The online world of sugar daddies & babies

It is common knowledge that the cost of living for students and young people in general is at an all time high. Factor in tuition fees, textbooks, rent, transport and entertainment, along with long-term plans for the future, and it's hard to imagine that a part time job waiting tables is going to get you far.

Yet it seems that is no longer the way for many young women (and men) around the country. The not-so-niche lifestyle of 'sugaring’ is on the rise, despite what many may think.

Websites such as SeekingArrangement.com have allowed individuals to use the Internet as a way to earn money. Ultimately, the site connects wealthy older men with young women, for a ‘mutually beneficial arrangement.’ In other words, a way for ‘sugar daddies’ to come across ‘sugar babies’ who they can pamper and spoil, often in exchange for sex and some sort of intellectual relationship.

Many scoff and say these women are just prostitutes or escorts. The daddies are supposedly ‘dirty old men’. Yet the number of Kiwis on the site is at an all time high, with over 13.5k NZ sugar baby females, and over 3k NZ sugar daddies. So what is the appeal? Is it all about the money, or is there something else to it, something deeper?

Whatever it is, it seems the times are changing, and more women are turning to sugaring as a way to put themselves through university, treat themselves to lavish luxuries, or just make some extra cash. And sites like SeekingArrangement.com are making that easier than ever.

The idea of an older man being with a younger woman has been around long before the introduction of the Internet and sites like SeekingArrangement.com. However it is within recent years that the terms 'sugar baby' and ‘sugar daddy’ have become a lot more common. The opportunity to become a part of this lifestyle is easily accessible, and it is due to this accessibility, along with the rise of awareness surrounding sugaring, that it is becoming more common in society.

Sugaring can involve both men and women, young and old. Sugar mummies exist (although only 334 are on the site in NZ), as well as male sugar babies (3k members in NZ). However it is the older male-younger female relationship that is most common. Older, wealthy men will sign up to sites including or similar to SeekingArrangement.com, entering details such as their annual income, hobbies, and marital status. They will then message younger female members, who are generally on the site for financial benefits, and in time, the two individuals will meet, often to discuss the terms of their mutually beneficial arrangement; a strange concept to some, but an increasingly popular one to others.

Brandon Wade, founder of SeekingArrangement.com, says he came up with the idea for the site when he found himself in his 30s, making six figures after studying a great degree, yet single and unhappy. He remembered what his mother had told him when he was a shy teenager growing up in Singapore – that one day, he will be successful and women will flock to him.

"Right from the get-go the site was profitable and more women were signing up than men, which was a very different experience than I had experienced when I was online dating back 10 years ago, on the likes of match.com and Yahoo Personals."

Wade says for a long time sugaring was a very niche thing, yet by just looking at the traffic his site creates, it can be seen the lifestyle is becoming much more mainstream and a part of where pop culture is going. And it seems he is right.

The sugaring lifestyle, as expected, comes with many perks. It has gained media attention in recent years with women speaking out about how being a sugar baby may have put them through law school or helped them see the world. Yet, is that really the case for all sugar babies?

Being a sugar baby in New Zealand is far less extravagant than sugaring in a country such as the U.S., where the levels of wealth are slightly more intense and impressive. However it seems the Kiwi sugaring life is not too shabby, with girls speaking of overseas holidays, large cash 'allowances', and excessive gifts.

Lisa*, a 20-year-old former sugar baby who now works as an escort, says in the arrangements she was involved in while sugaring, she would make anywhere between $300-$600 each time she would meet with a sugar daddy. She says it’s difficult at first to know what to ask for in terms of monetary benefits, as "you don’t want to rate yourself too low, but then if you do it too high you get nothing".

Lisa would use some of the money she would get from sugaring towards study, however she mainly would use it for entertainment such as going for a night out. She had four sugar daddies over the time she was sugaring (one at a time) and says she only had good experiences.

“I was quite good at picking out the good from the bad people on the site because there are quite a few people who you do need to avoid and you don’t want to get involved with. So I was good at picking through messages and stuff, so when I actually met with people it was generally a good fit.”

Millie* a 19-year-old Kiwi sugar baby is currently seeing a 47-year-old sugar daddy who she says “slotted right in” to her life. She is also often treated to dinner, where she will receive $200 for new clothes, along with other gifts such as perfume. She too is a student and wanted some extra money for “nice things”.

