is) was the highest bidder, offering the girl 2.5m Euros ($2.9m/£2.2m). The next highest bidder was an unnamed Hollywood actor, with an offer of 2.4m Euros ($2.8m/£2.1m).

According to the Daily Mail:

Giselle said she had planned to sell her virginity before finding out about Cinderella Escorts, but decided it was safer to work with an agency.

The agency rose to worldwide fame after the auction in 2016 of Aleexandra Khefren, a 18-year-old Romanian model who sold her virginity for 2.3 million euros (£2 million) to an unnamed businessman from Hong Kong.

Twenty percent of each auction goes as a fee to Cinderella Escorts, according to local media.

The man behind Germany’s most famous escort website is 27-year-old Jan Zakobielski, who runs the business from Dortmund, and likens a woman’s virginity to a ‘very old wine’ or a ‘luxury car’.

Giselle said:

I am happy to have decided to sell my virginity through Cinderella Escorts. I would never have dreamt that the bid would rise so high and we would have reached 2.5million Euros. This is a dream come true.

My personal opinion on the story was well encapsulated in an article from A New Kind of Human:

The teenager says she will use the money to pay for school fees, to buy herself a new home, and travel. In response to critics, she has expressed her decision as a “form of emancipation,” which is a clever play on words but deeply rooted in bullshit.

The Truth is, selling oneself for money is plain old prostitution, and no little girl grows up wanting to be a prostitute or sell their bodies to strange men and let a stranger stick their penis in them. I don’t know of any mentally stable woman who seriously views having sex with strangers as being empowering or emancipating in any way, shape, or form.

Any woman who has ever had to prostitute herself for money can tell you that it’s not worth it. In fact, does anything anyone does for money really ever feel worth it? Who says to themselves, “I’m really glad I just spent 50$ on that meal” when it is gone in an hour? When you ask a regular person this question, does “this” make you happy (referring to something they bought or something money related), they often insist that the money/item did in fact make them happy. But I’d have to disagree.

I think almost any excessive amount of money, comfort, or indulgence far outside necessity (unless it’s using money or an item to improve another person’s life) is ultimately void of satisfaction, hollow, like a drug.

People will sell their souls aspiring to achieve some satisfaction, but they never actually get it at all. They just keep chasing the green dragon we call the dollar. The man who bought this girl’s virginity is probably chasing the green dragon as well.

There is a reason why pop music is constantly trying to influence people to be consumeristic, shaping people who try desperately to derive satisfaction from money, possessions, and things that never yield the feeling they want it to.

(Image credit: A New Kind of Human, the Daily Mail)