Labor of Love (4 page)

        
Moderate

        
Substantial

        
High

In addition, Daddies list their net worth and annual income.

If you are serious about sugar dating, you will want to upgrade to a Premium Membership. These currently run between $15.95 and $29.95 per month, depending how long you commit to. Once you upgrade, the site will prioritize your profile in the searches of others, bringing you more traffic. It will also perform background checks, allowing a Baby to verify that a Daddy is who he says he is and has roughly as much money as he claims.

In the past two years, SeekingArrangement has attracted more and more media attention, for the way it targets college students. One section of the site, “Sugar Baby University,” explains the advantages of having a Daddy to support you, so that you can graduate without debt. It offers free Premium Memberships to anyone who signs up using a .edu address.

The CEO, Brandon Wade, says he is proud of the function his company serves. In early 2015, he announced that around 1.4 million college students had used SeekingArrangement to earn money during the previous year, and that that figure was up 42 percent since 2013. Every year he now releases a list of the top ten “Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Universities.” They are all schools that you have heard of. There may be one in your city.

*   *   *

The Sugar Baby I meet in San Francisco graduated from Princeton. She says that her years sugar dating have taught her to recognize that almost all romantic relationships are transactional. “People are always getting something out of each other.”

Her SeekingArrangement profile describes her as “a half-hispanic super sweet bisexual metal chick.” I can see why she is good at hustling (her verb). Her presence is magnetic. Since she graduated five years ago, she has dipped into and out of different sites in different cities. She was on a lesbian Sugar Mommy site called Mutual Arrangements for a while but could not make it work. She was living with her parents in Florida at the time; there were not enough Mommies within driving distance.

She says that sugar dating is better in San Francisco than anywhere else she has tried it. Since moving here nine months ago, she has used an app called StrawClub to make paid dinner dates with a few businessmen from out of town. But most of her regulars are married Sugar Daddies she found on SeekingArrangement. She sees them for one to two months. She usually meets them in a hotel room they have rented, for a few hours between when they work and when they go home. She takes a flat fee of around two hundred dollars per meeting.

“These are men who just want to feel seen,” she says.
“
They like me because I make them feel like they matter.” She likes married men because they pay well. To do so reassures them that their “incentives are aligned.” They want to know that she will not get angry and run to their wives.

The copy on SeekingArrangement admonishes Sugar Babies that they must not fall for their Daddies. But the women I speak to who have done this kind of work—where you see someone regularly, and get to know him, providing a “girlfriend experience” as well as sex—say that in practice it almost always goes the other way.

A professor, now in her forties, tells me about a client she met while working as a dominatrix in a private “dungeon” during grad school. He would come once a week, bringing her books and theater tickets. She made the mistake of telling him her real first name. Then one day he came in with an experimental play he had written. It ended with a scene of her whirling around an empty room in a tattered wedding dress. When she moved to another city soon after, he tracked her down. Packages started showing up at her apartment. He even called the university where she was working. He pleaded with her to come back.

I ask whether it surprised her.

She shakes her head. “For most of them, there was only one of me, and usually they were cheating. So I was this very big deal in their lives. I was seeing a dozen of them a week.”

The Princeton Sugar Baby says that almost every one of her long-term Daddies has ended things because he says he is developing feelings.

She laughs. “I guess I'm too good at my job.”

*   *   *

Ever since the invention of dating, the line between sex work and “legitimate” dating has remained difficult to draw and impossible to police. Around the end of World War I, the reformers who had vowed to stop the tide were starting to accept that they could not. Dating had spread far beyond the recognized vice districts. A waitress who had been arrested for making dates explained to an Illinois court how easily you could fall into it while working.

“You wait on a man and he smiles at you. You see a chance to get a tip and you smile back. Next day he returns and you try harder than ever to please him. Then right away he wants to make a date, and offer you money and presents if you'll be a good fellow and go out with him.” If this was how a woman fell into sex work—
smiling
, and trying harder than ever to please customers—then turning tricks was just part of her job.

When a Sugar Baby invites me to log on to her SeekingArrangement account to look at her messages, what strikes me are not the messages. Those actually seem like pretty standard online dating fare:

What do you do in your free time?

Write. I hike on weekends.

What do you write?

Sci-fi and fantasy, mostly. How about you?

I like to sail.

I've always wanted to learn! Maybe you can give me lessons.
☺

What shocks me is the vanilla corporate language the company uses to tout itself as a kind of job-training center.

All paid dating sites are laden with euphemisms. They have to be. This is how they stay on the right side of the line that divides (legal) escort services from (illegal) prostitution. But SeekingArrangement goes to extraordinary lengths to promote the idea that sugar dating prepares you for a career.

The ex-dominatrix tells me she bluffed her way through interviews at several dungeons she applied to by alluding to “rope and needle skills” she did not actually possess. It did not matter. All that the people hiring cared about was your physical type: white, Asian, black, or Hispanic; short or tall; curvy or thin. Once she got hired, coworkers taught her during downtime how to stimulate clients to orgasm without directly touching their genitals. The dungeon did not pay for the hours that employees spent receiving this kind of on-the-job training or waiting for clients to show up. Like Uber drivers, the “girls” bore the up-front expenses of costumes and makeup and regular waxes, manicures, and pedicures, and they paid a portion of their earnings for the opportunity to work.

SeekingArrangement encourages Babies to think of the site as a source of opportunity for personal development, describing the Daddy's role as “mentorship.” Near major Sugar Baby universities it hosts meet-ups, where women are invited to talk about sugar dating as a route to financial empowerment over coffee and chocolate fondue. The last time I logged on to the site, the most recent post on its blog was called “Your Application Has Been Unsuccessful.”

