Late last year, I was strapped for cash, in classic underemployed millennial fashion. I had been working part-time in marketing for a few months, and gradually circling the drain of a return to school.
The idea of selling our bodies for money had been a longstanding joke among my friends, but I started to consider the idea more seriously.
Before Becoming a Sugar Baby
There were some strong deterrents: the potential of violence, first and foremost. The prospect of explicitly offering myself and my body up to the male gaze gave me pause; in my day-to-day life, I attempt to resist objectification with the aid of oversized sweaters, earbuds and a carefully cultivated resting disdain face. As a firmly sex-positive, third-wave feminist, I rallied my intellectual arguments in support of the validity of sex work, but hundreds of years of social shame and stigma regarding "loose women" are not always easy to slough off.
In interrogating myself, I felt a bit like everyone's favorite sexy narcissist, Carrie Bradshaw: Could I be comfortable exchanging sex for money? Would selling my charm and my body demean me...or empower me?
After letting it percolate in the back of my mind for a few months, I spent a night avidly researching the not-so-lurid tales of sugar babies on r/AskWomen.
Stuff I Learnt on Reddit About Becoming a Sugar Baby
Here's what I learned.
- Meet in public.
- Use a fake name.
- Use a service to block your phone number.
- Tell friends where you're going.
- Practice asking for your allowance from some daddies you don't care about, so you're more confident in your ability by the time you reach the one you're interested in.
- Above all, trust your instincts.
Shutting off the blue light of my laptop in the wee hours, I decided it was time for my own foray into the world's oldest profession.
Actually Becoming a Sugar Baby
The following night, sitting around the living room with my roommates, I used a fake email address to create a profile on Seeking Arrangement, the most prominent sugaring site.
Newly invigorated by this validation of my own disinterest, I uploaded four former Facebook profile pictures, being careful to set them to "friends only" on Facebook in order to avoid reverse-Google image search bearing out my public personal life. I wildly overestimated my "lifestyle budget," the amount I generally spend per month, at $3,000. This, I later found, made me a "Practical" baby in the world of those seeking arrangements, who can set their expectations as high as $10,000 per month.
When I first logged on with an approved and public account, I had 15 profile views, five "favorites," and five messages, ranging from the Tinder classic "hey, how are you" to "you're hot. do you have a bubble butt?" to a multi-paragraph treatise on the decline of the contemporary gentleman.
For about a week, I was obsessed. Seeking Arrangement surpassed Instagram as my toilet-time-scrolling-activity of choice. I felt a little rush of validation from each new view and message, and I checked them constantly.
In some ways, I felt a bit like a virgin all over again, new as I was to the norms of having sex for money. I scoured sugar daddy profiles and began to accustom myself to the language of the site. I tweaked my profile to better reflect what I wanted: a monthly allowance from someone I liked and wouldn't mind boning. (Of course, expressed slightly more delicately.) When writing to dudes, I made jokes and referenced their profile info when at all possible. I requested access to their onsite private photos.
Meeting The Sugar Daddies
I began to set up meet and greets. I met guys for meals, nice drinks, afternoon coffees. These meetings follow the pattern of a standard first date, except half the time I don't know what the guy will look like. We make awkward small talk for a minute or two about the weather, then I settle in and work my charm to transition us to some more interesting topic — music, politics, my psychological studies, or, for the least interesting among them, travel and/or good restaurants in town. Everyone can talk about places they've been.
At some point, the conversation always turns to one's experiences on the site, usually by means of some allusion to "well, we met in an interesting place..." or more directly, "How long have you been using the site?" Underlying any approach is the fundamental anxiety: "Are you a 'normal' girl?" I opt for a casual approach, mentioning a fictitious friend that has had an ongoing sugar relationship. I mention that I like to have fun, meet interesting people ("guys my age are so boring,") and keep things casual. But, of course, you gotta talk money. Having confronted my share of hesitation around a monthly allowance (for which I ask $1,200), I now also have a ready per-date quote: $300.
More from HuffPost Canada:
- More Canadian Students Turning To 'Sugar Daddies' To Help Pay For Tuition, Website Says
- 'Sugar Daddies' The New Way To Cover Soaring Tuition Costs, Website Says
For those of us that have been in the app-centric world of urban dating in the last few years, Seeking Arrangement is nothing new, just a higher proportion of older men and a higher incidence of the words "intimate," "spoil," "generous" and "discrete." Certainly, I've received my fair share of distasteful, cringeworthy, strange, or just plain lame messages...but Snapchat has also served me unsolicited dick pics.
Our society trains people categorized as 'women' to perform emotional labour almost constantly.
We listen, we empathize, we validate, we concern ourselves. We remember life events and interviews and minutia. We are generous with our time and our bodies. Let me be clear: I enjoy participating in these small acts of love for my friends and family. But even strangers consider themselves entitled to our smiles. And I realized that if I'm going to perform this work for these unknown men...well, I might as well get paid.
This article was originally published on Bellesa.
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