Could Sugaring Be Feminist?
By: Amelia Cane
Tags: Sugar Daddy, Sex, Dating, Money, Relationships

Could Sugaring Be Feminist?

Reclaiming sexual agency through remuneration

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Seeking Arrangement and similar sites and apps are experiencing a surge of popularity as stigmas around sex work begin to subside and enterprising young — and not-so-young — people decide to use their… talents… to supplement their income.

Particularly popular among students and millennials seeking to mitigate their student loans or credit debt, Seeking (as it’s recently been rebranded) is becoming increasingly appealing among the internet-dating generation.

The site actively encourages students to sign up, offering users that sign up using their university email address a free upgrade to a premium membership, and it’s reportedly common for sugar daddies to help pay for their sugar babies’ studies.

Officially, the site does not support the exchange of money for sex — at least, not in countries where such transactions are illegal. Seeking toes the line by encouraging the “Successful Member” (AKA sugar daddy/mommy) to compensate the “Attractive Member” (AKA sugar baby) for their time and attention with gifts — which may or may not be cash — and any sex that may result is incidental.

It’s common for sugar daddies to pay their sugar babies a monthly allowance and shower them with gifts such as jewelry and luxury clothing or shoes. Not to mention luxurious dates and travel. According to this New York Times article, the average monthly allowance is around $3,000.

By all accounts, there are plenty of sugar daddies out there that aren’t looking for sex and just genuinely want female companionship and attention and are willing to pay for it. I have yet to encounter one of these unicorns.

On the other hand, from what I gather from reading the profiles of many, many prospective sugar daddies (as well as some very icky discussion forums), there are plenty of hopeful young women trying to meet these unicorns. And who can blame them?

Founded in 2006 by MIT graduate Brandon Wade, the San Francisco-based company has faced significant controversy over the years, for obvious reasons. The site is available in 139 countries and 10 languages and reportedly has 4.2 million active members in the United States and some 10 million around the world, but it’s difficult to find evidence to support these numbers.

According to DatingScout, around 80% of members are sugar babies (both male and female), while the remaining 20% are sugar daddies or mommies (around 1% of users). According to this recent blog, the keyword “How to find a sugar daddy” is searched between 10,000 and 100,000 times per month.

The site’s terms and conditions carefully forbid “pay per meet” relationships, which is the sugar community’s euphemism of choice for straight-up prostitution. Instead, it aims to facilitate mutually beneficial relationships between what it calls “Successful Members” and “Attractive Members” — it seems like (mostly) doing away with “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies” was part of the recent rebrand.

While I’m all for getting rid of the creepy “daddy” and “baby” vibe, the euphemizing and/or user experience was so inelegantly executed that I accidentally signed up as the wrong one. I thought that they were trying to gauge my preferences in terms of whether success or attractiveness is more important to me in a match so that they could tweak their algorithms to deliver more relevant options.

But alas, by conceding that I was seeking “Attractive Members”, I accidentally became a Sugar Mommy — a fact I only discovered when I was asked to add my net worth and annual income, and caught a glimpse of the fascinating meat market of over 40’s sugar babi — sorry, “Attractive Members”. It’s not pretty. It took an awkward email to the help desk to get that sorted out.

Could sugar dating be empowering for women?

When I told a friend about Seeking, she said “I’m signing up today. I’ve been a fool, doing this [online dating and casual sex] for free for so long!” She’s a pretty outspoken feminist, so it made me think.

I’ve had a lot of sex that I’ve regretted. So many men that were unworthy of me, whose needs and desires I put above my own simply because that’s what women are trained to do. So many men who have used my body as a human Fleshlight, brought themselves to climax, and then rolled over and fallen asleep with no thought for me and my sexual satisfaction — nor for the crushing emptiness I felt after they rolled off me.

So many “partners” (not a good word, because it suggests equal investment) that I’ve worked tirelessly to please, worshipped and given my submission to, only to find that my pleasure was not a priority.

