The Resurgence of Sugar Baby Culture (and the Advice to “Marry Rich”)

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“Sugar dating” is a resurgent phenomenon on social media right now, and rumors coming out of the dating app Tinder speculate that a new offering aims to compete with the preeminent sugar dating site, Seeking.com (formerly Seeking Arrangements). We’re diving into this world with the help of award-winning BBC investigative journalist Tiffany Sweeney.

As a content warning, there are mentions of both sex and mental health throughout this episode.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Is it Feminist to Get Rich?
• The Secrets of Sugar Baby Dating from Tiffany Sweeney
• Listen to BOSSY with Tara & Katie
• Vice‘s report on the Psychology Behind Sugar Daddies
• Paradise Lost by Terry Martin Hekker in New York Times
• The Fiscal Feminist by Kim Davis
• To Prenup or Not to Prenup with Kim Davis

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Transcript

Katie:

A few months ago I published a blog post on money with katie.com entitled Is Getting Rich Feminist. As an inhabitant of the center of the Venn diagram between content for women and content about money, it represented my grappling with a branding direction that I see a lot, the idea that it’s radical, progressive, and fights the patriarchy for a woman to accumulate a lot of personal wealth. But where I landed in that exploration is that this accounting of the world and women’s rights is ultimately a little too convenient, and we’ll link the post in the show notes if you are interested in reading it.

One corollary to the arguments presented, though, sent me poking another bedazzled bear. When a culture believes that accumulating wealth is intrinsically empowering, then that means anything one has to do to get that money is automatically grandfathered in, and by the transit of property, empowering as well.

So I was in the midst of that personal exploration and reflection when I received an email from a listener about what she called the sugar baby mentality, or living your life located somewhere on the conscious versus unconscious and explicitly transactional versus implicitly transactional spectrums, as though you’re waiting to be saved by what she dubbed an already successful person. Can you guess where this episode is going?

Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show, rich sugar girls and boys. I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and in perhaps the most not safe for work episode we have ever done, today we’ll be talking about the resurgence of sugar dating culture and its recent unofficial rebrand as a girl-bossy way to cash in.

We will be joined by Tiffany Sweeney, an award-winning investigative journalist with the BBC who produced the documentary, The Secrets of Sugar Baby Dating, and we’ll link to that in the show notes for you. But as a heads up, we do cover some pretty touchy topics, so I’m going to give the content warning upfront on the topics of sex and mental health.

Now, before we dive into it, I wanted to plug two very exciting updates. The first is that our second podcast all about building businesses premiered last week. It’s called Bossy, and I’m co-hosting it with my friend Tara Reed. She’s the CEO of a multimillion dollar business, and I’ve already learned a lot from her just in the process of filming together. So check it out, we’ll put it in the show notes.

The second is that the wait list for our 2024 Wealth Planner is now live, hell yes. So if you want a discount on the Wealth Planner and you want to get the free annual review template that’s going to be sent out during launch weekend, the link to join is in the show notes. We will be right back after a message from the sponsors of today’s episode.

So first things first, let’s all get on the same page. The concept of sugar dating is defined as a pseudo romantic transactional sexual relationship between an older, wealthy person and a younger person. Now, coupling up explicitly for the practical purposes of providing oneself with resources is about as old as the institution of marriage itself, and we’ll get into that too, because it’s marrying for love that’s a relatively new phenomenon in human history. But of course there’s quite a gaping canyon between explicitly transactional sugar baby daddy arrangement, and, “Gee, I hope my future husband has a trust fund.” So I want to be clear that while we’re drawing a tenuous connection here, thematically we are not equating the two. Because the marrying rich trope is the way the Disney princess narrative arc manifests in the real world of student loan debt and daycare bills, when a woman is “saved” by Prince Charming and his family’s summer home in Montauk.

But what about when that arrangement is made more transactionally explicit? Because the sugar baby mentality that this aforementioned listener was describing represents a sort of shortcut that enables a person to wake surf on the momentum generated by someone else’s boat rather than building and captaining their own. And this phenomenon, like most salacious things in the modern world, has been metastasizing online. Videos tagged “sugar baby” have racked up a cumulative 2.5 billion views on TikTok. Sugar dating and sugar baby culture have experienced such a boom in recent years that rumors flying out of Tinder claim a new $500 per month subscription is in the works allegedly called the Vault. And most users on Reddit speculate that it seems as though Tinder is trying to compete with the biggest game in town, Seeking.com, formerly Seeking Arrangements, which has more than 40 million users.

But what’s been fascinating about the way the internet era has ushered in a new phase of sugar baby culture is twofold. First, the conversation around contemporary sugaring online takes on the same tenor that I referenced a few moments ago. When a woman obtains money or material goods by any means possible, it’s recast as an empowering choice. I kind of feel like a joker using TikTok for my source reference material, but when an online space has 1.1 billion monthly active users, it tends to be a pretty valuable cultural well to draw from. And this feels like an idea that’s easier to show than tell, so-

Speaker 2:

I need a sugar daddy to go and pay my bills.

Speaker 8:

Go find rich husband.

Speaker 2:

Pay my bills.

Speaker 9:

Go find a rich husband.

Speaker 11:

Go find a sugar daddy with the boat.

Speaker 10:

A day in the life of a sugar baby.

Speaker 12:

I want to look nice and fresh for meeting a new sugar daddy.

Speaker 10:

I always have to get a new set of his choice.

