College Students Want No Part of the "Real World" Unless It's a Show on MTV

I currently live in a college town, and today a female friend of mine asked me why it is that yet another strip club has opened its doors in our fair city. I told her that it was because we live in a college town, and college towns and strip clubs have always had a symbiotic relationship. This relationship is not a phenomenon in itself, but is actually part of a larger concept I have dubbed "The Circle of College Life." I'll break the concept down into bite-size bits for easier digestion:

Strip Clubs

The benefits for a strip club in a college town are twofold. First, the common stereotype/joke about strippers is that they're all working to "pay for school." Med school, law school, veterinary school, clown college...you get the idea. But like any joke, there's some truth to it. There are some college girls who just flat out do not want to wait tables or work in retail. This leaves them with two main options for earning money: they can carry on a torrid affair with an aging English professor who buys them lots of stuff, or they can strip. The more talented girls will be able to find regular work at the clubs. The not-so-talented girls, well...that's why Amateur Night exists. This usually-weekly event is heavily publicized in college newspapers and on kiosks on most campuses. The purpose of Amateur Night is to bring in as many college students as possible. Females will flock to the club looking for an easy $200 payoff, and the male students will head to the clubs hoping to see that one hot girl from their chemistry class take off her clothes in public, which is way better than spending every night downloading her Facebook pictures. So the male students, by way of patronizing the local strip club, are in fact funding the tuition of many of their female classmates. This works out fine and dandy for the girls, but the guys soon find that their own funds are sadly depleted. If only there were some way for them to make their own quick cash...

Drugs

College guys generally aren't any more keen on working in food service or retail than their female counterparts. The bills keep coming, though, and a body has to make a living somehow. Now, there's always the option of hanging around the bars at upscale restaurants and hoping to meet a wealthy, elderly widow lonely for "company," but that could involve psychological damage to such a degree as to rival most of the girls working at the strip club (at least THEY never hear the phrase "you remind me so much of my grandson...). Stripping is still an option, but women don't frequent strip clubs nearly as often as men, and many of the straight guys would be too homophobic to work at the gay clubs. Plus, there's always the chance that they could end up on American Idol someday, and the whole "stripper past" thing can really come back to bite them (right, David Hernandez?). The best option for many of these guys is to become small-time pot dealers. Any guy attending college is likely to know other people who attend college. And guess what? A lot of those people smoke pot. So do their professors. So do their professors' TAs. So do their professors' TAs' dogs. And so on and so forth. The point is, it's theoretically possible to be a pot dealer on a college campus without ever having to get off the couch. Students from the honors college buy it because they're stressed out about school. Music, Art and Philosophy majors buy it because they need "inspiration." Pre-Med students buy it for "research." Strippers buy it because they want to escape the memories of horny frat boys and sweaty middle-aged townies drooling over them. It seems like a pretty sweet deal until the dealer realizes that the Reagan administration put laws in place that make it less of a crime to punt babies into a campfire than to be caught possessing, smoking, or selling marijuana. Sometimes they decide that maybe the risk isn't worth it. And that's where that pissy new cook at your job came from.

So you see, the entire college town economy is dependent on college students not wanting to work a regular job. Not when there are degrading and/or illegal jobs around that pay better than a part-time gig at McDonald's. Some girls strip to make money. Some guys blow their cash at the strip club and start selling drugs. Some musicians buy pot from the dealers with the money they made playing a show attended by strippers and dealers alike. Some professors buy pot with the money they get from working at a college where many of the students have to repeat classes and pay more tuition because they were too busy working, drinking or smoking pot to actually do any studying. Then the dealers go back to the strip clubs. And thus, the Circle of College Life continues.

Puny human college students.