When Megan, 23, was planning her move to NYU in August 2012 for a grad-school program, she knew it wasn’t going to be cheap.
She worried over the phone to a friend about the costs of living and joked that maybe she’d use a dating site to score a few free meals in her new, expensive city.
Her friend suggested she try out sugar dating.
“I was like, ‘What’s that?’ I’d never heard that term before,” Megan says.
A quick Google search led her to SeekingArrangement.com, an online site that connects well-heeled benefactors, otherwise known as sugar daddies, with lesser-off “sugar babies,” and specifically targets Megan’s demographic: college students over their heads in debt.
Megan put up a profile even before she’d touched down in the city and was invited out by a 47-year-old lawyer. She spent one of her first nights in the city enjoying fancy sushi and cocktails, and it pulled back the curtain on the privileged world of moneyed Manhattan.
“I was skeptical at first about it because I was like, this is like the kind of thing that could attract a lot of creeps, but [it was] actually really nice.”
A few dates later — and only two weeks in — she found a 40-something finance professional offering to pay her $1,000 every 10 days, in exchange for her company at dinner, over drinks and on occasional weekend trips.
The relationship turned physical after a time.
“I never felt pressured to do anything I didn’t want to do,” Megan says. “But, it did eventually reach that point. But it felt natural. It felt just like a normal relationship.”
Megan collected an estimated $20,000 from her sugar daddy before they ended the relationship on amicable terms.
Her goal is to graduate debt-free, though she concedes that’s unlikely to happen; yearly tuition for her program at NYU is $68,000, and with cost of living, it’s nearly $100,000.
She says she uses the money on bills and modest indulgences, like organic food and an occasional plane ticket home. “I more or less live comfortably because of it. I’m able to pay my rent a little easier. I haven’t been really able to attack the principal amount on my loan.”
Her current arrangement with another sugar daddy is for $300 each week. She says sometimes getting to the point of agreement on the money is often a little uncomfortable.
“It’s always very awkward. No one’s ever been really smooth about it. I’m glad that I’m not in the position to have to bring that up. Usually after a half an hour or an hour there might be like a silence in the conversation and then they’ll be like . . . it’s always the same, what brought you to this site? Here’s what I’m looking for. What are you looking for? Here’s what I’m offering if you’re interested.”
Hook, line and sinker
On college campuses across New York, young women are being lured into a world where sex and money intermingle. But instead of johns and tricks, here it’s “dates” and “arrangements.”
If that sounds like prostitution, well . . .
“Prostitution is black and white; it’s just an exchange of sex for money,” says Angela Jacob Bermudo, public-relations manager for SeekingArrangement, which encases its matchmaking service in a cloud of euphemisms.
“On SeekingArrangement, people are coming to find their ideal relationship. It’s about the connection. These men are shelling out $3,000 a month for a sugar baby. That’s not something that a man is going to spend for a simple, one-night engagement.”
SeekingArrangement actively pursues college-age students and lures the financially vulnerable demographic with free premium memberships (which provide increased exposure and messaging capabilities) if they subscribe with a dot-edu e-mail address.
Since offering the upgraded memberships in 2011, the site has seen an increase of 58% in its college enrollees. They now account for 44% of total memberships and are the site’s largest demographic. The site claims 58,000 sugar babies in the New York City area, Bermudo says.
Official company materials highlight the allure of sugar dating, encouraging students to stop “wasting precious study hours at a minimum-wage job” and to instead connect with a “generous benefactor” who might provide valuable networks and introductions.
“Why hope for financial aid when you can guarantee it with a sugar daddy?” says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder and CEO. “Student loans lead to endless debt, which amounts to more than a new graduate can handle.
‘Sugar scholarships’ provide real solutions to the problem of student debts.”
Peppered around the site are advertisements about how this is the gateway to female independence.
“SeekingArrangement.com was created to empower women,” Wade said in a 2012 statement for National Women’s Month. “A sugar baby is an empowered woman who is tired of dating losers that contribute nothing to her life. She has made a commitment to only date men who will help her to achieve her goals.”
Young women often rationalize their participation as one of brass tacks. Men often buy them dinner and gifts. Why not add cash — or the rent — into the equation? That the money usually changes hands through PayPal, and not an envelope on the dresser, helps reinforce the illusion that this isn’t tit for tat.
Like other sugar babies, Megan doesn’t consider this special brand of financial aid prostitution; she compares SeekingArrangement to any other dating site, just with a different clientele.
“ I think that sugar-dating sites are more likely to attract the type of person who is interested in a traditional power dynamic between men and women, [who] is older, has more resources, has more money to . . . I don’t know . . .”
Betraying her own rationalizations, though, she admits that she takes more security precautions when she’s out with a potential daddy than if it were a “regular” date.
Making ‘arrangements’
So, is being a sugar baby really that innocent? I decided to sign up to see.
Registration for SeekingArrangement is simple and mirrors most other dating sites, except that here you also choose from a drop-down menu with a desired level of monthly support — an allowance, the site calls it, to “help with bills or tuition, or any other form of pampering such as gifts, travel or meals.”
The menu on the path to such goals uses adjectives like High, Moderate, or Practical and even Minimal (less than $1,000/month).
In the sign-up process, users check a box to signal compliance with the site’s disclaimer prohibiting “anyone from promoting illegal activities (such as prostitution) or commercial activities of any kind in their profile or in messages sent on the site.” Such conduct, it says, can lead to removal from the website or a permanent ban.
(There are other cautions about sending money by Western Union, receiving bad checks and “any messages involving Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Russia and wiring money.”)
