I Went on a Sugar Baby Website for a Week and This is What Happened.
Both finding love and paying the bills is never easy. Women have ditched barista aprons for laptops to find another source of income.
You can make hundreds of pounds a week by becoming a sugar baby, so I decided to try it for myself.
Opening up Seeking Arrangement, I am faced with a man who could not be more than thirty-five with two beautiful blondes on each arm. When you google sugar baby, this site is the most popular. I set up a profile to get to the bottom of what is expected of a sugar baby – sex, intimacy or just companionship?
Before creating a profile, there are pages and pages of terms and conditions an aspiring sugar baby must accept. Seeking Arrangement will not accept responsibility if information on someone’s profile is fake and they will not accept responsibility if you meet a sugar daddy and he is not who he says he is. And that is only the first page.
The site takes other precautions though, requiring you to use a fake username, something that cannot give your real name away, mine being ‘RedRubes’. The pictures you upload to your profile are reviewed before published, and they discourage you from posting any ‘explicit’ photos.
Within ten minutes of my profile going public, I had two messages. The men replied instantly, and within an hour or so there were twenty-five sugar daddies interested in RedRubes. With some, the questions started quite simple. They asked me how my day was going, what I did for a living. Others immediately jumped into telling me what they wanted from me, as their sugar baby.
Next to some sugar daddy’s names were a ‘premium’ tick. At first, I thought these men had their finances verified. But, premium actually meant that for a membership fee they can see when a message has been read, and also gives you ‘advanced security’. This seems backwards to me as the sugar baby is likely to be in the most vulnerable position and should be given as much security as the site can provide, and for free.
I fished through the mails, clicking on their profiles. There seemed to be a trend of not including faces in a sugar daddy’s profile. However, some provided private photos which you had to gain special access to see. Men from the UK to the USA to Australia didn’t hesitate to speak to RedRubes, their net-worth ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Before you get too excited, there is no guarantee or back-ground check carried out to determine whether or not this is where they live, or their guaranteed wealth. Sugar babies have to be cautious when seeking out a relationship with these men.
There seemed to be a pattern in the way men spoke to me. They would either treat our relationship as a formal contract, most offering around three-hundred pounds per meeting to meet them once a week. Or, submissive men would offer money to send them videos once a week. Sometimes, there was a less formal approach where the men wanted to get to know me and what I was like, being very selective and specific with what they asked and wanted from a sugar baby.
From a man offering me one-hundred pounds a week for one video of me filming myself forcing him to wear tanned tights, to men offering me up to four-hundred pounds to ‘spend the night’ with them, the whole thing made me quite uncomfortable. It was not flattering or complimentary, I did not feel empowered or independent, I simply felt used, like an object to them.
Logging off the site for a few hours to go to work, it felt like a much-needed break. I came back to piles of mails in my inbox, some from new sugar daddies, others from previous ones I spoke to, sending clingy messages, angry that I had not replied.
Some people don’t view sex work as a full-time job, but at this point it was made clear how much of a commitment it really was. Sugar babies need to get to know someone who could be as bland as they come, spending hours of their time talking to them and having to show an interest to build a relationship, and it wasn’t easy. It was completely draining being treated as someone’s therapist, sex toy and girlfriend.
Traditionally, most understand the act of sugar babying as younger women providing platonic companionship to older men for money. It makes you wonder why everyone does not do it, apart from the emotional baggage and commitment you have to deal with, it appears an easy and painless way to rake in money. But, it seems like that was too good to be true.
You might find the odd sugar daddy willing to fork out hundreds of pounds just for the company of a beautiful young girl, but realistically, transactional sex seemed to be on nearly every sugar daddy’s wish list. From wanting ‘kisses and cuddles’ to wanting me to ‘spend the night’, intimacy was clearly very important in the eyes of the average daddy. Communicating through Seeking Arrangement was not enough. They asked for my Kik, Snapchat and WhatsApp usernames, and I got the impression that these men had been fooled before.
I decided to get to the bottom of how important physical intimacy actually was in the relationship between sugar daddies and babies. I asked the men if it would matter if I did not feel comfortable having a physical relationship, and the answer was a resounding yes.
At this point, I wondered why they did not use full service escorts to satisfy their sexual needs, but through more conversations, it was clear most wanted the girlfriend experience. This was made clear by the abundance of mails I received if I left someone on read, how much a daddy would confide in me about his personal issues and how territorial they could turn when I mentioned an offer from another man for my services.
In this experiment, it was clear that sugar babies have their work cut out for them. Providing emotional support, sometimes sex and commitment to messaging daddies all day seemed exhausting.
This demanding form of sex work is not as easy as just providing your company for money. Getting a financial commitment from clients can take months, leaving babies in financial hardships. Sugar babies juggling a job as well as their promise to be available on-call 24/7 deserve the utmost respect.
Feature Image Credit: Josep Vinaixa via Pinterest.
This author doesn’t quite get it.
A sugar baby is a mistress, plain and simple. But not every man on the site is a real, wealthy, sugar daddy. Most are not. Most women on the site are not real sugar babies either.
The author came across men who pay for custom porn or some other fetish. Not a sugar daddy.
She came across johns trying to hire prostitutes. How much for what matters, not who she is. Not a sugar daddy. The women that go for this are also only interested in how much, and they are not sugar babies.
She glossed over the real sugar daddies, “the men wanted to get to know me and what I was like”. These are the gems. They are not looking for a sex object, they are looking for a girlfriend, a special kind of girlfriend. The women that find themselves with this kind of man are going to have their lives changed. They will go from making coffee to becoming a corporate lawyer, from being in school debt to free and clear, from scraping by to flying across the country on a whim, from taking a bus to driving a new car. They do have to be careful, because it is too easy to fall in love with a very successful, powerful man who treats them well.
Women that are successful at finding real sugar daddies tend to be in or recently graduated from college, pretty, and have a pleasing personality. They understand this is a relationship with an intimate component, not a transaction. There will be true friendship that can continue indefinitely, and he can be a continuing resource.
Sugar dating is not for everyone, but for some, it is wonderful.
After year or so on SA and interacting with hundreds of women of ages 18-35, meeting 30-40 and having arrangements with dozen or so, I have come to off the cuff division of “sugar babies”. My guesstimate is about 10-20% are basically hookers, 40-50% are trying to get something for nothing such as selling pics/videos or wanting platonic yet spoiled arrangements, 25% are scammers trying the most creative lies and sob stories to get a man to send them money without meeting, and 20% m/l are legitimately looking to build an arrangement. Most women see a man as little more than an ATM machine while men realize quickly if they have any brains that women easily sell their body for few hundred a week allowance.
I could go on and on with my opinion and experiences but I made my main points.
[…] Siobhan Hamilton got a Seeking Arrangement account for a week to see what it would be like. She asked the men she was speaking with if it would matter if she didn’t feel comfortable with a physical relationship. There was a “resounding yes,” that it would matter. […]