Propped up by a single pink satin pillow, Elizabeth, 20,* sits perched on the side of her bed. Stark white sheets blend into the walls behind them, contrasted only by a stainless steel rack above her bed that holds Elizabeth’s extensive collection
of leather harnesses and chain collars. An assortment of ropes, chains and sex toys act as the only wall decorations in her top-floor studio apartment, which she pays for mostly with money she makes as a “sugar baby” using a website called SeekingArrangement.com.
The website offers its users the chance at a “mutually beneficial” relationship through a sugar baby-sugar daddy model. Within this framework, Seeking Arrangement promises its sugar babies the chance at travel, steady income and a luxurious lifestyle. Sugar daddies and mommas who use the site can have lasting relationships with an attractive young person of their choosing.
Seeking Arrangement describes a sugar baby as “an individual seeking mentorship, financial support, or general companionship under the terms of an agreed-upon arrangement.” Sugar daddies are defined by the site as “successful men and women who know what they want. They’re driven, and enjoy attractive company by their side.” Elizabeth offers a slightly different description of these relationships as rich older men wanting “younger hot women” to showcase to their friends and spice up their sex lives.
Elizabeth’s Seeking Arrangement profile, a collection of photos with her wearing little more than leather harnesses and bondage ropes, accompanies a bio which portrays her as intelligent yet hypersexual, a combination that Elizabeth says men consider to be the perfect woman. She says her profile may scream over-sexed alt girl, but the reality of the profession is much less erotic.
“Most of the work is sitting on a computer making phone calls and sending text messages,” Elizabeth says. “Ninety percent of the time and energy I spend on all of this is just cultivating the persona.”
Elizabeth has one regular sugar daddy whom she sees at least once per month, and she makes anywhere from one thousand to three-and-a-half thousand dollars per month seeing him and an array other men from the site. While this covers her rent and some living expenses, she supplements her income with a job at her university. Although she acknowledges that there are many types of relationships one can have as a sugar baby, Elizabeth’s relationship with her main sugar daddy is based primarily on a transactional arrangement of kink-centric sex in return for gifts and money. She describes herself as “an exciting thing in his really boring life” and, more generally, “an intimacy provider slash fantasy fulfiller for lonely people,” a description she feels encapsulates the multifaceted nature of the job.
Elizabeth, who has been a sugar baby for seven months, is one of over one million college student users the website reports to have amassed since its creation in 2006. And while the commodification of sugar babies afforded by Seeking Arrangement has brought the idea of “mutually beneficial” relationships to the masses, it has done little to destigmatize or address stereotypes surrounding these types of relationships. Sugar baby/daddy relationships—often based on an exchange system of sex and companionship for money and gifts— present a controversial moral ambiguity. In this way, people who use Seeking Arrangement for sex have not only brought the conversation of transactional sex to a greater audience, but reignited a poignant feminist debate: can you be a feminist and a sex worker?
Elizabeth believes you can. With her grown-out body hair and boyish haircut, she could be the poster child for third wave feminism.
Feminists have debated the relationship between feminism and sex work since the second wave of feminism in the 70s and 80s. Referred to as “the sex wars,” this debate spawned “sex- positive” and “sex-negative” feminism, deeply dividing the movement and in many ways carving the path for the third wave feminist movement of the 90s.
While the two camps agree that sex work in the form of coercion or trafficking is abhorrent, they differ greatly in terms of their understanding and acceptance of voluntary sex work. Sex-positive feminists say that society should accept the profession as a form of bodily autonomy and even a source of empowerment.
“Sex work is a job and it’s a form of labor,” says University of Oregon Women’s and Gender Studies professor Kemi Balogun. “It needs to be understood as a form of labor in a broader political economy.”
On the other end of the spectrum, sex-negative feminists believe selling your body in any form, including pornography, constitutes coercion. This school of thought follows the principle that sex work in all its forms is a manifestation of patriarchy and serves only as a form of female oppression.
Seeking Arrangement warns against what it calls “sex opportunists” and even states that those suspected of prostitution will be banned from the site. However, the site’s emphasis on “no strings attached” relationships and of ridding its users of having to “read between the lines” could suggest that sex is central to most “arrangements.”
“Sugar baby is a term that’s so afraid to admit what it actually is,” Elizabeth says, half chuckling. “Seeking Arrangement is just prostitution without admitting that it’s prostitution.”
Perhaps the pure ease of perusing sugar babies on the site fosters the transactional quality of these relationships. The endless scroll of scantily clad women with provocative usernames seems reminiscent of a supermarket whose only product is young women looking for money—an aspect Elizabeth acknowledges.
“The sugar babies on that website are commodities who are advertising themselves to the consumer,” she says.
Though her online persona is a hypersexual dominatrix kink queen, in the moment, with diffused midday light peeking through fishbowl-like windows of her airy apartment, Elizabeth appears soft.
“I have this personality that’s like, the ‘different’ girl on the platform of Seeking Arrangement,” she says, explaining that her short hair and unshaved armpits make her a standout on the site.
