I think it’s:
c) social media has created impossible expectations among an increasingly impressionable, psychologically vulnerable and cash-strapped population in terms of the minimum requirements for happiness. These include unattainable physical perfection requiring expensive surgery, minimum 100k worth of handbags, 100k worth designer clothes/shoes, 250k worth of generic, instantly recognisable (for the ‘gram) designer jewellery, weekly trips to flashy restaurants and 5* hotels by chauffeur driven Rolls and to luxury resorts by private jet.
The number of people globally who have and can afford this lifestyle as the fruits of their honest labours is vanishingly small, but the number of people who feel the need to fake it for the ‘gram, and whose addiction to likes and follows makes them materially poorer and mentally sicker by the day, is growing exponentially. Recognising that no career, no matter how “middle class”, white collar, professional or successful, is likely to ever get them anywhere near what they have been manipulated and programmed to believe is what they need to be happy, a large and growing number of young women, educated or not, good backgrounds or not, manage the gap between what they can afford and what they have been conditioned to need/want with some form of prostitution. “Nice” girls may prefer to think of it as being a sugar baby or whatever, same thing.
It should go without saying, but in case it isn’t absolutely clear to everyone here, we are all complicit in this arrangement. Everyone who parses the lives of strangers on instagram, or critiques their wardrobe choices and their morality on here, has a hand in turning these educated middle class girls into prostitutes, by convincing them that they too can have everything the Kardashians have without exceptional levels of effort and talent, because clicks = $.