Speaker 12:

Blow draw my hair.

Speaker 10:

Get him and his friend drinks, drop it off to him at work.

Speaker 12:

Little out check and a booty shake for good luck.

Speaker 10:

Hang out with him for at least two hours.

Speaker 12:

And of course a workout.

Speaker 10:

Then he gives me $500 and I do what I want.

Speaker 8:

Go find rich husband.

Speaker 13:

We’re going to pray. Okay? Let pray. Lord, we love your wallet. Your kingdom come and they will be done on bed. Please, please, please, please send me a sugar daddy.

Speaker 14:

Give us this money for our daily show.

Speaker 13:

Please. I’m a goddess. Lord, you know that.

Speaker 15:

Sugar daddy, sugar daddy, sugar daddy, sugar daddy, sugar daddy.

Katie:

This is a world full of blurred lines. What’s the difference between sugar dating, escort services, sex work, and so on? It’s not always clear, and that can get messy quickly, particularly when expectations are not set accurately. Here’s Tiffany explaining what she encountered going undercover In this world.

Tiffany:

There’s different people on the sugar dating websites. I met a young girl who I was in awe of her maturity. And I don’t know whether she was deep down like that, but then when I spoke to her, she knew what she was doing. She said to me, “I make money. I meet up with these men. They’re bored of their wives. They moan all the time. They want a young girl to dress up like a school girl. They want someone to open their mind to all these fantasies, and they pay me for it. I’m going to invest my money and I’m going to save my money, and I’m going to put it into fashion, and I’m going to be a business woman, and I’ll stop when I’m ready to stop. And we are both clear on what our roles are, and he pays me for this and I get the money and I do this with the money. And it works.”

And then you have the other side of it, which is the darker side, which is a young guy who was on there and he was so shy, so nervous, such an introvert, and he was sleeping with men for 20 quid. You could see he was not comfortable with it, and he didn’t want to be doing it. He was doing it because he was so desperate because his parents had no money. He’s at university, he’s struggling, and he said, “It’s the easiest way to make quick money.” And that’s the problem. There’s loads of other things. You need to take into account the young person that you are dealing with. Do they have family? Are they vulnerable? Are they depressed? How are they struggling financially? Are you exploiting them? Have they got a support group? Or are all the people on the website girls who are owning it and know what they’re doing and proud of it and feminists and want to be in the world of sex work and taking control.

It’s just a melting pot of different people in different situations. And naturally what happens is when they’re all put in one place, people get exploited, people get scammed, horrible things happen. A lot of escorts, they know what they’re doing. They get payment upfront. They’re clever, they’re savvy about it. They’re older maybe. They know what they’re doing. Sugar dating is young, young people. Some people were on there were like 16. I said to the guy, the man that I met, “Why are you on this website?” “Oh, it’s all young hot girls.” “Why are you not on Escort?” Because on the sugar dating website you are dealing with young vulnerable people, and that’s who they can take advantage of. On an escort site, you can’t take advantage of these women.

Uni students, you’ve got no idea. You are opening up to conversations around sex and things like that, but two days ago you were just at your student union chatting with your friends about something completely different and now you are trying to negotiate payments on sex. That is what I had the biggest issue with, is that you are allowing these two worlds to collide and there isn’t the right platform in place in terms of verifications and checks. You’re not given the right support. It should be dealt on a case by case basis, and it isn’t. And unfortunately people are connecting and it just gets messy; really, really messy.

Katie:

The website that Tiffany’s referring to is Seeking.com. As Lucy Harbron writes for Glamour UK, “A quick scroll through the hashtag and sugar baby life seems idyllic, full of creators sharing the gifts they’ve received, vlogs of holidays, and even tips for finding sugar daddies. They’re always adamant that there are no strings attached, painting it as a lifestyle full of perks with no drawbacks and not a glimpse of intimacy or sex work involved. The comments are full of young girls sold on a lie asking how to sign up.”

But this glittering portrayal obfuscates the reality of what these relationships at their most fundamental level really are, a customer purchasing a product.

Tiffany:

People want to make money and they want to make money quick. And especially with social media now, people are like, “I can have all these nice things. People have these holidays, they’re doing these nice things. I want them and I want them quickly.” And sugar dating was offering that essentially to young people. Like you said, on TikTok, on all the social media now, everyone just wants to have the next best thing. It’s such a rat race, and this is such an easy way for people to make money.

And a lot of people won’t tell you what they’re doing. That’s the problem as well. Now, I think, more than ever, people are not open about being a sugar baby. People won’t tell you, but you’ll see people on social media and they’re on holidays every week or they’ve got designer bags. I’m like, “How are they doing that? How are they funding that?” And I know deep down they’ve got to be dating someone or they’ve got to have a sugar daddy, but it’s still such a taboo subject. People still don’t want to talk about it.

Katie:

Because when I scrolled through these videos for a while one afternoon allowing myself to be immersed in the sugar dating world, I marveled at the way they all seemed to feature similar images as though they were being pulled from a shared playbook. Fresh manicures extended in front of the steering wheel of a luxury car. Bright orange Louis Vuitton boxes stacked high on marble countertops. The interlocking G’s of that Gucci popular pattern draped over every surface imaginable. Wine glasses clinked together in dimly lit restaurants, and business class seats to Dubai. The one thing that was very obviously absent was any mention of sex work or physical intimacy. And it’s pretty obvious why someone who doesn’t know any better wouldn’t have accurate expectations based on these videos.