In a world where so many, many, men cruise by on unforgettably mediocre sex, and where the burden is on women to ‘put out’, it doesn’t seem strange to me that a growing number of women are saying “enough is enough” and asking to be paid for their time, and for the physical and emotional labor involved in having bad sex, time after time. I can’t recommend Lili Loofbourow’s article The Female Price of Male Pleasure enough. I think everyone should read it. Taking that point of view into account, why shouldn’t men pay the price for male pleasure?

Let me be clear: I’m not talking about all sex. I make a distinction between glorious, intimate, vulnerable sex with a trusted partner and wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am-one-night-stands. If it’s the former, making it transactional would be weird (unless that turns you on, which I can totally understand, but that’s a topic for a different story).

However, if it’s the latter, I’m all for women getting something more out of it than a faked orgasm and a vague sense of regret. I think it’s empowering, in a roundabout way.

But as Melanie Berliet points out in this Vanity Fair article on the subject, “it’s one thing to intellectualize something and quite another to live it.”

So I went and signed up

So far, I’ve been on one date with someone from the site. According to his profile, he’s 49 and has been on the site for a year, but he said that he’s never had a sugar relationship. Pretty much right out the gate, he wanted to meet, saying that he could tell from my profile that I was “genuine.” He didn’t waste time asking whether I’d be open to “being intimate” if there was “chemistry” between us. He said that he was looking for an emotional connection, but that he was “open” in terms of the specifics of the “arrangement.” When I asked for more details as to what his ideal sugar relationship would look like, he became vague and repeated that he was “open.”

I was was curious enough to take a train to his city, almost two hours away, to see whether this could work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was an attractive, sophisticated man, impeccably dressed in a clearly expensive charcoal blazer and a turtleneck sweater. He took me on a tour of the city, treated me to lunch at a nice little café, and took me to see the Christmas light show in the main city square after the sun had set. He was charming* and eloquent and casually touched my hand or arm to emphasize his points or get my attention. I found myself truly attracted to him, and the feeling was clearly mutual.

*I did ignore quite a few fairly offensive things he said. Rose-colored glasses and all.

It might have been the perfect date, except for the fact that when he pulled me close in the crowded square and kissed me, he didn’t know how to kiss. I can only describe his kissing style as “licking.” I couldn’t believe that someone this outwardly attractive could have reached 49 years of age without learning how to kiss. As he awkwardly lapped at my mouth, I felt my attraction dissipate rapidly. I wondered what amount of money could induce me to endure this. If he’s this bad at kissing, imagine what he’s like in bed!

I took the train home and spent some time deep in thought. Not about my self worth or my morality or anything boring like that — I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with exchanging money for services rendered (not that any was exchanged in this case — the topic never came up), but about whether he was legit. I’ve read so many stories of people getting scammed on these sites by a) con artists out to steal money and/or identities and/or sell you into human trafficking, and b) fake sugar daddies that sleazily secure themselves some free sex.

The creepy kissing really unsettled me and, in a way that I can’t quite explain, made me doubt that he could be a real person. Was he testing me in some way? Was he trying to get a reaction out of me? Was he planning to do weird, humiliating shit to me?

He messaged me later and wanted to talk about sex. I was unsurprised. I was also unsurprised when it quickly took a turn for the weird. He asked whether I’d consider not shaving/waxing for him because he liked it au naturel because that’s how women looked when he was a boy. Hmmm. I decided that this was a good time to steer the conversation to what’s in it for me. Again, when I coyly asked what kind of arrangement he wanted he said, “I’m open.”

I probed a bit further, specifically asking whether offering an allowance was in line with his expectations. He dodged the question by saying that he needed to go to bed and he’d reply in the morning.

When he finally got back to me, he said that upon reflection, he didn’t think he could bring himself to pay for intimacy.

Fair enough, I wouldn’t either. But then again, I haven’t been signed up as a sugar daddy on a dating site specifically catering to sugar arrangements for a year. Come on, man. Know thyself.

Maybe if he wasn’t such a terrible kisser, and he wasn’t so obsessed with body hair, and the commute to see him didn’t take four hours out of my day, and if he’d asked me any actual questions about me during our date, and he wasn’t pro-Brexit, I might have considered dating him for real.

But alas.