Prostitution

Last Friday I unexpectedly ended up at my institute's graduation ceremony. I had left work much later than planed and wanted to go read and think in the OSI library for my written exam next week. When I stepped into the OSI hall, I noticed that Things Were Different. There were high round tables set up, larger ones with glasses and bottles at the back, and, most disturbingly, two orderly and virtuous looking girls standing on each side of the entrance holding a stack of programmes. The blond one on my left handed me a programme and asked if I intended to go to the graduation ceremony. I opened the programme with surprise and muttered that I hadn't planned to. Before I could glance inside the flyer, the blond stopped smiling, her mouth violently moving downwards with spite, and she grabbed the paper back, adding as if I'd wronged her, that this was only for graduates and guests. I said "Ooooh but I understand", put on my best Hurt Face and headed for the library as planned. An unusually high ratio of people wearing suits and/or their best clothes gradually started appearing.
I was focused and concentrated and managed to do what I'd planned more quickly than expected. Which was just as good, because eventually the institute's director started his Pointless Boring Speech which carried all the way into the library.
It sounded so absurdly boring and pointless, thanking as he was the family of the graduates for enabling them their studies (by bearing them?), that I thought I should go and listen. The programme was a long list of the worst speech-makers available that day, including the stuttering university vice-president and a union-woman who teaches at the institute this semester and held an affirmative speech validating her experience, choices and path as the best example, in twenty chapters with footnotes, digressions and annexes. She interpreted every bold collective attempt at bringing her to an end by clapping on those rare occasions when she needed to breathe as signs of enthusiasm.
I looked at the students. A large number of them was wearing expensive, well ironed, clean and tidy suits. They exchanged self-satisfied looked, and I could feel a lot of them felt united in the identity of the Young, Beaming, Successful Urban European Academic. A guy arrived behind me. Thick black suit, red tie, brand new leather shoes, fancy mobile phone - and besides him his mother, out of place, with tacky clothes, an imitation jaguar-skin top. He had climbed up the social ladder, was obviously proud of having reached a better social status than his parents. He was showing off. I disliked him on the spot.
As I continued to look around the room, I spotted well-read L., whom I'd last seen in the U-Bahn a few weeks ago, and next to her Little Creative Genius D., who had been in the same seminar where I got to know L. and made me even more shy than Well-Read L. L. waved and I went over. She greeted me as a strengthening element for the Undisciplined Fraction they were trying to build.
Eventually the buffet was opened and there was wine galore. We ended up outside in the snow drinking, and Mister Social Status unexpectedly walked up to L. "Didn't we do our Abi [A Levels] together?"
L. accepted to engage in a communication process with the man, although every remark we could catch was disturbing. Eventually he said he was now working. Lobbying. He wouldn't say for whom when I asked, but turned round to me and said "Well, you would also open your legs for those who pay, wouldn't you?" I think we all looked at one another in shock and horror.