These girls are not alone. The amount of young Kiwi women interested in the sugar lifestyle is increasing, with many women on private social networking groups discussing their experiences and the perks of the jobs. On one Facebook group which has over 10k members and wont be named to protect privacy, there are hundreds of posts about the sugaring lifestyle from both women interested, and those already involved.

Many of the girls interested want to know what they have to do for the money. Do they have to have sex? Do they have to meet the sugar daddy in person? There are actually sugar daddies out there that will deposit money in women’s bank accounts without having a physical relationship with them – however these men are hard to find – an unfortunate fact for the many Kiwi women who hope for this type of sugar arrangement.

Although it may seem the young women involved in the sugar lifestyle are just in it for the money or gifts, there are many other aspects to sugaring that attracts these women.

John*, a sugar daddy from SeekingArrangement.com says that women are not necessarily just on the site for financial benefits but also because they are looking for someone who is going to treat them well and give them respect. He thinks that Kiwi guys are "just blokes and lads, and to be frank, dicks", and that the women he has been with are somewhat jaded that they aren't respected or treated well.

Steven*, another sugar daddy from the site agreed, saying that he has found a lot of the women on the site are on there because they are fed up with the way they are treated by “young, fuckwit guys who don’t know how to treat a woman correctly”. He explained that the women are looking for something that is satisfying to their intellectual needs as well as their physical and financial needs as well.

Steven claims he is in a position where he can afford to do “different stuff”, such as fly a sugar baby to Sydney for dinner and a show, and then fly to Fiji for a couple of days on the beach, all on a whim. He does however say that he likes to make the person he is with feel special, and special is “one rose, not sixty”.

All of the sugar daddies and babies I spoke to agreed that sugaring is fairly similar to conventional dating. Texts are exchanged weekly, relationships are formed, and an emotional connection is created between the two individuals, despite the arrangement being fairly transactional.

Millie, the 19-year-old sugar baby from earlier, says her sugar relationship is rather similar to a conventional relationship. Her sugar daddy will text her every couple of days to see how she his and what she is doing, something she says shows elements of a normal relationship within the arrangement.

“I think with my sugar daddy, he’s really chill. He doesn’t act like an older kind of man; he slotted right in, so it’s almost like conventional dating but not. I wouldn’t say it’s a hard-core sugar baby lifestyle – it’s much more conventional.”

While there are arrangements, as previously mentioned, that don't have a physical side to them, it is rare. The large majority of sugaring relationships include a physical element, in other words, sexual acts between partners.

The girls that sign up to sites such as SeekingArrangement.com are all aware that sex is often a part of the mutual agreement. Amber*, an Auckland-based women who signed up to the site but never met anyone, says it wasn’t a big deal in her opinion to have sex with someone from the site. She signed up to the site thinking if she could find her perfect arrangement where she could get monetary benefits out of it, as well as have a connection with the person, then sex would not be a problem.

Amber never met up with any sugar daddies from the site as soon after joining she got into a conventional relationship with her current boyfriend and therefore deactivated her account. However, Millie and Lisa both engage in physical sugar relationships, as do John and Steven.

John says all three of the arrangements he has been involved in have been with young female students, and each of the relationships has been physical. He says there are many girls on the site who don’t want to meet face-to-face and just want an online relationship, however he is not into that, saying he wants both the emotional and physical elements.

Steven too states that the physical element is important to him. He went as far to tell me that through having an emotional and physical connection with his sugar babies, he teaches them the difference between "fucking and making love". He repeatedly mentions the idea of 'teaching’, and being able to have ‘intellectual stimulation’.

So sex ultimately is a part of the ‘job’. Any confusion about this is answered with another site put together by Brandon Wade and his staff at Seeking Arrangement, called Let’s Talk Sugar. The site is a step-by-step guide on how to be a sugar baby, with articles discussing intimacy in the arrangements including tips and advice on how to enjoy sex with your sugar daddy, to always use protection when having sex and to ‘fake it ‘till you make it’.

With sex clearly a big part of a sugar arrangement, it leaves people to often ask the question, or state their opinion rather, that sugar babies are just prostitutes. And it's understandable why – after all, the definition of a prostitute is a person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment. However are sugar babies and prostitutes the same or even similar?

The views are mixed. Often the sugar babies that don’t identify as sex workers are women that hold stigma toward the prostitution industry, and so do not want to come under that title. However then there are sugar arrangements that contain a heavily emotional aspect as well, as previously mentioned, and so in this case, it seems as though it is more of a relationship than one-off sex work.

