Due to college labor practices, many adjunct professors now need side hustles; Dr. Mistress Snow’s involves beating up men in a sex dungeon.
[This is the full version of the Daily Beast interview I did with Mistress Snow, Ph.D. Due to their length guidelines, they did not include large parts of my introduction, and some parts of Mistress Snow’s answers. Segments not included in the Daily Beast version are indicated with asterisks **before and after the segments.**]
When you think of a college professor, you don’t usually think of a dominatrix. And, you also don’t usually think of someone who is so underpaid that they don’t know how they’re going to afford rent or groceries. However, due to college administrators’ relentless drive to cut labor costs via outsourcing college instruction to freelance “contingent faculty,” the latter situation of professorial poverty is increasingly common. And for that reason, at least one professor—whom we’ll meet soon—has taken up the former as a side job.
More than half of all college professors are now “adjuncts”: part-time freelance instructors who often have the same Ph.D.s as their tenured and full-time colleagues, but who get paid low amounts on a per-course basis, with few or no benefits or job security. Typically, adjuncts (also known as “contingent faculty”) string together gigs at multiple colleges, which pay an average of $3,984 per course. Three courses a semester, or six per year, is considered a full teaching load–many adjuncts report it’s difficult to get this many courses–which implies a typical yearly income of $23,904 for the “lucky” adjuncts with a full-time-equivalent teaching load.
For reference, full-time baristas at Starbucks make an average of $27,030 per year, and are eligible for benefits including health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, parental leave, and even emergency financial assistance during family crises; adjunct professors typically receive none of these benefits. **And, making these thousands of dollars per year more plus benefits as a barista does not require ten or more years of study and foregone earnings during college and graduate school, nor the often-six-figures of student debt that adjuncts carry.
One researcher titled his book on this downtrodden half of the professoriate “The Adjunct Underclass.” The title is apt: according to research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25% of part-time college faculty are on some form of public assistance, including Medicaid, welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and/or food stamps. Since 50% of the faculty are part-time now, taken together, these statistics imply that one-in-eight college professors are adjuncts currently on public assistance. If you’re taking a college class right now, there’s a chance your professor just showed up to your class having slept in her car.
Welcome to what one team of researchers have referred to as “The Gig Academy.”
How did this happen?
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total tuition, fees, room, and board across all four-year undergraduate institutions (public and private) has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 2.39% above inflation since 1985. In that year, the average published price per year of a four-year college, including room and board, was $12,551 in 2018 dollars. During the 2017-18 academic year (the most recent in the NCES analysis), the price was $27,357, over double the 1985 price, in constant dollars. (Note: the actual price the average student pays is less, due to grants. Also, most college-age people would need to pay some amount for room and board whether they were in college or not.) Columbia University, currently the most expensive in the nation, costs $79,814 per year to attend, including room and board, before financial aid.
Yet, during this same period that colleges have been jacking up their prices, when it comes to their professoriate–the core of their value proposition–colleges have been going on a labor-cost-slashing, downsizing, and outsourcing binge that gives Sears, GM, and Ford a run for their money.
According to a 2014 report entitled “The Just-in-Time Professor,” from the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty. Today, they represent half.” The report finds that this trend has been uniformly negative on the student learning experience. While contingent faculty often have the same academic qualifications as tenure-track faculty and care passionately about teaching (why else would you teach for grueling hours if you were barely getting paid?), the severe stress caused by low pay, zero benefits, and semester-by-semester job insecurity seriously harm adjuncts’ ability to be fully present and available for their students. For contingent faculty, almost all activity outside of class–advising, office hours, detailed commenting on papers–is unpaid, and increasingly untenable. Plus, adjuncts are itinerant workers—what one commentator referred to as the “fast-food workers of the academic word”—which impedes the multiyear academic mentorship bonds that are often the most meaningful part of a college student’s educational experience.
