Last week’s Amanda Fairbanks piece in the Huffington Post on college students and their “sugar daddies” has drawn a firestorm of attention in the media. As Fairbanks reported, sites like Seeking Arrangement and Sugar Daddie have grown in popularity during the recession, as more financially-strapped and debt-burdened college-age women seek out creative (if time-honored) solutions to their money woes. Fairbanks interviewed college students and their “sugar daddies,” exploring the question of whether these arrangements are just another form of prostitution, or something genuinely different.
Sites like Seeking Arrangement, of course, only facilitate the kind of sex-for-money transactions that have been going on for eons. Just as people had extramarital affairs before AshleyMadison.com, young women and older men sought out “mutually beneficial” relationships long before Al Gore invented the Internet. What these sites do is provide both ease and legitimacy for what was once secretive. They enable older men with money and young women without it to find each other far more easily than they did before. They also provide at least some small opportunity for young women to screen the “sugar daddies.” From a safety standpoint, Seeking Arrangement (which claims to vet its male clients) offers somewhat more protection than an old-fashioned newspaper ad.
It’s easy to overhype the popularity of the sugar daddy phenomenon. It’s safe to say that it’s neither as new as some imagine or as widespread as some journalists (and website operators) claim. But it’s also clear that the Internet, the recession, and spiraling student loan debt enable and encourage these relationships. And in some instances, these clearly are relationships.
Two female students of mine have told me they’ve met older men on Sugar Daddie (the older of the two main sites facilitating this service). One, Nicki, in her early twenties ended up in what she describes as a romantic relationship with a man three decades her senior. The last time I spoke with Nicki, she’d been with her older man for more than a year. Part of the deal is mutual sexual exclusivity, which she takes very seriously; the only difference is that the sexual exclusivity is explicitly tied to the monthly retainer she receives. Like the women in the HuffPo story, Nicki insists she’s not a sex worker. “My mom told me it’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one,” she says. “All I did was use the internet to find a rich man whom I could fall in love with.”
It’s easy to understand the motivations of young women like Nicki. It’s harder, however, to excuse the actions of men twice and three times the age of the college students they pursue. The quasi-romantic nature of the sugar daddy-young girl relationship is troubling. The rich old man isn’t just buying sex, he’s buying status (if, as some of these men do, he chooses to “show off” his college student). If he’s buying her listening ear as well as her body (something that Fairbanks suggests is likely), he’s treating emotional intimacy as a commodity that can be purchased.
By blurring the lines between a genuine romance and prostitution, the sugar daddy relationship is more problematic than a traditional john/hooker encounter.
That pretense of intimacy is inherent in the term “sugar daddy” with its hint of the incestuous. While the term “john” (for a male client of a sex worker) suggests anonymity, “sugar daddy” reeks of emotional (as well as sexual) boundary violations. The implication is that the real fathers of these young women have failed to provide the right combination of emotional and financial support; the term reinforces the not-entirely inaccurate trope that younger women who seek older men have “daddy issues.” And it suggests that the older men who seek out “sugar babies” are looking for young women whom they can spoil and fuck, deliberately blurring the line between paternal indulgence and sexual objectification.
The real question is whether the term “sugar daddy” is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what’s going on, or an all-too-accurate description of something dark and especially ugly.
—Photo orijinal/Flickr
About Hugo Schwyzer
[Sincere] I wish people would only downvote messages that are abusive. That was offered up as the rationale for downvoting. I want to read the ones that are not.
People downvote messages they dislike – abusive or not.
The other question is if your message even appears for up- or downvoting. – It seems there are filters and messages which Hugo does not like to read, for example critical messages from MRAs who keep young women and old men equally responsible for their agreements, often disappear as he deletes them.
I think it’s appalling that women must be coerced by the funding of their education into selling pieces of themselves – be they emotional or physical pieces.
The term “relationship” in these arrangements smacks of rationalising what is inherently less than optimum. I have no qualms if women choose sex-work for themselves by themselves but coercion by financial constraint is just an awful reason to start.
If College’s and Universities across the North World are serious about equal opportunities for both men and women in tertiary education, then they must also offer flexible payment options that will allow women (and males) to simply enjoy life and study without having to sell off pieces of themselves to the richest bidder!
As far as I can tell, these are mutually agreed upon and beneficial arrangements — why is it anyone’s business? I suppose the women could get jobs at Starbucks, but that won’t go very far.