I ended up watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of anonymous Tell-all style articles about this phenomenon, and the mingling of blatantly commercial elements with non-commercial parts of life are fascinating. Take this example from the BuzzFeed community. “Most of the sugar daddies I’ve met are just busy, and they want the sex and companionship of a relationship without all the responsibilities of being a boyfriend. Many of them actually do want a wife, but one who admires them and is pleasant and submissive.”

Another anonymous source shared, “Most of my sugar daddies have really crazy work schedules, which is how they became so financially successful in the first place. So normal methods of dating are too time-consuming. They don’t have time to text or call a real girlfriend every single day, so this transactional arrangement lets them contact you as frequently or infrequently as they want without the girl being offended or neglected. There’s a lot of flexibility in this type of dating, and a lot of standard courtship etiquette is not required.”

But think about what these quotes are really saying. The men are too busy personally enriching themselves and climbing higher and higher on the corporate ladder to treat a woman their age with any sort of respect or human decency, so instead they pay younger women to accept whatever sort of treatment suits them? One of the other things I discovered is that both sugar daddies and babies alike tout the way the transactionality of their arrangements allow for utter transparency about their desires. And while many of the men in a Vice report said that a financial domination fetish was a big allure for them, some were more specific about why sugar dating was valuable to them. One such man told Vice, “When you use a traditional dating app, people expect the relationship to end in marriage or kids; but as a sugar daddy, you get to set expectations right from the start.” This man goes on to explain that he ended up getting engaged to his sugar baby, but that the flexibility of the arrangement, read the power dynamic wherein he was the customer purchasing a product, has “allowed him to explore an open relationship with his to-be wife.”

There’s a sort of stripping down, I noticed, of human connection, reducing it to its basest stereotypical impulses, women just want money, men just want sex. The “acknowledgement” of those “truths” is often discussed as a good thing. There’s no ambiguity. It’s black and white. Cards are on the table, rather than a remixed return to the way things used to be when marriages were transactional and men effectively and legally owned their wives. Now there are both implicit and explicit examples of power differentials in the tell-all pieces that I’ve found, like the man who said he would prescribe how his sugar baby would dress. It’s a little reminiscent of the way Kanye West often dressed Kim Kardashian when they first got married, a practice that some say was actually a sign of abuse about him wanting to control her image, who she spent time with, and her personhood more broadly.

Now, not all sugar dating relationships end badly, but these issues of control and power differentials extend beyond money as Tiffany uncovered. Tiffany, you went undercover as a sugar baby for your documentary, The Secrets of Sugar Baby Dating, back in 2018, 2019 timeframe. What was that experience like for you? And for our audience who may not have seen it, how do you reflect on it now?

Tiffany:

Terrifying. I think I was very naive. It was the first ever investigation in my career as a journalist, and I was so eager and just wanting to put myself out there and get the best possible story. I remember speaking with the director, and she explained it would take it to another level. For young people watching, explaining to them this could be potentially dangerous is one thing, but actually being that young person myself and allowing them to see themselves through me actually going undercover would take it to another level. I didn’t really understand at the time just what that would involve. It just sounded exciting as a journalist going undercover, and then I agreed to do it.

And then the morning of when I woke up in the hotel and we had the producer and we had security, it was just terrifying. They were putting the cameras on me. And I think what made it even more scary was the fact that the guy that I was meeting thought that I was going to have sex with him. That made it more awkward. It wasn’t just the fact that I was going undercover. It was the expectation from the person that I was meeting was that he thinks we are going to go to a hotel room and we are having sex.

I would say, yeah, naive, terrifying, all those emotions. Looking back on it now, if I knew about it, maybe I’d been a bit more hesitant. I remember halfway through the interview I told the guy, I was like, “Look, I need to go to the toilet.” And then the director met me downstairs and I was shaking. I was like, “I don’t know if I can do it.” I was like, “He wants to go to the room now.” I was like, “How am I supposed to?” Because I don’t know if he’s going to get angry. I don’t know if he’s going to lash out. Thankfully he was totally fine. He got the vibe that I didn’t want to go back. I asked the questions that I needed to ask. I got the answers I needed, and it was fine.

Katie:

Talk me through, you said you knew he was expecting that there would be physical contact, that you were going to be intimate with him. How did you know going into it that that was his expectation?

Tiffany:

Because I signed up to these sugar dating websites. Seeking Arrangement was the main one at the time because they were targeting students specifically. So on their website, the main page would say you’d get an allowance of 2000 pounds. So it was enticing. So that was the main one. I think I said I was 18 at the time. I was just inundated with messages from men asking me to sleep with them basically. I remember coming across this one guy who was in the UK and he was like, “Do you want to meet?” And I said, “Yes.” And I went along with the story. It was kind of agreed verbally that we would go to a hotel room and we would sleep together and he would pay me. So he suggested the hotel. He suggested the location. I didn’t know anything about him. I just knew he was an older guy, 50, 60s, assuming he had a family, something like that. And I just made up a story that I was a uni student and that I needed cash and that was it.

