Like we said the other day, today’s students are staying in school longer, and racking up more debt than ever before. What do you do with tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Well, you could pick up a part-time job, sell trinkets from your parents’ attic on eBay or… go into sex work.
Everyone loves a good titillating story, which is perhaps why the whole sugar baby/sugar daddy phenomenon — in which an older, richer man pays for the company (and, presumably, sexual favors) of a younger, poorer woman (or sometimes man) — is getting a ton of press these days. People love a good sleazy sex story, it seems — plus, it’s even more compelling when the young people offering themselves up on creepily-named websites (SeekingArrangements; SuggarBabie.com) are trying to fund their graduate degrees at the London School of Economics, for example.
Yes, the sugar baby is having a moment. Maybe you saw the recent episode of MTV’s True Life, “I’m A Sugar Baby”; or maybe all your friends linked to the excessively detailed HuffPo story from last week. Both explore relationships that straddle the fuzzy line between being “an arrangement” and straight-up prostitution. Is it titillating? Depressing? Liberating? Hard to say; the HuffPo article, in particular, can’t seem to settle on a tone, glorying in all the creepiest details (“She says she’s now engaged in three separate sugar daddy relationships, in addition to working part time as a topless masseuse on the Lower East Side. On her profile on Seeking Arrangement, she describes herself as a M.B.A. student from Bahrain”) but snapping back to a vague moral outrage every now and then.
Is this 2011’s version of the high priced call girl?
