Has the entitlement society gone too far?

Some people go to extreme lengths to maintain their desired lifestyle.

Since I’ve grown up in a Baby Boomer’s America, our society has been the subject of one particular advertising mantra, clearly stated: sex sells. Once it was something like the pinup calendars for the back area of the local garage where few but the male mechanic staff dared to tread or the double entendres on the idiot box that people in the know would fully understand but would go right over the rubes and the gentle peoples’ heads, but now it’s pretty much everywhere and far more risqué. We have the evidence sex sells because pornography has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

This brings me to a story which probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day aside from the fact that sex sells, but their justification is what brought me to write about it today.

I’m sure 28-year-old Samantha Peer and her husband Dillon were fretting about how to raise two kids on teachers’ salaries. (From what I have been able to gather, she was a full-time middle school teacher while he was a part-time substitute in elementary grades.) Teachers aren’t the highest-paid folks out there, particularly on the front side of their careers as these two probably were with only a few years in the field.

So they decided to take an unusual second job together, perhaps recalling that the song Hot For Teacher made Van Halen a mint back in the day. She started up an OnlyFans page, and thinking she could do so on the sly Samantha Peer did it under an assumed stage name and blocked access from the state of Arizona where they lived. Best laid plans, you know? (Pun not intended.)

It didn’t work: Samantha Peer was found out and “pressured” into resigning, while Dillon was outright fired. It looks like they now only have their OnlyFans income to fall back upon; then again, their new notoriety may give them a larger fanbase and make up for the job losses for awhile. (Now they are celebrities! I guess they would now be about D-list celebrities?) Good thing because they’re most likely finished as teachers after all this. Unfortunately, they’re not finished as parents and Lord have mercy on the two kids who will have to grow up eventually knowing what their parents did.

"I created content at the beginning of the summer in order to earn extra money on the side to help pay for our basic necessities that our salaries were no longer meeting," said Samantha Peer in a video posted to social media. A lot of teachers will take summer jobs as wait staff or cashiers; certainly there were a plethora of manual labor jobs Dillon could have worked over the summer. The thought that the Peers even considered this form of prostitution for the voyeurism pleasure of complete strangers as a justifiable way to make money represents a mindset (and, to some extent, lust for “stuff”) that’s foreign to me.

Look, I am no stranger to the second job or side hustle. For the last thirteen years I’ve had a great side hustle as a writer for The Patriot Post. There were a few lean times during the Great Recession where that was my first job, and there was a time The Patriot Post was my third job: when I began at the company for whom I now work full-time, I moonlighted after hours and on Saturdays just to get my foot in the door while still working full-time at my other job. That situation lasted about five months before I finally went full-time there, with a significant pay increase. If I ever decide to add paying subscriptions here on my Substack, it may be a new side hustle.

But I would be curious to know what the Peers considered their “basic necessities.” Yes, rent, food, a car payment, and utilities are basic necessities, but I doubt they couldn’t cover all that with their salaries or find a more legitimate job to help out. How shallow and worldly must they have been to sacrifice a part of their dignity by exposing for all to see what should be their private, most intimate moments?

According to Fox News, “Peer, a mother of two, says she regrets the videos but felt ‘trapped’ by her financial situation and felt it was the ‘only way’ for her family to ‘survive.’” But she apparently still has an active OnlyFans page, so at this point I think her only regret is that she was caught.

But I’m sure what led them to even consider such a thing was that old mantra, “sex sells.” The tragedy is what they ended up purchasing with it.