That was kind of the expectation when we got there. It was all on his terms. He was very nervous as well. As soon as I met him, we were inside and he wanted to go outside, so he was on edge as well. So I don’t know, it felt very seedy to me. At the time, a student, I think they offered me like 50 quid, and that makes you realize the discrepancy of students. Even 50 to a hundred pound is a huge amount of money. And for a rich guy, that’s nothing. And that’s what happened to Chandler, the girl in the US. That is essentially what happened. She needed the extra cash. He said, “I’m going to arrange a hotel room,” but he said, “Can you book it?” Which is weird in itself, but she went ahead and she booked this hotel. They met up, they went into the room. She was thinking, “I’m doing it with my friend, it’ll be fine.” And then she goes on PayPal or whatever, and then he shows her that he sent the money. And she thinks it’s gone through and it hasn’t. And then they sleep together, and then she doesn’t get the money, and she’s just entered into the world of sex work.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s so easy to make that transition into that world. And not only into that world, but then to get scammed and there is no protection, there is no fallback. Chandler in America, she can’t go and tell the police because it’s illegal. And that’s why it’s so scary that there’s actually a platform that facilitates that, that puts these two worlds together and is basically making it so easy.

Katie:

We will be right back after a message from the sponsors of today’s episode.

Another reason modern times make sugar dating a phenomenon worth exploring is that the websites and apps that help connect wealthy, older men with hot young mistresses position the arrangements as equally mutually beneficial for both parties. Journalist Lisa Ling interviewed the founder of Seeking.com, Brandon Wade, for CNN, and she presses him. She asks if he believes his business is setting women back. He answers that, “No, actually. These relationships are quite empowering for women.”

Brandon Wade:

Both parties have power in their own ways. The guy might be powerful because he’s rich and wealthy and has financial means. The woman is powerful because she might have youth and the beauty.

Katie:

I think that just about says it all, don’t you? A man’s power comes from his financial autonomy. A woman’s power comes from her youth. It’s a world in which men get to be powerful and successful, and women need to look pretty and be passive in order to make money. And it’s this bald power differential at the end of the day that the economic exchange relies on. Sure, the exploitation might be transparent and mutual, but I’m not sure that that makes the outcomes equal. The party holding the purse strings is in control.

And here’s the fascinating thing. Wade, despite claiming repeatedly in interviews that sugar dating is empowering for women, and having that same message filtered down into the likes of TikTok videos about the subject, effectively admits to Tiffany that financial dominance is an issue. In Tiffany’s documentary in which she speaks with Wade, he says he financially supports his then-partner, a 22-year-old former sugar baby named Zoe, who was featured in a lot of Seeking’s marketing material and interviews, where Wade highlighted all the great things that can come out of a sugar dating relationship.

Brandon Wade:

Actually, instead of giving her an allowance, I’ve actually put money in a savings account every time we hit specific milestones in our relationship. Because I want her to feel secure that if this relationship doesn’t work out, that she has the resources to be able to leave if she wants. And that’s one of the key points that a lot of sugar babies have commented to me on the website is that because they’re dating a lot of these older guys, they feel dependent on them to the point where they can never leave because they’re constantly dependent on their support. And I don’t ever want that to happen between us.

Katie:

To further illustrate the point, apparently sugar dating is also exceedingly popular in Australia, and the 60 Minutes Australia episode on the topic was, well, let’s roll the clip.

Speaker 5:

I went to a music festival and I took 25 girls all paid for, just flew them in from all over the United States.

Speaker 16:

But you’re bringing over this group of girls, and they’re on your money, right?

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Speaker 16:

So you’re-

Speaker 5:

Full control.

Speaker 16:

… controlling them.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, for me it’s just fun.

Speaker 16:

It’s fun to control the young girls.

Katie:

Because what do we know about how financial autonomy, power, and control tend to change over time? What happens to money over time? Well, it grows. It compounds, exponentially in fact. But the half-life of youth and beauty, those have an inherent expiration date. It’s a troubling dynamic when one party is inherently biologically set up to expire and lose the thing that supposedly gives them value. It’s a unnecessarily short-lived arrangement. As a practical prerequisite for sugar dating is a wide age gap, or the expectation that the woman participating is very young and very attractive.

To me, it still puts people on an innately uneven playing field. It’s like, even if you want to make money like that when you’re 22, you can’t really make money like that when you’re 52 unless there’s a whole nother demo out there that I’m unaware of. But that seemed to be that they want hot young women. You’re only hot and young for a certain chunk of your life.

Tiffany:

No, definitely. And the girl that I spoke to that was really confident and was making a lot of money, she is the minority. She is really beautiful and she knows it. And that’s the thing. Like you said, that will expire. It’s not sustainable. She can’t be like that forever. And eventually it will affect her. I spoke to her and she doesn’t do it anymore. She stopped doing it. So at the moment you might feel empowered, at that time you might feel like this is great, but no one sees the after effects. No one’s speaking to them afterwards and says two, three years on, “How do you feel? Where are you now? How much money did you make? How has that made you feel mentally? Do you have to have therapy?” It’s not a long-term thing, and you’re exactly right.

It’s just crazy to think that that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for the beauty, they’re looking for the looks. And then again, that feeds into the whole idea of women now knowing that they need to look a certain way and that puts pressure on. And then as a result, everyone gets plastic surgery and then women are trying to look a certain way, and spending more money so they need more sugar daddies to pay for the surgery to stay looking young and beautiful. It all ties into it.

Katie:

A blog post from the American Philosophical Association captured this tension well. “The sugaring ethos is deeply apolitical because it sees gendered hierarchy as unjust but natural. It’s just the way things are. It concedes that a woman’s greatest talent is being young, pretty, and available, and that the fundamental measure of her worth is what men are willing to pay for it.” Ultimately, borrowing success means living on borrowed time. Still, it’s not just the sugar daddies who see the value.