“Consider the position of an employer looking to hire new staff,” the anonymous author begins. “This is basically what the process of meeting a potential Sugar Daddy is like.” The 7 mistakes that make a profile a miss include “poor communication skills,” “poor presentation skills,” “asking the wrong questions,” and “no wow factor.” That is, the same things that would make you sink a job interview.

*   *   *

As the first decade of the twentieth century gave way to the second, the middle classes gradually accepted dating as a legitimate form of courtship. In 1914,
Ladies' Home Journal
—the largest-circulation magazine in the country, with more than one million readers—ran a short story about a sorority sister and her love life. The author put the word “date” in scare quotes but did not see a need to explain it further. By the early 1920s, stories about college students going out to dinners and dances and vaudeville shows and movies had become widespread.

Soon, nobody seemed to remember that these activities ever appeared dubious. Today, authorities like
The New York Times
refer to them offhand as “traditional.” Americans seem to have gotten over the ambiguities that once made vice squads worry that dinner dates were just another form of sex work. Yet other ambiguities remain. If daters are often unsure about what it is they are trading “on the market,” there is also a lot of uncertainty regarding the point of dating.

What is dating for?

The rituals of calling had served a clear purpose: marriage. The parents and relatives who oversaw the process had a clear incentive to make sure that courtship led to the formation of new couples, who would start new households and produce heirs. Not only would this make their children happy. It also would enlarge and extend their family property.

The first entrepreneurs to create dating platforms had different incentives. The success of restaurants, bars, and amusement parks did not depend on the quality of marriages that resulted from dates there. It depended on the volume of daters who came and went. Unlike your mother, a bartender did not care if you ended up making babies with the guy you came in with. In fact, the best thing would be if no one ever settled down.

By bringing courtship out of the home and into the marketplace, dating became a lucrative business. The practice made it possible to take basic human needs for sex and attention and affection that can never be sated and turn them into engines of potentially endless demand.

For the first time in human history, dating made it necessary to buy things in order to get face time with a prospective partner. This remains true today. Even if we find dates on apps that cost nothing to download, we pay in the hours that we spend creating and updating our accounts. We pay in the attention that the owners of the apps sell to advertisers. It may be a symptom of the confusion about work and play that dating first created that it would be hard to say whether we are working or enjoying leisure. Updating your OkCupid profile seems like both and neither.

For OkCupid, getting us into a relationship that might take us off the app is, at best, a secondary goal. The first priority is to harness our desires in order to increase their profits. In this sense, every dater is still a Charity Girl even if you pay for it, and even if you think you are just having fun. These are the tricks dating now plays on everyone.

 

CHAPTER 2.
LIKES

Dating moved courtship from the home onto the market. As it became possible to shop for your own mate, it also became necessary to sell yourself. Taste became a key way that a dater could create her brand.

“What really matters is what you like, not what you
are
like.”

In the movie
High Fidelity
, John Cusack says these words directly to the camera. His character, a thirty-something record store clerk, wouldn't dream of sleeping with a woman who preferred recent Sting to a classic Police record. When the indie rom-com
Garden State
came out in 2004, the group the leading couple bonded over was the Shins. By the time
500 Days of Summer
followed, five years later, the 1980s were cool again, so it was the Smiths.

The editors of the “girl-on-girl” blog Autostraddle agree with Cusack.

“It's not what you're like, it's what you like,” they wrote in a post on Valentine's Day 2012. “It might take you a while to be sure, but one day you'll just know that it's time to lend her your copy of
Birds of America
and hold your breath while you wait to see if she likes it.” Either she will “get” it, or she won't. Either your girlfriend gets
you
, or she doesn't.

Celebrity couples like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West publicly declare that they get each other.

“Kanye has the most amazing taste in the world,” Kardashian recently gushed to a reporter at
Extra
.

Her husband concurred, “It's really all about dopeness at the end of the day.”

Ordinary daters dream of finding someone who shares their (amazing) taste, too. At least they yearn for someone who does not actively offend it. A sad smile of recognition crosses my face when I overhear a girl on the train complaining to her friend about her one-night stand with a man who started playing Limp Bizkit on his laptop in the morning. Though the sex had been good, there was no way she was giving him her number.

“I want the guy I like to like the things I like,” she sighed.

“Oh,
that
,” my friend groans when I quote the line from
High Fidelity
to her. “You wouldn't believe how many men put that on their OkCupid profiles.”

*   *   *

Over the past ten years, the rise of online dating has given “likes” an increasingly central role to play in courtship. Different sites and apps take stock of what you like in different ways. But they all give information about your taste a prominent place in the profile that prospective partners see.

Match.com asks users to share their “Interests,” “Favorite Hot Spots,” and “Favorite things.” Even celebrities answer dutifully. When Martha Stewart joined in 2013, under her Interests she listed “Cooking, dining out, fishing/hunting, gardening/landscaping, movies/videos, museums and art, shopping/antiques, travel/sightseeing.” She said her Favorite Hot Spot was somewhere called “sushi yasuda.” Her favorite things are “British
House of Cards
, American
House of Cards
,
Homeland
, all the food, the symphony, opera & rap.”

Martha's profile skillfully deploys just the right mix of self-revelation and elusiveness. Anyone who happened upon her profile was likely to know that she enjoyed “all the food.” But who knew she liked hip-hop? Likes may be especially important for famous people who want to use online dating services while preserving their anonymity.