Lisa, the young women who used to be a sugar baby and now works as an escort, says the two are not necessarily completely different things. She says when she was sugaring, she would tell herself she wasn’t a prostitute because she considered that to be a bad thing. However now when she looks back after partaking in both, she says she realistically was a sex worker, but that isn’t a negative thing.

Millie disagrees, saying she had a debate with a girl online who thought sugar babies were just prostitutes, saying it is more than that.

"You don’t just see them once and do something and get money. Especially with mine, we have quite a good conversation, he knows quite a bit about me, and I know about him. So it’s like having a boyfriend who is a little bit older and gives you money. It’s definitely not prostitution in my opinion."

However from a professional opinion, it seems the two are looked at as fairly similar. New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) national coordinator, Catherine Healy, says often sugar babies are working in isolation and are in denial about labelling themselves as a sex worker, despite the parallels being strong.

“We respect people self-labelling, so if someone says they don’t feel they are a sex worker, then we respect that…I would say that some people might start and think, 'oh I will just have a sugar daddy’, and then gather understanding of sex work in the course of that experience and then seek other arrangements, and expand. So, yeah it’s kind of all about people’s perception of where they are on that spectrum.”

Brandon Wade says that on SeekingArrangement.com it is frowned upon to use the site for prostitution, and “at the end of the day a sugar daddy-sugar baby relationship is really a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship except one party is wealthy and is willing to help the other financially”. He states that there is a clear romantic element to a sugar relationship, whereas an escort relationship tends to be a whole lot more transactional.

So obviously there is no concluding fact about whether sugaring is prostitution or not – the opinions range, and as Healy says, it seems it comes down to an individual’s perception of where they sit on a spectrum, as well as the type of arrangement they are in.

Evidently some sugar arrangements involve emotion, with the individuals choosing to connect with each other on a deeper level. However many sugar relationships do not contain much emotion, if any at all, which leaves some questioning whether or not it is realistic to think a physical relationship can be formed, without emotion coming in to play.

LetsTalkSugar.com contains an article that discusses falling for a sugar daddy and what to do if this happens. It acknowledges that it isn't abnormal for sugar babies to become attached and 'catch feelings’ for their sugar daddy, however states that this cause ramifications to the arrangement.

Sex therapist, Louise von Maltitz, runs North Shore Counselling and Sex Therapy, and says in her opinion there is a capacity for individuals to get hurt when involved in the sugaring lifestyle, as when a person gets physically involved with a person, emotions also tend to become involved.

"I think if you think about orgasm, a woman can orgasm in many different ways and I think if it’s vaginally, there is a lot of emotion that goes with that... there is a large degree of emotional investment."

Von Maltitz does suggest however that some people are able to stay emotionally detached – sometimes as a result of factors such as porn addiction, or childhood sex abuse, where an individual will make up their mind to stay detached and not become emotionally involved.

Nic Beets, clinical psychologist from Couplework.co.nz, says when individuals enter into close relationships with people, feelings get involved, and people can get hurt.

“If you’re going to enter into that world of intimate engagement, and engaging as real people through socialising and spending time together, and certainly if it is an on-going sexual relationship, you’re playing with your feelings, and people get hurt in that arena.”

Beets says particularly these arrangements need to have a level of honesty, where individuals need to be upfront about their feelings and expectations, in order to avoid getting hurt.

Brandon Wade agrees with the need for a sense of openness, saying that SeekingArrangement.com encourages people to be upfront about what they want. It is through this idea that Wade thinks a sugar relationship is actually healthier than ‘normal’ relationships.

“I think in most normal relationships people don’t think about what they want. They enter into those relationships beating around the bush and then finally in the end getting hurt because one party is cheating on the other or expectations are not met whereas in the case of a sugar or arrangement type of relationship, you’re forced to have to think about that and discuss that upfront, so that in itself is very healthy.”

Wade's site is fairly simple to use – create an account and get sugaring. The amount of information an individual must provide however is slightly daunting – I would know, as I signed up myself in order to come across sugar daddies to interview.

As it turns out, journalism students aren’t supposed to be on the site – something I knew, but thought I would give it a shot anyway. After a few weeks of being a member and messaging various sugar daddies (and receiving plenty of unsolicited messages myself), I was banned from the site. A representative from the company emailed me to let me know I was in violation of the terms of use and solicitation is not allowed on the site (slightly ironic).