Speaker 6:

I’ve got friends my age who go out to clubs, they use dating apps, they’re hooking up with guys, having sex with them and never seeing them again. Whereas I don’t want to waste my time with that. I can go to a sugar daddy. And even if the sex isn’t great, I’ve got money out of it at the end of the day.

Katie:

Now you hear Brandon Wade, the founder of Seeking.com that we mentioned earlier, reference this type of heterosexual nihilism a lot. And I was surprised by how his interviews made me feel quite sad actually. He would mention how women don’t want to date losers, and most of the time loser just meant a man who didn’t have a lot of money. And as you just heard in the clip, young women figure, “Well, if I’m going to have disappointing casual sex anyway, I might as well get paid for it.” There’s this detectable tone of resignation.

This idea that gender hierarchy and differences are unjust but natural is a relatively resigned take that attempts to make the best of a bad situation. “Well, if men are trash and being objectified is inevitable,” the rhetoric goes, “you might as well start collecting subscription payments for your trouble.” The sugar dating paradigm and the businesses that try to monetize it simply take this gender norm to its rawest, most explicit form, shrug their shoulders, and say, “Well, if this is what people want, we might as well monetize it.”

At the end of the day, how someone makes money consensually is their own business. But I do take exception to Seeking’s marketing angle that this is somehow especially economically empowering for the women who participate, and the fact that they used to and may still target young women with EDU email addresses with marketing materials referencing an easy way to pay off their student loans. Because oftentimes, the sums being discussed between $1,000 and $3,000 per month or between $12,000 and $36,000 per year on average based on the more than 20 interviews, articles, and tell-alls that my team consumed for this episode, it pales in comparison to the type of money the sugar daddies are earning. Seeking.com reports that its average male user earns $250,000 per year or more. The sugar baby could never earn enough in this career path, particularly not in the abridged timeline she’d be considered desirable in the narrow discriminatory sugar dating pool to economically match her sugar daddy, so the inequity and financial stature and the uneven power dynamic are all but insured.

I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about this sugar baby university marketing push, and what you found when you were on sites like Seeking Arrangement and the fact that they’re targeting this audience. What type of language are they using?

Tiffany:

It wasn’t just allowances, as they would say, you get money. It would be mentorship, it would be guidance. So for example, I was at university. When you’re starting out, you want to meet people, it’s all about networking, and who are at the top of their game. So they would say they’ll put you in touch with the relevant people so you can help expand your career. It wasn’t just financial, it was all these other things. It just sounded amazing.

One of the things that the websites say they don’t offer is pay per meet, which is money for sex essentially because that takes it to sex work. So they were adamant that they don’t allow that and that they just offer people who want to meet other people and they have a mutually beneficial relationship, whatever that might be. So whether that’s you choose to go over the line and have sex, or whether you choose just to meet up and have coffee. But essentially the websites are adamant that they don’t do pay per meet. And that language is basically, no cash for sex. We don’t facilitate that on our websites.

So what they are offering and what they are clever in the way that they’re wording is they have these lovely pictures of young students who are starting out in their career and want to be successful and who are ambitious, and we can open you to this world of people who are like CEOs top of their game. And not only will they do that, they will give you money for your time. So in no way, shape, or form when you look at the websites, would you think that you are going to be doing sexual acts and they would be facilitating sex. You would think that that would be on escort sites.

And that’s what was crazy. You open it up and you start messaging, and I was just flooded with messages from people just straight away. Nothing to do with my university, nothing to do with my course. All of the messages were, “Let’s meet for sex. Let’s come off the website. Can I add you on WhatsApp? What’s your number?” But that’s what Brandon Wade, the CEO at the time, he was very good at doing, targeting these students to say, “No, this is all above board. We really do encourage people to have relationships. The men are lonely, the girls are good-looking, everyone can connect and everyone’s happy.” But of course that’s not what happens, or that wasn’t my experience.

Katie:

What kind of verifications were in place on the sites? If you have a bunch of young women who it sounds like, I would imagine, are potentially a little naive about what they’re getting themselves into, just based purely on how the product is being positioned and the discrepancy between what is being marketed and what the actual experience is, assuming your experience was reflective of kind of the norm.

Tiffany:

Minimal verifications is the bare minimum. When I signed up, it was essentially a driver’s license that you’re supposed to upload, but I don’t even think I did that. I don’t even think you had to do that. I said my name was Ariana and I was 18 and I was at a university. I had no evidence of that. I had no confirmation, and I was able to make a false profile. So back then at the time they said it was some form of identification, but I don’t know how they were checking that. Loads of people would’ve slipped through the net because I essentially created a whole new persona with my pictures, with a name that was made up, with an age that I just said I was.

So in terms of people being catfished or saying they are who they are, that is so minimal. I think that needs to be upped massively because they’re just doing nothing really in terms of protecting the young people. They’re trying to make it as easy as possible, and they just want as many people on there.

The only thing they do in terms of financially is men have to pay a fee. So if men want to be on there, they had to pay to be on there. But in terms of their checks, again, I’m sure they say they would have to do ID and verification and they tell you that, but lots of people slip through the net, and the evidence is there.

