Gold Diggers to Neanderthals: Drop Dead

Uncovering a wild new social trend, the Daily News profiles gold diggers (their term, not ours) in a shocking — shocking! — piece this morning profiling underpaid middle-class exiles looking to keep up the lifestyle to which they’re accustomed. The Daily News acts as if gold digging is a bad thing:

And although the label “gold digger” is an ugly one, Erica doesn’t mind.

“It’s more acceptable, indeed even expected, for a woman to want a man with money. It’s a consumer-based society – the biggest house, the fastest car, the most extravagant vacations,” she says. “This is a culture that revels in excess and hardly ever advocates moderation on any level, and we all buy into it.”

Fat, sloppy “to be sure paragraph” to follow:

The trend is nothing new (and perhaps not surprising in the face of a burgeoning luxury market and glossy magazines that advertise just how well the other half lives). The difference now is that for many young, educated women, dating rich doesn’t have as much to do with social standing and security as it does with experiencing the finer things in life. Women like Sarah even see scoring free dinners at fancy restaurants and gifts like an Hermes scarf (which she promptly sold on eBay) as engaging in a reverse feminism, of sorts.

My Inner Daily News says they’re pretty pathetic, but my Inner Class War is jealous they use eBay so intelligently. And they claim they don’t even have to sleep with them.

You want to scream: Dandies, Trust-Funders, the Idle Rich — wake up, you’re being used! The Daily News salves that impulse:

But while some men seem comfortable playing sugar daddy, others, like Alex Valerio, a 26-year-old in fashion marketing who divides his time between New York and Paris, say that they like to keep their cash under wraps.

Valerio, whose parents own a pure-bred Arabian horse farm and an international housewares company, recently ended a six-month relationship after he began to feel that his girlfriend was using him for his dough.

“We’d travel everywhere together, and I’d buy her gifts,” he explains. “But I began to realize that she didn’t like me, so much as she liked the life I could provide her with.”

He promptly dropped the girl, and now waits several months into a relationship before revealing that he’s got so much money that he doesn’t have to work at all. He says he wants to find someone who’s in love with him.

But many gold diggers say that just because they want a guy who’s wealthy doesn’t mean that they don’t want a happy, meaningful relationship, too.

“You can have it all,” says Sarah.

You know what — these guys deserve it. Are they that stupid to think someone can’t tell that one doesn’t have to work? What do you do, fake like you work? (Film Script Idea, activate: form of, light romantic comedy about a sugar daddy who fakes like he works; agents can contact us at info -at- bridgeandtunnelclub.com.)