(With college revenue soaring, and core teaching labor costs slashing, where do college administrators park all that extra cash? To a large degree, into their own paychecks. According to the Wall Street Journal, since 1987, the number of administrators relative to faculty has doubled. Interestingly, though there’s not 1-to-1 causation, this was roughly the same period in which college prices doubled as well. As two analysts for Bain & Company put it, “In no other industry would overhead costs be allowed to grow at this rate—executives would lose their jobs.”)
The College Price Bubble and Student Sex Work
Here’s where sex work comes into the academic picture.
The people most widely impacted by the revenue-line increase of college are, of course, the students. Student debt in the US now stands at $1.67 trillion. (When I wrote a book criticizing the college cost bubble in 2011, that figure had just hit the $1 trillion mark.) To pay for this skyrocketing tuition and debt, a not-insignificant number of students have turned to sex work. A 2020 survey in the UK found that 4% of college students there had engaged in some form of sex work to pay tuition and living expenses. (This suggests that in a typical 25-student college classroom, 1 student is a sex worker, on average.) This phenomenon has been reported widely in the media, and was the subject of a recent documentary.
Feminist porn pioneer Nina Hartley put herself through nursing school at San Francisco State University by stripping. Porn star Tasha Reign starting performing in adult films while at UCLA in part to pay for her women’s studies degree, and continued as she earned her recent master’s in journalism at USC. And there have been several high-profile memoirs of student sex workers: Heide Mattson wrote “Ivy League Stripper” about paying for Brown University through stripping, and Melissa Febos wrote “Whip Smart” about working as a dominatrix while she was a student at The New School in New York.
In addition to the typical risks sex workers incur, college students who do sex work face the risk of having their outside work seriously interfere with their studies if they are outed during their time in school. The most well-known instance is the “Duke Porn Star” Belle Knox, who was outed by a classmate, and eventually took a leave of absence from her studies due to the relentless bullying. (Hypocritically, the guy who outed her recognized the true identity of Belle Know while he was a paying member of the porn site where he saw his classmate. It’s an instance of the old porn performer adage, “They point fingers with one hand while they jerk off with the other.”)
Only a year later, in a chillingly similar story, a college freshman who was doing porn to pay for college was outed by students at her former high school; after a relentless online bullying campaign by the high school students, she committed suicide. Recognizing the parallels with her own story, Belle Knox wrote a moving open letter to the deceased student:
“We were both straight-A students. Like you, I have battled depression for years. I too was a freshman in college when I was outed as a porn performer. We even shot for the same website, where I had an experience that traumatized me to this day. And, just like you, I was bullied relentlessly by my fellow students for my actions as a porn performer. I was threatened with death, rape, and heinous acts of violence. I was called every derogatory name in the book — every horrible epithet that society slings at sexual women. . . . I do not think pornography caused your death. But I think society’s reaction to pornography did.”
There are more horror stories. Porn star Brett Rossi paid for nursing school through doing porn. In an exclusive interview I conducted with Rossi as background for this piece, she told what happened when she was outed:
“A fellow student at school, whom I thought was a friend, had done some Internet sleuthing, and found out everything about me. . . . She and her friend group outed me to the entire school. Everyone. The students, the deans, the professors. I was terrified that they would tell the doctors and nurses at my clinicals in the hospital, and that I would be kicked out of the hospital and unable to become a nurse. I left my first year. I was actually bullied out of school by my fellow students.”
To address the needs of this hidden, stigmatized, and underserved student population, the Sex Work Research Hub put out a detailed safety and support toolkit for student sex workers. And in 2018, a group from the Sex Workers Outreach Project Sussex organized a table to provide risk-reduction support to student sex workers at the University of Brighton in England. When anti-sex-worker-rights feminists caught wind of this, they became enraged; taking a page from the “abstinence-only” sex ed playbook, they suggested that offering advice on how to reduce the risk of an activity would put the wrong thought in students’ heads, and would encourage risk-taking by “normalizing” and “grooming” the activity. (Notably, their rage did not extend to the soaring tuition and school debt leading students towards sex work in the first place, nor did they offer any other ways the students could earn equivalent money as in sex work, working the same number of hours.)