Students and money is always going to be a massive topic. When I was a student, because I was struggling, I had two or three jobs when I was in Manchester, and it was really difficult. I didn’t have parents who could help me, so I could totally empathize. I looked at that website and I was so enticed. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds amazing.” But then I thought to myself, at that age, because 18, 19, you are so young, how would I have fared if I’d have sat in the room with a guy who was basically trying to tell me that they could make a career for me or sell me the big dream, could I be enticed? And I don’t know.

And then if you start at such a young age, like I said, it then transitions. You might reflect and say, “Did I ever think I was going to be in sex work? Probably not.” But that’s the thing. People can’t associate when they start with sugar dating because it sounds so lovely and fairy and just magical and like, “Oh, it’s just cutesy, like sugar dating. Oh yeah, I’m going to do a bit sugar dating. I’m just going to meet this guy. He’s going to pay for my bag.” And that’s what we simplistically think of sugar dating, but it’s not. And that’s the reality is that it just opens this world of so many people now.

Katie:

This highlights another oddity of how sugar dating is often positioned as somehow different from other sex work. When Tiffany asks Brandon Wade if he accepts that he’s facilitating sex for money on his site, he says, “No, absolutely not.” He repeatedly says in interviews that the sugar babies who use Seeking.com are ambitious, they’re starting businesses, they’re going to school, and they’re just using his service on the side so they can connect with wealthier successful men who will help them advance in their careers.

But this, to me, appears to be a vision of his product that exists only in fantasy. There’s never any evidence provided that women’s careers are advanced by these arrangements, or that the women who sugar date become successful business owners as a result of their additional $1,000 to $3,000 per month on average in income or connections to rich men. The sugar daddies are painted like business mentors, not Johns, but that doesn’t quite square with what the daddies themselves tell interviewers, as we shared earlier. Most men specifically seek out this type of financial subordination listing qualities like submissiveness, youth, and beauty as most desirable, or specifying control and financial dominance as their modus operandi. They’re not looking for a career mentee.

We dug up an interesting academic journal from 2014 that confirmed our suspicions that Wade’s view, that making gender norms transactional and that men who financially support women are a fan of ambitious women, was perhaps a little rosier than the reality. Five studies based on 993 heterosexual married men with stay-at-home wives found that those men were less supportive of women in their own workplaces. They “disfavor women in the workplace, and are more likely than the average of all married men to make decisions that prevent the advancement of qualified women.”

This is where the reputation and marketing of sugaring compared to other sex work diverges. Other sex work is rarely, if ever, pitched as a strategic business decision or a way to meet business mentors. Most sex workers do not claim that they’re trying to meet investors to fund their startup ambitions while they’re servicing clients.

Yet, this is a pervasive defense of sugaring proffered by the likes of Brandon Wade. It’s the primary alleged quality that’s touted time and time again that supposedly differentiates sugaring from more straightforward sex work, that the women are “ambitious” as in they have ambitions outside of being a sugar baby, and they “know what they want out of life” and think that maintaining a sexually transactional relationship with a rich man will help them get it.

I’m curious where you stand on this delineation since they typically are positioning sugar dating as though it’s a way to find career mentors.

Tiffany:

It made me think about society on a whole. It definitely glamorizes it. It essentially is young, pretty girls predominantly, and then rich older men. And society that we live in, we see that all the time. Most of the time there is this discrepancy; the men hold the power, they have the money, and the girls come in and they’re on the back foot. You could say it in loads of relationships in Hollywood, and I think that’s what society’s portrayed. So sugar dating is just another subsection of that. So essentially it’s saying, “Well, I’m beautiful. I’m young, I’m attractive. I won’t stress you out like potentially your wife will or your corporate job, so I can give you that fun side. And you can just pay me because you are rich and you’ve got loads of money and you might be able to give me some contacts.”

But then essentially what then happens is then it does cross over, and then before you know it, you are stepping into that world. But it’s so subtle; when you go into it, you don’t think, and that’s down to the marketing. Because the world that we live in, that’s glamorized all the time, like young pretty girls go with rich, older, powerful men. So when you see that setup, you’re like, “Oh, that’s very normal. That’s how the world works.? But then what you don’t see is when they start saying, “Oh, okay, so you need more money. How about sleeping with me? Have you ever thought about that? I could offer you three grand,” or even less than that.

Katie:

Were there sides to the sugar baby experience that you saw that you thought might actually be a positive? Were there benefits beyond the risks that we have not considered or unpacked yet?

Tiffany:

Yeah, so obviously the documentary was an hour, and there was definitely people that I spoke to who didn’t make the film. I remember just having a conversation via email with a young girl who had nothing bad to say about it. She said, “I met a guy, he flew me to America, and we met up once.” He wanted to sleep with her, she didn’t want that. And then he sent her a load of money and she paid off her student debt and she never spoke to him again. So stories like that, you could say Seeking Arrangement just helped one young person pay off their student debt. But how frequent is that happening? And the reality, if there’s millions of people subscribed, that was one person that I spoke to. So is that the reality? What is the majority?

People said they met up, they go to a nice hotel, they go for a nice dinner with a man, it’s like meeting up or dating essentially, and it doesn’t go any further and they respect the boundaries, but that was not the majority. That was the minority of people would tell me things like that on the whole. Unfortunately it was the darker side. I wish it could be the other side, but that’s not the reality because in this life, nothing is free. That doesn’t ever work. There’s always a catch. And when something’s too good to be true, it usually is.

Katie:

At the end of the day, sugar dating is a job like any other labor performed for money is a job. But as we’ve highlighted, it’s different from other jobs in a few key ways that open the door to risk, particularly because sex work is technically illegal in the US. There’s very little legal recourse that a sex worker has.

