Sugar daddies & Sugar babies: This sugar is making us seriously sick - Women's Agenda

Sugar daddies & Sugar babies: This sugar is making us seriously sick

Have you heard of Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies? I actually hope not, but it looks like you might in the near future because apparently they’re increasingly common.

Sugar Daddies are “wealthy” men who use online dating sites to meet young women – Sugar Babies – in need of financial help. The men then provide the young women with an “allowance” in return for a “relationship”.

Websites such as SeekingArrangement.com are marketing themselves as “Sugar Daddy dating sites” and are enticing young women to meet wealthy older men to help them through their financial difficulties.

These young women are given an allowance by their sugar daddies of $3000 per month to help them with their daily expenses and in return are forced to accompany these men to extravagant meals and far-flung places.

The website attempts to make this all seem very simple and innocuous: Just go on a few dates with older men and you’ll never have to worry about money again!

The troubling question is, what else is involved in this transaction? What is expected of these young women in return for their “allowance”? And isn’t it dangerous to take advantage of young people’s financial struggles by indebting them to “older” “experienced” men?

How is it possible to keep young women safe when they are being encouraged to enter into a relationship of paid servitude with older men they have never met?

Worse still, the website specifies several times that Sugar Babies must be “beautiful” to qualify.

Sugar Daddies are described as men who “know what they want” and “enjoy attractive company by their side”.

“Where Sugar Babies enjoy a life of luxury by being pampered with fine dinners, exotic trips and allowances. In turn, Sugar Daddies or Mommas find beautiful members to accompany them at all times,” the website reads.

Perhaps the most worrying of all is the last phrase of the website’s mission statement – “to accompany them at all times”.

It is worth noting that SeekingArrangement.com specifically preys upon female students with mounting university debts to repay. The site uses the federal government’s recent increases in university fees to entice young women who are faced with rising costs of tertiary education.

“The future is not exactly bright for college students, with the vast majority guaranteed debt or unemployment rather than a career. Some 1.4 million students are buffering their outlook by turning to Sugar Daddies,” the site’s most recent statement reads.

It goes on to explain that the website has grown its membership in Melbourne recently by encouraging university students at all the city’s major universities to sign up.

“To avoid the burden of student debt, many uni students in Melbourne have found an alternative way to finance the highcosts of education — Sugar Daddies.”

The statement claims that students make up 42% of the website’s membership, with 255 students signed up from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology alone.

SeekingArrangement CEO Brandon Wade founded the business in 2006. It now has over 3.6 million members.

How is it possible that there still exist people who wish to capitalise on women’s economic disempowerment by encouraging them to depend financially and emotionally on rich, successful older men? What century are we living in?

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