Younger girl dating an older man

When Alicia* was halfway through her university degree, she found herself cash-strapped and overworked. “I was a full-time student, I had an internship and I was working part-time,” the 22-year-old from Texas tells me. “I didn’t have a lot of free time.” So one night, in an attempt to solve this problem, Alicia and her friends signed up to several apps and websites hoping to make quick money. And after dealing with some scammers and a short period of trial and error, Alicia found a legitimate answer to her problem.

Sugar babies – (usually) young women, who spend time with (usually) older men in exchange for cash or gifts – tend to get a pretty bad rap. “Sorry, but if you take money to ‘hang out’ with old men, you’re desperate trash”, “Sugar babies are very young women, it’s nasty” and “I feel sorry for ppl that need ‘sugar babies’ or ‘sugar daddies’, it’s creepy af” are just a few of the predominantly negative tweets plastered all over Twitter about them. They are trashed as sluts, labeled as “damaged goods” and demonised by anti-sex work advocates, even though what they do isn’t necessarily sex work. But not only are sugar baby/sugar daddy relationships more common than you think, many of them are healthy, mutually beneficial partnerships that sugar babies feel happy about and over which they carry very little regret.

Students make up a huge portion of sugar babies in the UK – half a million alone are on the popular sugar baby website SeekingArrangement. Like Alicia, 24-year-old law student Stephanie* met her first sugar daddy during her undergraduate degree while working in retail in San Francisco. She tells me that her future sugar daddy began flirting with her while getting help selecting gifts for his wife. “He would come in often for a bunch of little things and would say his wife was about my size,” she says. “He ended up giving me all those things and later we started dating.”

This was the first of Stephanie’s two sugar daddies, one of which she describes as being a “gift-based” relationship and the other as “more cash-based”. “My second SD slid me an envelope after our first date with $250 in it,” she says. “Once we started to be intimate, he increased that amount to $500.” Stephanie did have sex with both of her sugar daddies, even though things started nonsexual. “We just went on dates and he liked to buy me things,” she tells me, “and after a while we began having sex.”

Leah* also began “sugaring” to make ends meet as an undergraduate student in New York, having relationships with five sugar daddies between the ages of 21 and 23. “To me, it has always connotated a longtime, implied monogamous relationship than a sex worker has with a client,” she says of being a sugar baby. “With that implied monogamous status comes the breakdown of other barriers – particularly communication is more frequent (say, between 9am and 5pm, rather than when strictly planning appointments). In my experience, a client looking for a ‘sugar baby’ experience isn’t looking to share, and is willing to pay slightly higher premiums for the privilege.”

Leah says that, despite monogamy being a ground rule, she rarely followed it. “I’d actually spent more time as a cut-and-dried escort (ie, clients booking by the hour, rarely seen more than 3-4 times). But sometimes I’d stumble on to the profile of someone looking for that sugar baby experience, so I’d lie through my teeth about the amount of men I was currently fucking and let the daddy-to-be buy me expensive lingerie (which I still wear) and sex toys (which I still use) in exchange for a few dates.”

Leah says that every sugar baby is different, and while many people would assume all sugar babies have sex with their sugar daddies, this isn’t always the case. Megan*, a 23-year-old Londoner who works in parliament, doesn’t even describe herself as being in a sugar baby/sugar daddy situation. “The guy who sends me money refers to himself as a pay-pig,” she says. After this man repeatedly offered to send her money with no strings attached, she gave him her PayPal details and gave it a go. “I just have to message him with a money emoji and I immediately get money transferred to my account,” she says. “I initially decided to take him up on the offer so I could buy a Nintendo Switch – and the concern about what people would think if they knew is totally worth all the hours spent playing Mario Kart.”

Megan believes that there are several misconceptions about women in her situation. “People assume that for somebody to be giving you money you must be giving them something in return, whether that’s attention, company or sex,” she says. “Obviously that’s probably the case for some girls, but, for me, it’s very much one way.”

“A narrative that I’ve heard pretty often is that sugaring – or any kind of sex work, really – is easy, since the majority of your job is spent eating expensive meals on someone else’s dime, wearing expensive lingerie or getting pounded on expensive sheets,” Leah tells me. “But glamour aside, the job is gruelling. For most of these men, a big part of the fantasy is that you only have eyes for them, which typically means dedicating a lot of time texting them or sending emails. When you’re together, you can’t just zone out; you have to dedicate time to actually listen and (at least pretend to) care about what he’s saying.”

“People mistake sugar babies as young girls who sleep with married men as a means to earn,” argues Deborah*, a 21-year-old student from Nigeria. “Instead, they just find comfort and maturity in being around older men.”

Stephanie believes that even with the positive elements of her experiences, sugar daddies often misunderstand sugar babies too. “Sugar daddies generally want to provide and want to be seen with beautiful young women,” she says. “They genuinely believe that that affirms their manhood. I think they have a misconception that we need them – rather than use them to supplement our lives.”

“A lot of them forget that this is, in fact, a job for the women involved,” Leah tells me. “I’d have clients arrive late, or cancel at the last minute, and act completely flabbergasted when I tried calling them out on how rude that was.

“Sex workers have lives outside of their career, the same way anyone does,” she says. “They’re not just lying on their $2,000 sheets eating cherries all day, waiting for you with bated breath.”

There are many things that make a bad sugar daddy, such as making sugar babies feel like they owe you something, being stingy or ungenerous, having few boundaries or, as Deborah put it, being “a hell-ass bossy freak”. “A bad sugar daddy wants to control everything in your life,” she tells me. “They wrongly think you’re a young naive girl that they can ease off.”

“Good sugar daddies don’t pressure intimacy, period,” Stephanie says. “They allow all benefits to grow organically, but show from the outset their intentions to be generous.”

“He’s always there for you; understands perfectly that there isn't a love bond,” Deborah says of her ideal sugar daddy, “and understands that you have liberty to be with whomever you want aside from him.”

“I think a lot of men hear about the concept of sugar babies and must assume they can give girls money and are ‘owed’ something in return,” Megan argues. “For me, the idea of nothing in return is good. If somebody gets pleasure from giving me money, if you’re able to detach the slightly gross connotations from that, that’s good. From a feminism point of view, in my own situation I feel like I have the power and I’m in control.”

*All of the women named in this piece asked to remain anonymous and have been given pseudonyms.

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