So why is this resurgence happening now? What is it about this specific cultural moment that creates fertile ground for companies like Wade’s? Let’s talk about capitalism in the 21st century US, shall we? It feels like we always come back to this. It’s like, “All right, so now’s the point at which we’re going to talk about late stage capitalism.” Because we’ve referenced the way our current economic paradigm affects culture on the show before, but the domain of women, career, and money is impacted in a particularly interesting way. Per Annie Kelly, a journalist and researcher whose work focuses on the impact of digital cultures on anti-feminism, “A frustrated yearning for a mythic past of material abundance at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to build careers and achieve financial security is not gender specific. Young people face ever more obstacles, higher demands, and continually dwindling returns in the form of work benefits, job security, and pay. We shouldn’t underestimate how some young white women, when faced with this bleak economic landscape and then presented with a rosy image of 1950s domestic bliss, may look back to 1960s freedom era feminism as having cheated them out of a family and a luxurious lifestyle all supported by a single income.”

I think this explanation is brilliantly constructed. In short, it emphasizes the way this ahistoric fantasy of domestic bliss, one that was only available to a very small subset of women for a very short period of time, is positioned as the way things used to be, a vision of life that seems somehow easier, less complicated, and more “natural”. I mean, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that this path is gaining traction as a viable option.

According to CNBC, women comprise only one in 20 of top 1% earners, and the gap hasn’t narrowed in more than 20 years. A woman’s best statistical shot at reaching the 1% is not through an illustrious career or education, which actually doesn’t correlate very highly with a woman’s success, but rather by marrying a rich guy. The researchers pointed out that in contrast, a man’s chances of reaching the 1% are closely associated with his career and education. This is a pretty demoralizing outcome when you consider that women are now the majority in educational programs for most high competition, highly paid fields like law and medicine.

So here’s where I’m going to make the Herculean leap from sugar dating to marrying for money, the “I don’t want to work, I just want a rich husband” trope that’s been picking up steam online. Are you ready? I’d mostly like to take this opportunity to highlight a few exceptional case studies, which I think do a bang up job of connecting these topics by their singular dangerous commonality, that financial dependence on another person is very risky.

Even as recently as 2013 when I started college, I remember the MRS degree joke running rampant on my campus. It was this idea that you as a woman were there not to get your own education and start your own career, but really to find a man whose coattails you could ride such that you wouldn’t have to. Because you might be wondering, what are the real risks? Is marrying rich a bad strategic move, or is it mostly harmless? Well, it’s certainly not without its potential downsides, given that financial dependence on someone else is almost always going to introduce complications and unfavorable power dynamics, whether or not the relationship ends. Here’s Kim Davis, a certified divorce financial analyst, wealth manager, and attorney who we interviewed last year for an episode about prenuptial agreements.

Kim Davis:

During my divorce proceeding, the fact that I moved to England and pretty much put my whole career on hold for 14 years, and I was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, none of that was calculated into any of this. It was kind of like, “Okay, well, you lived your life. This guy lived his life. You have the three kids and we’re going to split this.” But I still had three kids that were in school, one that was in university. It was very unpleasant. So if we had had that discussion before.

Also, it just is a discussion about the fact that when you’re staying at home, you’re not living off the fat of the land; you’re doing a job, you’re bringing up the children. I mean, women, unfortunately or fortunately, because being a mom is very fulfilling, but we’re expected to work like we don’t have children and to be moms like we don’t work. That’s not possible, and what we do is valuable for society because that’s how society grows and prospers by having children in it. But if people are going to be penalized for having children and aren’t going to get down the road what they need to have to live an appropriate lifestyle in retirement, well then, I would say people aren’t going to want to have children anymore.

Katie:

Now, Kim talked at length about her own situation and how when her marriage ended and her children were still in college, her decision to leave the workforce for 14 years to raise her kids, it didn’t really matter in the eyes of the court and it put her in a financially vulnerable position as she then had to find work after being out of the game for so long.

I hear stories like this all the time, but it wasn’t until I found a modern love piece from 2006 that I realized there are a few incredible unintentional longitudinal case studies on this topic. A woman named Terry Martin Hekker had written a New York Times op-ed in the 1980s in the midst of second wave feminism’s bull run explaining her decision to be a full-time homemaker as a defiant choice against the backdrop of a societal push to get women into the workforce making their own money. Then in 2006, she wrote a follow-up piece. “I wasn’t advocating that mothers forego careers to stay home with their children; I was simply defending my choice as a valid one. The mantra of the age may have been “do your own thing”, but as a full-time homemaker, that didn’t seem to mean me. The column I wrote morphed into a book titled Ever Since Adam and Eve, followed by a national tour on which I, however briefly, became the authority on homemaking as a viable choice for women. I ultimately told my story on the Today Show and even to Oprah when she was the host of a local TV show in Baltimore.” She explains how she would speak to wrapped audiences about building one’s life around supporting one’s hardworking husband and being there for your children.

Now, of course, it is very challenging to parse the sexist exile of women from the workforce that relegates them to their laundry rooms with the reality that raising kids and maintaining a household is an incredibly challenging 80 hour per week unpaid job, which is why these conversations can become touchy and sensitive and difficult really quickly. But the truth that underpins all of this, that it’s dangerous to be financially dependent on another person with no recourse should their affections for you change or otherwise something happened to them, remains.

