askyermom

This is exactly the kind of question I get for having my “ask me anything” approach to advice. My initial thought was not my business, but that’s incorrect. It’s a business in which most of us have dabbled.

No, really.

If you’ve gone on an uncomfortable date with someone else paying, it’s the same thing. If you’ve let some dude pay some of your bills so that he could call you his girlfriend, that’s it too. I once had a much older coworker ask me to go for drinks after work and I sputtered, “Are you already drunk?” This was not good sugarbaby behavior but it worked beautifully to get him to never ask again.

There is some very weird psychology in the typical hetero sugarbaby arrangement (any other types of sugarbaby dealings are certainly every bit as weird). It assumes that the young women are fine with being decorations and the older men will pay to either gaze on these decorative people and/or show them off as fake decorative property.

A sugarbaby is not required to provide invasive sexual contact, but they are generally required to feign interest, listening to personal stories and deferring most choices to the buyer, the sugar daddy.

They also have to pretend this isn’t gross. Whole economies, it seems to me, are built on people pretending things aren’t revolting, e.g. chicken farms or any type of factory meat business. How might we proceed if we were honest about it, “I’d like an extra helping of slaughter, please!” So disgusting and so routine.

Anyhoo, when a girl’s motivations include working to earn money there is a predictability to her part. She will have boundaries and her own code of some sort, while the only requirements on her are to show up and stay in character. If she’s rude like I was, there will be a complaint and she may lose her pipeline.

To maintain this for any length of time, she will need to remind herself that she is a free agent and the pathetic part of the deal is the paying, not the showing up as an avatar of someone else’s fantasy. I think she’s hypothetically correct in this hypothetical set of ideas. There is more to consider, of course.

Actors can drift into this stuff with more ease than the average character. It’s essentially a paid improv exercise. You go along with the set up and say yes to everything.

If there’s nothing wrong with this, why can it feel gross? Is it the money? What if the sugarbaby performs for a chance at a brand new washing machine? That’s just a game show. If the sugarbaby performs in competition with others for a chance at a real relationship? Also a game show.

I don’t think the money is providing the yuck factor: I think the uncomfortable bit is the abuse of power the money represents with the sprinkling of lies on top.

If you have a ton of resources and experience you can use these gifts to help others or you can use these gifts to help yourself, or both. There’s noting wrong with helping yourself, but there is everything wrong with using your advantages to help yourself to another person’s dignity and agency. If you stop and wonder if you are using people, congratulations, but you probably are using people if you’re wondering about it.

What if a sugardaddy offered to buy dinner for a college student and also asked the student if they truly wanted their company for the meal? This imparts a teeny risk of rejection to the sugardaddy and yet it seems more fair, more in the spirit of noblesse oblige.

How is hiring a sugarbaby different from hiring someone to clean your house or repair your fence? Do you require your home helpers to pretend to enjoy your company as if they are just stopping by to hear about your worries while they happen to wipe down your baseboards and take out the trash? Do your office assistants feel obliged to care about your defective children? Did you do that?

There is an important distinction here: is there a strategy involved in the situation or not? Intentions matter. I’ve worked in places where management deliberately recruited people who were intrinsically motivated to be generously and personally involved with clients. This was the way management expected to get the most bang for their buck. It worked, up to a point, but even the most naive employee will burn out when they realize that they are being used and paid in fake appreciation gestures.

Work doesn’t have to be exploitative and grueling, I promise!

Fake appreciation is the thing to watch for. Real care and kindness has a very different flavor. Real care and kindness generates loyalty. When real care and kindness are met with cynical strategy, strategy will crumble. It might take some time, but such strategy is shallow. Strategy is a ship against the iceberg of truth. The iceberg always wins, even in the summer.

Asking someone to fake their care and kindness is a very dark strategy. What if we lose the ability to tell the difference? This is harmful to the faker and the fakee.

So yeah, sugarbaby if you want to and don’t if you don’t but do your homework to be sure you’re not being pulled into a cult or cornered by a bank account. Don’t sneak around. Tell everyone what you do and see how that feels. If you find yourself telling people you’re a night nurse, maybe think about why you have a new game of make-believe in your routine.

Love,
yermom

This is the place where I link to book info (4.3 stars! better than good!) and book status info which needs an update of its own. Don’t Eat Your Children might cross the finish line in 2023, but Harlot’s Last Laugh definitely will not. I’m sorry about that. It’s a full time job having my full time job these days.

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