The Sugar Baby Trap

A Twitter friend of mine, Pardes Selah, recently retweeted an article she had written before called, “Five reasons to get yourself a sugar daddy” (PS: I have no idea whether Pardes has ever been a sugar baby or like a majority of Americans according to the latest polls, just considers herself sex work positive.) I don’t agree with the general gist of Pardes’ argument, but she did say some things that prompted me to think, so I thought it was worth talking about her article. So here are some excerpts from her piece with some thoughts afterward…

Here are five reasons to get yourself a sugar daddy….

1. You’ll never have to work again.

“But what if s/he dies? Or makes you get a divorce??”

Being married to a rich person has always been a foolproof way for people to become rich– that’s why prenups exist. Even if you get a divorce or become widowed, they’re likely to leave you with alimony or a hefty will. And if they’re a lot older than you, you won’t even have to wait so long. Just be really nice to them while they’re alive.

So, the flaw with this from the female side is that most guys don’t want a girl who has done sex work, even if it is as Pardes’ refers to it, “light prostitution.” If you are a prostitute, stripper, are a Cam Girl or Sugar Baby, do Only Fans, etc, etc, a lot of guys, probably even most guys are going to stick you in the “Good for fun, but not for a relationship” bucket. They don’t want to introduce a stripper to their mom or have their son see a video of his mom having sex with a dozen guys at once someday. The number of single men who would have sex with a stripper they asked out at Chipotle is very high, but the number that would go on to marry her is very low.

3. You’ll get to live your own life.

Believe it or not, sugar relationships can be very liberating. I personally know a good amount of people in these relationships. They tend to be exceptionally mindful of each others’ boundaries, and they usually have their own separate lives during the day: sugar daddy managing his business or finances or whatever, and sugar baby taking care of kids or at the spa with girlfriends, et cetera.

I’m sure this is true and it’s undoubtedly one of the more appealing facets of potentially having a sugar baby for a man. If you are a man who’s paying a sugar baby, when the two of you are together, it’s a night on YOUR terms. You don’t have to let her pick the restaurant, go out dancing, get drinks for two hours at the bar, have sex, and spend an hour cuddling if you don’t want to do it. You can have her come over for dinner and sex, maybe even just sex, thank her and send her on her way until next week. Is that preferable to being in a healthy, loving relationship? Doubtful, but it may very well be preferable in some cases to the sh*tshow online dating has become for most men.

5. You are more likely to be happier and fall in love long-term.

This sounds counterintuitive, right? How can you fall in love with someone if your entire relationship was built on nothing but money and fresh ass in the first place?

Well– you’re not gonna like this, but that’s how many loving relationships subconsciously start. Superficial qualities like wealth and physical attractiveness might only be bait for a relationship to be instigated or continue longer than it otherwise would, but at the end of the day that’s all that’s needed in order for love to have a chance…

We’ve already discussed this, but it is worth noting that there’s some truth to what Pardes’ says.  People do fall in love in some pretty weird circumstances. There are an awful lot of couples I have known in my lifetime (and sometimes that I have been a part of) that you would look at and go, “How the Hell did those two end up together?”

All that being said, there are a couple of major issues that Pardes’ that just blows past.

The first is the obvious one. If a man and a woman start a relationship that is explicitly based on money, how does he ever know that she likes him for him? Some guys might be so desperate that they don’t care, but ultimately if you’re a man, you want a woman that likes you for who you are as a human being. Of course, the counter-argument to that would be the deeply cynical, but unfortunately, often true argument that women are hypergamous and if they ever conclude they have a good chance of being able to get a man with more money & status, they will often start looking for the exits in their current relationship. Is marrying a sugar baby who wanted to be with you initially because of your money worse than marrying a woman who wouldn’t have dated you in the first place if you weren’t a doctor or didn’t own your own business? Once you start thinking about it in those terms, maybe it’s not as easy a call as it seems to be at first.

However, there is a major problem that very few people ever discuss about sex work. That’s the damage involved to the women that participate in it. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, there are not a lot of mentally healthy, happy women that get into sex work to begin with. Then, consider the fact that the sort of people that they’re going spend most of their time around in that profession are also often going to be damaged. Pimps. Pornographers. Other sex workers. The type of sleazy guys that prefer to spend their time around sleazy women. If you are an average of the 5 people you spend the most time around, what is their “average” going to look like? It’s probably not going to be pretty. Last but not least, sex workers see humanity at its worst on a regular basis. They’re the ones getting d*ck pics and weird sexual fantasies every day. They’re the ones being offered money to give a married guy a blow job in a back room. They’re being exposed to the guys that view them as worthless whores they can treat like trash. All those things are going to shape how they view life, the world, and yes, you.

Personally, I have known women that have done sex work that I genuinely liked as human beings and I have nothing against sugar babies as people. In fact, after having done long-distance dating, it might even be a cheaper way to go than some of the relationships I’ve been in. If I were doing a straight-up cost comparison to buying a cross-country plane ticket every four-to-six weeks to just having a sugar baby, it would probably be a lot closer to a wash than you’d think. All that being said, would I advise any woman I know to become a sugar baby? Absolutely not. The idea of getting paid to date may be tempting for a woman, but in the end, it will probably turn out to be a trap.