In their simplest forms, these relationships are exchanges of time for money, whether that exchange involves sex or not. And while they may not always fit within the framework of love, or even mutual sexual attraction, they are far from being devoid of emotion. On the contrary, Elizabeth says, sugar babying and sex work in general are time-consuming and emotionally arduous. Between frequent texting, phone calls, emailing and in-person visits, keeping up the persona is a full-time job that goes beyond physical interaction. All of this, and the threat of being taken advantage of physically, emotionally and fiscally contribute to the stress of the job, which Elizabeth has felt firsthand—her first date lasted an uncomfortably long eight hours.
“I didn’t know what I was doing and he only gave me $200 for that entire date and that was really, really exhausting,” says Elizabeth, recounting why she now sets a time limit of five hours. Yet even considering the emotional labor demanded by this type of work, Elizabeth believes the service she provides goes beyond the immediate gratification of sex.
“I literally consider myself to be a healer,” Elizabeth says. “I’m using my body in a way that has the intention of making this person feel fulfilled. These people are lonely, they lack human connection, they lack sexual fulfillment, they don’t get the attention and love that they need in their daily lives.”
Although sugar-babying has afforded Elizabeth a more luxurious lifestyle, an apartment of her own and a steady influx of cash, it has also strained her relationships with family and friends who can’t seem to grasp her lifestyle choices. She thinks their feelings of confusion and even anger may stem from a common stereotype of sex workers as inherently damaged and desperate to fill an emotional void through their sexuality,astereotypewhichhas burdened Elizabeth. Although she feels confident about her life choices, she explains that having to constantly field the judgments and opinions of others makes it hard to be open with people about her life as a sugar baby.
“There’s this huge theme of people assuming that when I complain about my job, it means that it’s damaging me, that I hate it, that I don’t want to be doing it,” she says. “Everyone thinks that I ended up here because of some trauma or because I’m desperate for money.”
Much of the conversation around transactional sex revolves around women’s presumed traumas or shortcomings as the root of their desire to do sex work. Yet, so little time is devoted to discussing why their male counterparts engage with sites like Seeking Arrangement in the first place. In Elizabeth’s opinion, the reality is not that she is trying to fill a void within herself, but instead, helping others to navigate their own emotional pitfalls.
“I’m mostly playing a role,” she says. “I’m just learning about these people, reading them as much as possible and trying to figure out what it is they need from an external source to compensate for whatever they’re missing in their life. Then I can reflect that, and fulfill some sort of void in them.”
When we look at it through this lens, perhaps an emotional void does not lie within sex workers but within men who use transactional sex as a cure-all for emptiness in their own lives. However, because the reality stands that sex workers and not their clients bear the brunt of these social repercussions, we must ask the question: why is it that people are so uncomfortable with the idea of sex work?
As Balogun explains, “It’s hard for people to think about sex as a form of labor, to think about it as being commodified, as something you can buy and sell. That kind of anomaly of women actually wanting to get paid for sex, something that’s supposed to be this intimate set of relationships, makes people uncomfortable.”
While some of us may have a clear vision in our minds when we hear the word “prostitute” or “sex worker,” those visions likely don’t include a well-educated, white
psychology student in a clean, code- protected apartment building. Sex workers are sometimes presented to the public through scandalous headlines, as law-breaking seductresses who swoop in to ruin the careers of high-powered men.
The reality is that most sugar babies use Seeking Arrangement as a means to stay above water while juggling school expenses, student debt and the cost of living. According to the site, 30 percent of the average college sugar baby’s allowance is spent on rent alone, while the majority goes towards college tuition and textbooks.
Though Elizabeth, like so many others, began her foray into sugar babying to pay for college, she admits there are other reasons she has stuck with it. Notably, the opportunity to explore her passion of psychology through unique interpersonal relationships, as well as her new-found confidence as an entrepreneur.
“I’ve done so much of this work on my own,” Elizabeth says. “All of the things that I’ve done have been so fulfilling because I’ve met my own goals and chased the money for myself.”
Perhaps instead of questioning the moral fiber of people who choose to enter this profession, we should try to understand them beyond their sexuality. It’s undeniable that the topic of selling sex feels taboo to most people, not because we’re unfamiliar with the concept, but because of an ingrained understanding of sex as a product of love and women as being inherently romantic beings. Sex work challenges both of these notions.
Elizabeth seems relaxed, even as she recounts some of the horror stories she’s experienced in the business. While she lives within the whirlwind of opinions cast on her by others, the person before me is calm. Maybe because she’s learned to drown out those voices of judgment, or because she’s simply another young person working, learning and exploring her sexuality. She reflects on how some may say she cannot be both a feminist and a sex worker.
“I’m allowed to have agency in how I express my sexuality, and I’m allowed to make money how I want,” she says, almost laughing. Although it may seem obvious, it’s these rather obvious things which are perhaps the hardest for people to understand.