However in the few weeks I was on the site, I managed to get an inside view into how it works and what it involves, as well as managing to come across a couple of men I knew. It was this fact that made me realise the site is fairly open, and that could potentially be one of its downfalls.

Anyone can sign up (including a journalism student not looking to be sugar baby), and after joining it is easy to search certain geographical locations to find individuals. People using the site that think they have some sort of anonymity are generally wrong.

This became a problem for sugar baby Amber, who despite never meeting anyone in person, was still found on the site and made to regret signing up in the first place. Amber’s family were told she was on SeekingArrangement.com and went on to tell her she is an "immoral person" because she “basically escorted or tried to prostitute herself”.

“The way [my family] have made me feel just from this experience, if it wasn’t for some of my friends and my boyfriend, I wouldn’t have been in a good place right now.”

Amber says if she could go back she wouldn’t have used a legitimate photo of herself, let alone signed up to the site at all.

And that is where the issue lies. The site requests you to use a genuine recent photo of yourself. Some people do not, however many do, and all it takes is a Google image search using that image to find various details about the person – their social media accounts, business endeavours, and information about their family.

It's no secret there is plenty of stigma around the subject of sugaring – when I told people I was writing this article I was greeted with laughs, cringes, and comments including 'ew, that’s so weird’, ‘they are all just prostitutes’, or ‘it’s actually degrading and disgusting’.

However it really isn’t. The popularity of the sugar lifestyle is on the rise and both sugar daddies and babies alike are hoping the attention put on the lifestyle through the media will help to decrease the stigma towards it.

Lisa says the stigma is completely unnecessary, and that the people who hold negative opinions about the sugaring lifestyle are people who in fact know nothing about the industry yet "continue to turn up their nose and judge it".

John finds that the girls he has spoken to or met with are generally concerned about their privacy due to the way in which sugaring is stigmatised, and the worry that their family and friends may find out.

“Some of them are very concerned and want absolute discretion, mainly from their family. Obviously the family may have a taboo attached to this.”

Ultimately, the general consensus from both the sugar babies and daddies was that they find the topic of sugaring is one that people often assume is distasteful and unacceptable. It is through this idea that the sugaring lifestyle has become something that women (and men) feel they need to hide from relatives and peers, despite them seeing it as something normal. Each of the sugar daddies and babies interviewed for this article wished to remain anonymous – a clear sign that the shame that surrounds the industry is frightening to those most heavily involved.

So why is sugaring seen as something so terrible? Because society makes people think that way. A 70-year-old man sleeping with a 20-year-old woman makes people think of Hugh Hefner and his playboy bunnies. A 20-year-old woman dating a 70-year-old man makes people automatically think ‘gold digger’, despite that possibly not being the case. It is through social norms that the sugaring lifestyle has become something that is looked down upon, and so it is only through a change of social norms that the sugaring lifestyle will become accepted.

The sugar lifestyle may be something that is becoming more and more popular however it does come with its risks. Just like with dating sites or apps such as Tinder, it is always important to take the necessary precautions to ensure your safety. Behind a screen anyone can portray somebody who they are not, and so the women and men involved in sugaring need to be vigilant.

Wade says his site publishes a list of things that people ought to be aware of and how to date safely. He acknowledges it is a dangerous environment, but people just need to practice some common sense.

"Don't go to somebodies house that you don’t know, meet them publicly for the first time. Tell your friends and family who you’re meeting and where you’ll be. Don’t give out your bank account information – when something is too good to be true it is generally false."

Millie agreed saying she always has a system in place when meeting someone new, through letting her flatmates know where she is going and what she is doing. The other sugar babies agreed saying that it is good to have code words with friends so if you are in trouble, there is a way to discreetly message or call them to let them know. Meeting in a public place is also a must.

So with the safety risks and the stigma attached to sugaring, is it really worth it?

Apparently, yes. John and Steven are both very happy with the arrangements they are currently in, with John having just taken his sugar baby up to Northland to go horseback riding for a weekend, and Steven taking his sugar baby on many dates.

Millie and Lisa both enjoy the sugar lifestyle and the benefits it provides. They say it is a great way to earn extra money, whether that is to pay for studies, rent, or just entertainment.

Ultimately, when it comes to sugaring, despite the differing opinions on whether or not is it prostitution, whether it is possible to stay emotionally detached, or if it is worth the risks or not, one thing’s for sure: sugaring is on the rise here in New Zealand, despite what people may think.

*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals