LOL, nothing new under the sun. Women have been trading with men for sex since humans first appeared. In fact, sex-for-goods is an exchange seen not just in Man but in the other primates, too. Chimps, monkeys, bonobos, gorillas, etc. ... female primates routinely withhold sex/reject male advances unless or until he gives her something: some fruit, whatever. Exceptions being that female primates will mate with higher-status males without waiting for consideration. Just like with humans. We're nothing but really intelligent primates, with the same typical proclivities and habits as the other primates. We just have larger brains and a thing for spoken languages.
Funny thing about the SB/SD phenom. though: economics is a ruthless taskmistress. Also a great deal of irony.
Used to be that women generally didn't go to college. Also used to be most men didn't, either, unless they really needed to for their line of work: medicine, law, accounting, etc. But when men went to college, the price was bad, but not so bad. My dad's family and he paid a total of $6,000 for his undergrad degree, incl. room and board (that was $6k in 1950 $). Today, a college degree can easily top $100k, just in tuition and room and board. Books and living expenses are added to it. College tuition rates are driven by supply and demand, like anything else. At some point, to get a decent job, you needed a college degree in something... anything would do. This started in the 1970s. But at least employers were willing to train ppl and furthermore, general layoffs were uncommon. Suddenly women entered the paid workforce in a mass rush. The number of workers chasing jobs doubled over the course of a few decades. So wages of course started to drop to match. In addition, more and more women started going to college. Demand for degrees goes up so pricess for degrees go up. (Today, more women than men earn college degrees at every level up through PhD.) More colleges opened but not so many more that the supply offset the demand. In parallel, ppl realized there is great financial opportunity in running a college, provided it is run less like a college in the classic sense and more like a business. College admins who were usually PhDs in something and had years of teaching on their resumes started to get replaced by MBAs with little or no classroom instruction experience but a fair bit of business experience. Colleges, while technically still non-profits, started being run like for-profit businesses. Consequently, colleges gained a huge advantage over for-profit businesses, as they were and still are exempt from many taxes businesses pay. Nice racket, indeed.
While ppl laud and applaud the increase in the number of women getting college degrees and seem happy to note that the average Millenial woman outearns the average Millenial man, what these figures don't reflect is the notion that just because a person is in a more shallow pit than another does not mean that the person in the shallower pit is doing fine. The typical college grad of either sex now graduates with 10s of 1,000s of $$ in debt, sometimes as much as $100k. Paying off $100k over 30 years requires hundreds of $$ in monthly payments, possibly 4 figures depending on the interest rate. Graduating to a job market that now rewards principally highly-skilled technical people or very intelligent business-savvy people with really good people skills, the average person of either sex is facing weak prospects. Student debt can't be discharged by declaring bankruptcy. Declaring bankruptcy whacks your credit for 7-10 years but not paying off a 30-year student loan whacks it for the entire 30 years. Graduate at age 22 and that means your credit is destroyed essentially for all your working life. At age 52, it will take the rest of your life to build it back to where someone might give you a loan for something, assuming you pay off your debt anyway. Or, the loan is simply referred to collections and until you pay it to the collector, your credit is ruined. By this time the bank/gov't has written off the loan as bad debt and sold it to a collector so in essence you are held to a debt no longer even on the gov't's/bank's books.
Moving women from being live-in hookers with a really short client list (ie, housewives and stay-at-home mothers) married to men who earned money and provided for them and their children to the workforce has had a few unintended consequences. First, women can no longer count on men to support them, either because men can't afford to (see my previous comment re Millenial women on aggregate outearning Millenial men) or because we simply do not want to. Why, after all, should I support a woman clearly capable of supporting herself? After all, women today outnumber men in the labor force. Or for that matter, why have children with her when marriages (assuming we even get married) typically don't last til death do us part, and in the event of divorce, mom almost always gets primary custody (and the support payments)? Why have kids when indeed, they are not even "your" kids even if they carry half your DNA? Marriage and paternity are simply unattractive propositions for men these days, esp. for Millenial men, but for men in general. This leaves Millenial women with a mountain of tuition debt and limited job prospects unless they are above-average smart in technical matters or above-average talented as business types. Those bucking that trend are a small percentage of both the male and female populations. The rest of the world gets whatever job they can, one that typically pays pretty badly compared to how jobs used to pay.
At least back in the Mad Men days, women could usually find men to marry and take care of them. Being a kept women (ie, a hooker with a really short client list) was considered an honorable thing for a lady to do, if not also a necessity. No one blamed her for trading her pussy for a roof over her head and food on the table. Besides, if the old man and she split, she got the kids anyway AND alimony, a thankfully dying phenomenon. But it was a safer proposition for men back then since divorce was considered dishonorable if not unthinkable. My how times have changed.
So ironically despite all the supposed progress of modern women, there are more hookers per capita in the US than existed in 1950. Fancy that. The average woman is simply not an attractive LTR partner for most men either because most men can't afford one or because the average man no longer sees why he should have an LTR partner given the risks involved esp. if having kids is part of it. Without either willing or financially viable prospects among men of their generation, and huge tuition debt to pay off, Millenial women are simply doing what women have been doing for millions of years: when in need of goods, trade sex for them. In this case, older men that have money to spend can spend it on them in exchange for banging young chicks. By the time they have hit middle age, many men now know just how to talk to women and deal with them, esp. younger ones. So the pairings are functional if not very romantic. But in today's age, there is little room for romance. Ppl have to be pragmatic.
No better time to learn two things: how to fuck and how to be practical - than in one's 20s. These are important life skills everyone should have.
At least Millenial women have their backs to fall back on to make extra money. My heart goes out much more to the Millenial boys who are pretty much fucked in the not-too-pleasant way. Makes me wonder just what will become of them. Prospects for Millenials are by and large dismal but at least the girls can suck and fuck for money. Unless they are gay (and the great bulk are not), the boys don't even have that. I do wonder if they will simply live in their mother's basements until they are 50.