It’s true that you probably won’t see many young men-older women type of arrangements, but I don’t doubt they exist; young men need to pay for college, too!
At least these arrangements are honest — both partners know exactly what they’re doing and why, and what they can expect. It’s much more unfortunate for a 20-something to marry an older, wealthy man to support a lifestyle she’d like to have and then bring kids into it. (Although, I don’t doubt some of the couples in those arrangements know exactly what they’re doing and why). Again, if it’s mutually agreed upon and it’s working for both of them, what’s wrong with that?
It is not clear if these women are really using their income out of escort services for paying fees in colleges and universities. Maybe they use the money for something else… who knows?
It’s not about old men either – it’s about men who are willing to pay – their age, race, looks are irrelevant. – The sole criteria which counts is the wallet.
As you said at least these arrangements are honest…
I also wonder how young men can pay for these fees in colleges as they are getting the same bills to pay.
I think, payment of such expensive fees for college and universities has nothing to do if the student is a male or a female. It has to do however with their families – some parents are rich and will help their children financially and some students have to go their own way – loans, part-time at Starbucks, escort services, whatever…
But the performance and commodification of intimacy has always been a part of sex work — google “GFE,” for instance (and what exactly is a “traditional” john/hooker encounter, anyway?)… I wonder if what’s “really” scandalizing about the piece isn’t so much the emotional labor, but the fact that a bunch of respectable college kids are involved (and mussing up people’s easy constructions of sex work to boot).
‘HUGO:
It’s easy to understand the motivations of young women ….
It’s harder, however, to excuse the actions of men twice and three times the age of the college students they pursue……
—–
It’s typical Hugo, it’s the fault of the man, and the woman is the victim.
However these young women are not minors, they are not drunk, they are intelligent – otherwise they would not study in an expensive college – and they decide out of themselves to sign up with a dating site for meeting older rich men, who are willing to pay them for their escort services.
Who pursues who? Good question…
What I’ve come away with between Hugo and his followers opinions and the counter opinion and particularly Gucci Little Piggy’s blog is that Hugos brand of feminism is damaging to women in that they are boxed off as passive, helpless creatures and damaging to men because they are stereotypes as the default adults that are responsible for these child-women and because their sexuality is seen as something that is often dangerous and seedy.
The counter position, which seems to be coming mainly from mra sympathizers seems to be the one that’s promoting egalitarianism and an expectation of females to be equally competent and adult as males.
It is up to the young woman and not up to the old man to sign up with such dating services on the internet and to offer her escort services against payment.
This woman is an adult, intelligent and nobody is forcing her to do this.
Why to blame men for everything?
Something that always comes up in debates like this is ‘it’s a person’s choice” to do what they want. I don’t really think that that’s the issue. There’s a pretty big gap between can and should. Just because someone chooses to do something doesn’t mean that other people can’t disagree with the reasons why they’re doing it.
I think selling relationships (whether they’re sexual, friendships, etc.) is creepy. There’s something about attaching a price tag to intimacy that just rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Like the article says, there’s something off about rich men who think that everything is for sale. There’s also something off about women who would rather sell intimacy than market other skills, even if it’s making coffee.
Over the years, it just seems that, in general, what is considered personal in our society has been reduced. This is just one example. Things like money have become so much more important than basic human interaction.
Also, not to trot out too much of a high horse, but are the villains here really these sugar daddies or the anti-labor, anti-education jerks who defund schools and make it impossible for so many college grads to find living wage jobs that they’re forced into the informal economy? And relatedly, is the most productive critique the one that castigates a handful of men for exploiting impressionable young women (though I admit I personally think they sound like creeps), or one that questions the conditions that created sex work–or whatever you want to call it–as the only option for these women in the first place? (I mean Hunter College, which one of the profiled young women attends, *used* to be free!) Acting as though this phenomenon is distinguished by its commodification of emotional intimacy to me not only suggests some naivete about the realities of sex work, it trades in the same right-wing moral panic that individualizes and pathologizes much broader and more complicated structural problems… which, incidentally, is not to blindly assert the primacy of economics over gender here — obviously this piece is a good example of how gender and class politics are inextricable from each other.
Really? This isn’t just a daddy issue. Sugar babies are women, younger and older, who seek financial stability and attention from a man they have an attraction to. In fact, that is the goal of every single relationship in the world. Financial stability, and attention and admiration from a person you adore.
This has nothing to do with one’s father. That’s a cheap cop out.