Can you sense the plot twist that’s coming? She continues, So, I was predictably stunned and devastated when, on our 40th wedding anniversary, my husband presented me with a divorce. I knew our first anniversary would be paper, but never expected the 40th would be papers, 16 of them, meticulously detailing my faults and flaws, the reason our marriage, according to him, was over.” She describes the way in which she wasn’t alone as there were “many other confused women of my age and circumstance who’d been married just as long.”

Her husband had left her for a younger woman. She writes, “Like most loyal wives of our generation, we’d contemplated eventual widowhood, but we never thought we’d end up divorced. And divorced doesn’t begin to describe the pain of this process; canceled is more like it. It began with my credit cards, then my health insurance, and my checkbook until finally, like a used postage stamp, I felt canceled too.” She ended up on food stamps.

Hekker’s story, while heartbreaking, is not unusual. One in four divorced women ends up in poverty, which is a rate three times higher than divorced men. Another study, this time about divorced mothers and their children, found that the worst financial outcomes after divorce occurred for low education women married to “high education men”. Highly educated women married to less educated men saw the mildest financial effects. From the site Support and Solutions for Thriving Beyond Divorce, “61% of women say that raising children or caring for other family members kept them from taking paying jobs. Only 37% of men claimed the same story.”

It’s this overrepresentation of women getting the short end of the financial and familial stick, particularly when that overrepresentation is painted as a gendered eventuality that’s concerning. And I don’t think we’ll see better support for stay-at-home parents until more men are represented in that pool. Being financially dependent on another human being, whether because you’re providing them with love, companionship, or sex, is always a gamble because ultimately the person conferring the power to you in the form of money can revoke it at any time.

Hekker concludes her modern love piece by saying, “If I had to do it over again, I’d still marry the man I married and have my children. They’re my treasure and a powerful support system for me and for one another. But I would’ve used the years after my youngest started school to further my education. I could have amassed two doctorates using the time and energy I gave to charitable and community causes, and been better able to support myself now.”

Much like we’ve highlighted how the legal system doesn’t really protect someone engaged in sex work, there are very few protections for a spouse without a paycheck job that later finds him or herself on the other side of divorce papers. There are a few specific vulnerabilities to be aware of. The first is what Hekker highlighted. Being out of the workforce for a long time can make it very difficult to reenter and find work again when you’re ready to, assuming you will need income to support yourself. Her suggestion to continue working in some capacity or continue one’s education can be one of the most valuable paths.

If there was no solid prenup in place that outlined how your contribution to the household would be compensated in the event that the marriage ended, there’s likely going to be quite a bit of negotiation at the time of divorce. Another consideration is that the size of your eventual social security benefit is based on the number of years you paid FICA taxes. Generally, you must pay into the social security system for a minimum of 10 years to qualify for retirement benefits, and the amount you receive in retirement benefits depends on the average of the 35 highest years of payments into the system. So your years spent out of work could translate to zeros in the social security work records, and in turn potentially reduced retirement benefits. If you end up divorced, you may be entitled to some of your working spouse’s benefits if you are married to your ex-spouse for at least 10 years, you’re currently unmarried, and you’re at least 62 years old and your ex-spouse is entitled to social security, retirement, or disability benefits.

Each state handles things like spousal support, which is intended to help the disadvantaged member of the marriage continue to live their same quality of life post-divorce, differently. But a California lawyer said, “The amount awarded will depend on your ex-spouse’s income and how much is reasonable to cover your basic needs. You shouldn’t expect spousal support to last forever. Most spousal support awards only last until you’re able to support yourself, meaning achieve the training or education to get a job and become financially independent. The courts will expect you to make a serious and good faith effort to find employment while you’re receiving spousal support, and your request for spousal support may be denied if you can already support yourself, or if you have property or assets that can provide support.”

I also thought that this writer’s comment was interesting. They wrote, “It’s potentially important to remember that marrying rich, as in the person has money before you get married, does not make you rich. There’s no magical transfer of wealth that happens when you marry someone. Income you both earn during the marriage belongs to you both, but the bank accounts you came in with are yours and theirs alone. And inheritances are not considered marital property. So if they get a giant windfall during the marriage because their rich ancestor died, you’re legally entitled to none of it. So it’s entirely possible to be married to a rich person but continue to be poor. And if they’re rich because of investments and not because of a huge salary, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll ever see any of that money. Plus, a rich person can afford a better divorce lawyer than a non-rich person.”

Kim Davis’s book, Fiscal Feminist, we’ll link it in the show notes, has an entire chapter on how to protect yourself. Our full episode with Kim, which focused on prenups, also had a lot of valuable nuggets about spousal IRAs and maintaining financial autonomy during marriage, even if you’re not actively earning any money. We’ll link that in the show notes too.

Ultimately, relying on another person for money may appear to be the easy way out, but it’s an easy way out that can ultimately lead down a more treacherous path. Building long-term stability on a foundation of a power dynamic that innately disadvantages one party is a recipe for economic disaster, and the data around divorced women in poverty pretty clearly bears this out.

And thus concludes our most not safe for work episode yet. We hope you enjoyed it. And if you would like to send us some feedback, because I know this one is a bit touchy, we’d love to hear from you. So hit us up at MoneyWithKatie@morningbrew.com and let us know what you think.

That’s all for this week, so I’ll see you next week, same time, same place on the Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact-checking comes from Kate Brandt.