Halfway down the Danube

Sponsor girls, won't you come out tonight

So, sponsor girls.

In Serbia, a sponsor girl is a young woman -- they're almost always between 18 and 25 -- who has devoted herself to finding a rich boyfriend. They tend to dress expensively, if not tastefully, which makes them fairly easy to spot. The Serbian language has developed a specific word for this: sponsorozhde.

Sponsor girls are pretty common in Belgrade. If you go to the nicer restaurants and cafes, you can't miss them. There are bars and nightclubs that are known as sponsorozhde hangouts.

Every society has girls who are looking for a sugar daddy, but they do seem particularly evident in post-Communist societies. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

One is the economic pain of transition. Unemployment in Serbia is high; youth unemployment, for the 18-25 age group, is especially high; unemployment for young women... I can't even guess. 50%? 70%? So, becoming a sponsor girl makes a certain amount of rational economic sense. What are the options? Killing yourself trying to get a job that will pay $150 per month, if you're very lucky?

Another is the general upheaval in many of those societies, especially the ones that have been hit with war and other problems in addition to economic woes. When you've seen your country collapse, your male classmates drafted off to war, and your neighborhood flooded with refugees, it gets harder to have faith in long-term planning. Live for today, and grab what you can.

Similarly, the typical sponsor girl outfit -- expensive but revealing, aggressively sexy, hung all about with jewelry and fashionable accessories -- is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a badly shaken society. Look, I am doing well: see my diamond rings, fur stole, gold lame bustier!

In a world where things like university degrees and good jobs no longer matter, status becomes more a matter of display. The young woman with the thousand-dollar outfit, flashing a university professor's annual salary on every finger, is obviously somebody.

Another factor might be the general drop in the status of women in some post-Communist countries. I'm not really qualified to judge this, so I note that some people think it's significant, and move on.

Whatever the reason, sponsor girls are everywhere in the post-Communist world. But they're a lot more obvious in some places than in others. As I said, they're very obvious in Belgrade. A bit less so in Zagreb; much less so in Ljubljana. Bucharest, medium. (I will freely grant that these are subjective impressions.)

Romanian, BTW, doesn't have a particular word for "sponsor girl". Oh, Romania has them... go to the cafes along Radu Beller, just north of Piatsa Dorobant', and you'll see sponsorozhde all around you. But Romanians haven't evolved a word for the phenomenon. They have the phrase femea intretsinuta, but that means more generally "kept woman".

Oddly, Romanians did understand what I meant when I just Romanianized the Serbian term. "I see a lot of sponzoritate up in Cafe Brazilia." "Oh, yes, there are a lot up there."

Posted by douglas at March 20, 2005 04:10 PM