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THE TOXIC WORLD OF ‘SUGAR DATING’
“When I first set up an account on Seeking Arrangement (SA), I was 16 years old, broke, and bored. I was a virgin. Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate that soon I would be knocking on the hotel room doors of total strangers to sell my body. […]
Within minutes of setting up my profile, my inbox was flooded by men detailing how their ideal arrangement would work: how many times they wanted to meet monthly, how much they were willing to pay and how often, and how they wanted meetings to play out. Some men would want to go on dates before having sex, others wanted you to meet them in their hotel room and fuck you straight off the bat. I was inundated with offers of travel, professional development and shopping, allowances generally ranging from £100 to £1,500 per meet, or £300-£3,000 monthly. A year after I joined Seeking Arrangement in 2015, the website was reported to have 5 million users and was generating $40 million in annual revenue…”
Read more: https://nordicmodelnow.org/testimonial/mila/
absolutely horrifying. here are two articles that this reminded me of:
girls and women need protecting from men
Those stories are so disturbing and sad. I'm not surprised the pro-sugar baby (so, pro-prostitution) content is on tiktok, I remember seeing it all over tumblr when that was the platform of the moment.
This is one of the most incredible (and sad) articles I have read recently. It debunks how upper class women feel sex work is totally okay, or a little discomfort to be brushed aside compared to the empowerment of the free market, and why that is wrong.
But I also wonder what is the parent’s side of this equation. I cannot help feeling that on some way it’s the parents’ fault. Never in a million years would this have flied for me. My dad was the always very clear about never putting myself in a situation where a man would feel entitled to having power over me, and that money is not a reason to be impressed by someone, you won’t be able to maintain money earned by dishonest means as you haven’t learned the hard work meant to make the money work, and so forth. My parents taught me that bodies don’t have much monetary worth and that the people who sell them are people who have nothing else to sell, which means they have no skills and will continue having no skills, and will essentially always live at the mercy of others, and will run the risk of losing the most essential and only thing they have. That is the greatest symbol of poverty.
How can these parents have let their 16 year old go out and dine with strangers? To bring back clothing and stuff they wouldn’t have ordinarily found with their friends? Why was a 16 year old feeling broke? A 16 year old who apparently comfortably knows they’ll go to university? This makes no sense.. Further, if the child has growing depression and an eating disorder, where is the family?
Sounds like she did it all behind her parents' back, and well, if she bought weed from the money and smoked that, they wouldn't know.
She mentions her mother is a "swerf" and was very against this, and that her parents made it clear they'd always be there to rely on financially, so ...
Idk, in this case it seems it really was just her low self-esteem, which isn't always the parents' fault. Which is very scary if you're a parent.
(Part of it might have been hanging out with the wrong crowd - if you feel it is a hardship that as underage teen you cannot afford to eat at restaurants, there's something wrong. Smoking weed is also not cheap, likely - I wouldn't know, never did it. She mentions her friends also having "money woes" - which does raise the question who they went to school with and why they felt the need to have that lifestyle. I admit I never was a normal teen, so perhaps only ever going to the cinema, if anywhere, isn't exactly typical, but from what I read in books about typical teens, the average teen back then tended to hang out on the streets. Just when did it become abnormal for a teen who still goes to school to not have a lot of money to spend?)