I used a real photo of myself and real biographical details in my profile — omitting that I am a writer but including other real pursuits. I wrote that I was looking for someone to assist with monthly rent and travel for independent photo projects. My range was High, meaning $10,000-plus a month.
The profile sat inactive for a week. After seeing official site figures that the average daddy spending per year is only $61,200 (down from $74,772 in 2007), I downgraded my income requirements to Moderate ($3,000 to $5,000 monthly).
Suddenly, I became more enticing.
The first message came from a graying theater artist who’d learned the ropes of financial investing after inheriting family money in the ’90s. We exchanged a few messages about photography, but he was, it turned out, in Canada.
A second, a West Village restaurant owner, sent a message that I was exactly his type. He’d just gotten out of an arrangement with a fashion student because she’d met someone and was dating him seriously, but he was looking to replicate the arrangement.
“It was like having a casual GF one or two nights a week without the commitment, drama and stress of one,” he wrote about his ex-sugar baby. “We hung out, laughed, shopped, played, traveled and frankly did a lot together. But more than anything we were/are amazing friends.”
He wanted to meet as soon as possible and sent me a link to his Facebook page, where cuddly pictures with a young, attractive sugar baby — “SB” for short — were easy to single out. But when I suggested e-mailing a bit more before meeting, he stopped responding.
The evaluations
Several other messages were extreme: One proposed flying me between New York and California a few times a month; a 30-year-old software engineer in Minnesota said he set up a bank account for me.
Some admitted outright that they expected a physical relationship; others claimed they simply wanted companionship (mostly during business visits to New York).
One said he did not want sex, but rather a sassy princess who would “tease and torment both in public and behind closed doors.”
His opposite sought a “submissive woman” for part in a “fantasy-type relationship to own a woman completely.”
For the more seasoned sugar daddies, I learned, it’s not uncommon to expect a “sugar baby evaluation series” — a pre-meeting web-chat where the daddy-to-be calls out commands and poses, and the baby is evaluated on how precisely orders are executed or how long poses are held.
According to one profile, a typical evaluation series might include things like holding the hands under the chin, crossing arms and touching the shoulders, or any other random poses that can demonstrate the “focus and overall ability to follow directions, both keys for real SBs.”
No one requested the evaluation, but I did spark the fancy of an older daddy paying by the hour.
He was disappointed to find out I was out of his budget, but he still went on to detail his overtly sexual “per meeting” arrangements.
“I have girls from 18 to 47 and more than 95% ask anything from $300 to $700 per meeting,” he wrote. “I have had Asians, Russian, Belarusian, Iranian, Latin from many Latin countries, Canadian, Americans, Germans, etc.”
His first time, he paid a girl $800 for a two-hour visit until a friend told him he’d overpaid: The friend’s standard was $300 to $500 per visit, “unless one was really in love with the girl.”
Now he has an arrangement with an 18-year-old girl for $300 per meeting but is thinking about dropping her because of suspicions she might be on drugs.
“That can be dangerous because I don’t use condoms,” he said.
‘Same as a rich wife’
These sorts of interactions are not supposed to happen, SeekingArrangement’s Bermudo says. Those who are seeking straight prostitution are removed from the site.
“We’re a smart tech company here. We’ve figured out the key words that they use to try and describe other things. So, for example, if someone says meet me for one night for $500, then we know what that means,” she says.
How, then, was it so easy to encounter someone who confessed to no less than eight pay-to-play encounters arranged through SeekingArrangement, and in his correspondence used key words like “300 to 500 per meeting,” “hotel room” and “paid this girl?”
“Often times if somebody has sent out something like that, it takes us just a couple of days to find them and then boot them off,” Bermudo says. “I wouldn’t say that happens rarely, but unfortunately it’s really hard to measure.”
(At the time of writing, the member in question was still active on the site, over a month after my initial contact with him.)
Lisa Schmidt, who often goes by the online pseudonym Exa Palmateer, is a former sugar-baby-turned-CEO at SugarMatchmaking.com, a competitor to SeekingArrangement that charges sugar daddies anywhere from $2,500 to $20,000 for a yearly membership.
She calls the unchecked pay-to-play arrangements a “plague” on the industry and says the volumes at million-member-plus sites like SeekingArrangement makes them the perfect online hosts to paid escorts.
“I’m not dealing with someone that’s paying me $30 a month for a membership. It’s different. You’re making sure [the babies] are on point, they’re not gold-diggers. I don’t sell sex. I sell relationships.”
But the “cleaner” side of sugar dating still has its detractors. Though Schmidt and SeekingArrangement’s Wade may have different ideas about how to facilitate the flow of sugar, they’re allied against a common enemy — often times, the modern feminist.
“You can raise your kids and not work at all and sit at home in a nice big house . . . So how is your life any different?” Schmidt says. “That housewife, she’s not contributing any way really to that life financially, you know she’s taken care of but she’s not called a prostitute — she’s called a wife.”
‘Not a transaction’
As for Megan, she says her choices are totally in keeping with her feminist ideals; she believes in doing “whatever makes you feel good and as long as the reason that you’re doing everything isn’t to please a man.”
She sees it differently than prostitution. “There is never any conversation about sex for money. I’m sure there are scumbags on the site, but there are legitimately generous people who really do have the extra money and who really do want to help someone out and feel good about doing it.
“It was never like, ‘I’m going to start giving you the money when you have sex with me.’ I’m sure they want it and expect it, but in my relationships it’s never been expressed to me. I think they trust that it’ll happen. It’s not a transactional relationship. I think prostitution would feel more like that.”
But does she think others, like her mother, would call what she does prostitution?
“Yes. Oh, yes. I think most people would. And that’s OK with me because I just have to worry about myself. I can’t be concerned with that. It’s not something that’s weighing on my conscience.”