The most popular forms of student sex work, according to the 2020 UK survey, are OnlyFans and sugar dating. SeekingArrangement, the largest sugar dating site in the US, claims to have 3 million members as sugar babies with .edu email addresses, including 2,724 sugar babies at Arizona State University (the #1 sugar baby school in the US), and 1,507 at NYU. (Other sex workers typically consider sugar dating to be a form of sex work, though the sites themselves and many sugar babies distance themselves from sex work.) “Intellectual dark web” thinker Eric Weinstein recently interviewed a spokesperson for “Sugar Baby University” on his podcast. Earlier, Weinstein wrote in a tweet: “Q: What’s the difference between commercial sex workers and University Academicians who push *non-dischargeable* student debt burdens? A: The former are ethical business people honest about their business model & generally oppose indenturing.”
This is what happens when college administrators relentlessly increase their revenue per student. But what happens when, at the same time, they aggressively decrease their pay per faculty member? Many adjunct professors now find themselves in the same position as students: needing to find significant side-work to stay afloat within academia.
And, at least one professor has taken a cue from the many students who now do sex work.** I came across the lively Twitter feed of Mistress Snow, Ph.D., whose bio reads, “Professor by day, pro-Domme by night – let me teach you a lesson.”
Last December, Mistress Snow—who says her field is in the humanities—wrote a personal essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix: She Rescinded Her Letter of Recommendation.” The summer before the article came out, she found herself without a teaching gig–which is common for adjuncts. “With no money in my checking account and no paycheck on the horizon,” she writes, “I had about a week to cobble together a couple grand before rent was due. The clock kept ticking; there was no lifeboat in sight. I was hungry. So I swallowed my pride, reluctantly dusted off my corset, and dialed up the old dungeon. By the end of the week, I was back in the sex trade, beating, humiliating, and degrading men (and sometimes women) for $90 an hour, plus tips.”
Mistress Snow refers to her mentor by the pseudonym “Anne” in the Chronicle article. Having developed a close personal bond with Anne over seven years–and thinking Anne would be supportive, as she worked on class and labor issues in her research–Mistress Snow decided to divulge her secret to Anne. To Mistress Snow’s surprise, Anne took it horribly, telling her, “Academia and sex work are mutually exclusive.” In an email that Mistress Snow shared with me, Anne wrote to her: “If this information comes out in any way, shape, or form, it will destroy your academic prospects. . . . In the age of FB and everything being on the internet, you don’t want this out there—ever. This is what I mean about blowing up the part of your life that matters most. You will lose all credibility. Time to stop.”
Strangely, after expressing this concern, Anne then tried to ensure Mistress Snow wouldn’t have an academic career, by rescinding her letters of recommendation, which are the main currency of academic job searches.
I had the opportunity to interview Mistress Snow recently via Zoom:
Why do you think your mentor felt that using your sexuality to support yourself was “mutually exclusive” in relation to the academic life of the mind?
It’s totally hypocritical, because faculty regularly encourage women to use our sexuality to pursue the life of the mind. An academic job mentor I was randomly assigned once–it was someone other than Anne–said to me, “Make sure you bring ‘fuck-me’ boots to the interview.” The amount of preparation I have to go through every time I have a job interview! “Is this too sexy?” “Is this too boring?” All of which has nothing to do with my academic research. It’s just another way of policing women’s bodies.
**I also think the illusion of the body-less academic is a way of keeping poorer people out of academia. If you’re rolling in to teach a class on three hours sleep, because you were up late at your side-job, you can’t think straight, and you’re not going to perform well. You can’t do academic labor—or any labor—effectively if you don’t know how you’re going to pay for your groceries or this month’s rent. This is half the reason capitalists gave in on the eight-hour workday: to optimize worker performance.**
Right before I told Anne about my work, I was teaching four classes, and only making about $30K a year from that. I needed more to pay my bills and student loans, so on top of teaching four days a week, I dommed three days a week. I was running each day from one campus to another, and then to the sex dungeon. I would get home from the dungeon at 2 AM, and then I’d have to go teach an 8 AM class. It was a nightmare. I would be shaking. I couldn’t see straight. My contacts would fall out of my eyeballs because my eyes were so dry. The body is very much necessary for the life of the mind; if the needs of the body are ignored, the mind can’t do its work.
**Shaming adjuncts for using their bodies to make money is actually a way of shaming and weeding out adjuncts from poorer backgrounds, who don’t have family support and have to take second and third jobs. A second job for an adjunct needs to be highly flexible, due to our teaching schedule–it’s not going to be some consistent office job. Most flexible jobs rely heavily on the body—such as waiting tables, retail, bartending, or sex work.
I think there’s this fantasy that many academics have, that their mentees are little carbon copies of them. When I started doing something with my body that my mentor found so repulsive, she had to distance herself as much as she could.**
Why do you think your academic mentor had such a problem with you domming?
I can read it for you [laughing]. Here’s a snippet from one of the last emails Anne wrote to me:
“About sex work—well, there are many arguments in favor of legalizing sex work and for accepting it, on the grounds that it is often between consenting adults (though very often not), that people have a right to experiment sexually, and that sex workers have a right to be paid fairly, etc. I understand that those arguments exist, but I am not going to make them because I mainly don’t believe in them. . . . Money is always nice to have, but it doesn’t sound to me like this is about the money. It strikes me as being an outcome of being sexually abused, and an attempt to take back agency while also expressing your anger. Is that really what you need to do?”
Where do I even start? First of all, if it’s not between consenting adults, then that precludes it from being sex work, bitch. Then it’s trafficking; it’s not work.
Then there’s her line about having a “right to experiment sexually.” Again, she’s not perceiving sex work as work. As if this is just about sexual experimentation for me, not about money. I don’t see it as experimenting with my sexuality at all, because it’s not about my sexuality; it’s about paying rent. Even if my client is getting off, I’m at work, and it has nothing to do with my own sex life. It’s not like I’m sitting there thinking, “Man, I wonder what it feels like for someone to suck on my toes. I’m going to go down to the dungeon and find some random dude to suck my toes and try it out.”
Then there’s her line, “Money is nice to have, but it doesn’t sound to me like this is about the money.” Like most tenured faculty, Anne is a boomer. She went to college and got her Ph.D. decades ago, when college was comparatively cheap, before there were the mountains of student debt we now have, and before the whole adjunctification trend really started. She has no idea what it’s like to try to live as a contingent faculty member with no benefits, hustling teaching gigs semester by semester, paying down six figures of student debt, on $30K a year.
**I once asked her, “Have you ever been in a situation where you had bills due, and you had no idea how you were going to pay for them?” She said, “No.” The idea that one might not have the money to pay rent or buy food just did not compute. I read a recent essay by Chris Belcher, who was domming to support herself while she was an underpaid graduate student TA, and she put it well: “Sex work cash is not go for an interview, fill out employment paperwork, promise you’re not a felon, work two weeks for a paycheck that can’t cover your expenses kind of cash. It’s fast. It’s ‘I need emergency medical care’ cash. It’s ‘all you need is an internet connection and a will to survive’ cash.”
A lot of tenured professors can’t relate to that. As with most positions of power, tenure-track positions tend to select for people from wealthier backgrounds, and this heightens once you finish graduate school. The adjuncts applying for tenure-track positions–the ones who are working class and have to work one or two outside jobs on top of teaching gigs at multiple colleges–usually don’t have time to do the kind of research or writing that will allow them to compete effectively to get those jobs. They’re too busy driving from one college to the next one to their job across town. In my anecdotal experience, most academics who don’t get a good job offer within a year or so of defending their dissertation leave the profession. In my Ph.D. cohort, only three received tenure-track jobs. Most are doing non-academic jobs now. Bartending. Working in bookstores.
So for Anne to say, “Money is nice to have, but it doesn’t sound to me like this is about the money”–it’s beyond patronizing. It’s dehumanizing, and it’s violent.
These tenured boomer women want to differentiate themselves from sex workers for a lot of reasons. I think one is that our society is set up so that women generally have to use their bodies to gain both social and financial capital. That’s how heteropatriarchy works under capitalism. And civilian women don’t want to admit that they’re doing that, to some degree, in their heterosexual marriages. [Note: “civilian” is the term sex workers use for non-sex-workers.] To be clear, heterosexual marriage is not sex work, but it is often transactional. I wonder if there’s some kind of resentment. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, I’m like, if I were fucking people for free. . . **
Did you do sex work before you were an adjunct?
Yes. The summer between college and graduate school, I was working retail. I was able to afford cereal and shit, but not, like, dinner. So I was going on two dates a day–lunch dates and dinner dates–just to get the free meals. At a certain point, I was like, “I’d rather just have the cash than the meals with these guys.”
When I got to graduate school, I tried to find a dungeon to start working in, but there weren’t any I could find in the city. I started doing some independent work, but then I had a really violent client, whom I didn’t screen properly, and I was like, “Fuck this shit, I’m done.” I stopped domming, maybe my second or third year in grad school.
I picked it up again in the summer of last year, as I wrote in the Chronicle piece. I needed cash ASAP. I started domming independently again because I didn’t have time to start in a dungeon, but I got into a dungeon after about a month.
What’s your specialty? Did you train formally in BDSM?
I shadowed more experienced Dommes. Some clients like being watched, so it works out. But there are so many Dommes, typically younger ones, who will go into sessions thinking, “Fake it till you make it!” Which is fine… if you’re not dilating someone’s urethra, or trying to give an enema. I didn’t give an enema until I watched several other people give enemas. [laughing]
My specialty is corporal punishment. Flogging, caning, paddling. The thing I really like about corporal sessions is that, for me, the adrenaline rush is far greater than with, for example, a humiliation session. It’s fun to flog the shit out of someone.
I was domming at the dungeon right up until the pandemic started. Since then, I’ve been doing a bit of online and phone work. And I still teach my college classes virtually.
Have you ever had a close call, like a student of yours or a colleague walking into the dungeon?
No, fortunately not. I’ve definitely had recognizable academics as clients though. It pisses me off. These men aren’t going to face any repercussions for coming to pay me in the dungeon. But I could get fired from my academic job for taking their money.
Do your clients know you’re a professor? And do you ever do professor/student role-plays with your clients in sessions?
Yes, I sometimes tell clients I’m a professor beforehand if I think it’ll be a selling point. Some of them are really into the professor/student role-plays. And it’s always so awkward, because all I can think of is how unethical this would be if I was actually doing it in real life. But we’re in a dungeon, so I’m like, “Fuck it.” I make way more money per hour playing a professor in the dungeon than being one in real life.
What do you think is the psychology of a guy who fantasizes about a professor dominating him?
A lot of the men who come to see me have a desire to feel vulnerable and to feel like women have institutional power over them. For many successful men, the last time they had a woman wield institutional power over them was probably in school. Teachers already get so much parental shit projected onto them—which I say because I have a strong theoretical background in psychoanalysis. These dynamics make sense to me.
What response did you get from your Chronicle of Higher Education essay?
Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of sex workers in academia wrote to me. A few were adjuncts, but most were graduate students, and some had left academia. Dominatrixes, strippers, escorts. On the one hand, it didn’t surprise me, because not just some, but most of the Dommes at my dungeon were grad students. On the other, it did surprise me, because I felt quite isolated as a sex-working academic and could have used this kind of community.
I had one academic I deeply admire write to me and say, “I don’t even know you, but if you want me to write you a letter of recommendation, I’m happy to, because this is bullshit.” Coincidentally, she had actually been my professor in college, which made the connection far more realistic.
The best thing to come from the article is that I feel like adjuncts, who consistently hold our tongues for as long as we can hold out hope for an academic career, can talk more honestly about the exploitation of our labor. If this profession has any hope of surviving after the havoc that’s been wreaked upon it over the past twenty years, these are the conversations we need to be having.
And I’d like to say that my platform has helped to destigmatize sex work, but there were already so many brilliant sex workers organizing and educating before I came on the scene, and we should be listening to them regardless of whether they have a degree after their name.
