DirtySurfaceWarning: Some Sexual Side Effects

It's always the right time for a good sugar parent. Or two.

The easy answer is to visit one of the dozens of web sites that match sugar babies with sugar parents, put up a profile and start meeting people. The more complex answer is that it may take more work than you think.

Your local legal environment, the tools of communication you're using and other factors that shape where your initial negotiations happen will determine some of how much effort it takes to find a good match. Start somewhere where the initial filters have already weeded out people who can't actually contribute to supporting you. (Free sites, for example, are good places to promote many services but probably not the best places to find a sugar parent.) Once you've done your own round of initial filtering for compatibility, consider planning an introduction meeting in public soon after first contact to get a sense of how much time you're willing to put into this person and how they make you feel.

The terms of sugar parent arrangements happen in an ambiguous grey area between the norms of overt by-the-hour sex trade transactions and of "unpaid" romantic relationships. Navigating that ambiguity is what entails the extra work on your part.

Romantic relationships that are thought of or presented as not for cash (whether they be dating, one-night stands, marriages or other configurations) often have economic elements and offer economic advantages. The traditional approach is to discount or downplay those economic advantages: to talk about money and sex as separate things and to talk about both in indirect ways. There are many unpaid romantic relationships in which a mutually understood and accepted code for "come fuck me tonight" is something like "Well, I thought maybe we could hang out for a bit, maybe at my place..."

Like most social institutions, unpaid romantic relationships favour the powerful. Whether your social power springs from gender, race, appearance, money, status, age, body type, physical ability, experience, intelligence, education, negotiating skill, something else or some combination of these elements, you're going to wind up getting your way in an unpaid romantic relationship more often and more easily if your aggregated social power outweighs the aggregated social power of your partner(s). Part of why these relationships favour the powerful is because the norm is not to name power and not to negotiate an exchange of value for value. Unnamed, unexamined power dynamics default to support the people who are already on top.

Intimate relationships that clearly, overtly start as an exchange of sex for money over a specific amount of time also favour power and privilege. These relationships upset some of the usual balances of power, however, because they address needs created or artificially inflated by other power imbalances, and because the terms of exchange tend to be much more clearly named. The social norm is to explicitly state expectations, to recognize that both parties expect to have some of their needs met and to name those needs. The social norm also values this service fairly highly, recognizing that there is often more demand for sexual attention than there are providers available.

For those workers who already have significant social power, this social norm can mean good wages and a certain amount of discretion about what they'll do with which clients. There are very few time-delimited sex-for-pay situations in which a client can get away with "Well, I thought maybe we could hang out for a bit, maybe at my place..." without in some form directly addressing travel time/cost, what exactly happens there, what doesn't happen, how long the person invited is asked to stay and how much they get reimbursed.

People seeking to be sugar parents can't be blamed for seeking for the best of both worlds for themselves: the easiest, most powerful options available in both romantic and pay-by-hour traditional norms. They may want someone who is unambiguously sexually available when it's convenient for them as consumers, someone who really wants the money or whatever they're offering, with whom they needn't invest a lot of additional time to seduce, reassure, build connections, etc.. The prospective sugar parent may also be seeking someone who can offer them attention, affection, care, listening, a sense of being trusted, a personal rapport, a sense of mutual desire. If they're coming at it from the powerful end of traditional romantic relationships, they likely expect a person with whom they can be indirect about money and vague about their expectations until it suits them to behave otherwise.

What frames all this is the stigmatization of whoring and the stigmatization of being someone who pays for sex. Stigmatization is how (patriarchal) societies try to reduce the power of whores and return to the normative imbalance of power. Attempting to avoid stigma attached to being a whore is part of why some sugar babies settle for unstable and often less overall remunerative arrangements with sugar parents rather than entering the more socially powerful, more able-to-negotiate position of declaring themselves outright as sellers of sex. Stigma is also what drives some sugar parents to enter into relationships in which everybody involved turns themselves inside-out to avoid naming the exchange that's happening, despite the deleterious effect that indirectness can have on the people in the relationship getting what they want.

So... as I understand it, the challenge of making an arrangement with a sugar parent is negotiating a balance between the social norms of being an unpaid lover and the social norms of being a paid whore. One end of that continuum allows less stigma and the potential for convenience and stability in exchange for the likelihood of less room to clearly negotiate limits and expectations, whereas the other end endures stigma in exchange for clarity and (often) a better rate of financial remuneration for the seller.

Because these relationships are happening in an ambiguous place between more clearly defined sets of social norms, there will inevitably be some jockeying for position and some push-and-pull as you and a potential sugar parent try to find a mutually agreeable path. Start tough and get tougher, drive a hard bargain and don't worry about scaring away people who aren't ready to meet your needs. That's the point.

In practice, I'd suggest that the way to get what you want as a sugar baby is:

A) Be ready to place yourself closer to the end of this continuum that allows you more negotiating power and a better rate of exchange by getting over the elements of whore stigma you may have internalized.

Thinking of sugar parent/baby arrangements as something other than prostitution won't protect you from having to do the work it takes to make transactional relationships succeed. Thinking of yourself as valuable, multi-talented, and an ideal match for someone out there (whether or not you've met them yet) is more likely to help you. If you have internalized ideas of romance as an untouchable, sacrosanct area unsullied by money, it might be worth re-examining those ideas too.

B) Filter applicants more selectively than you would as an outright seller of sex and more selectively than you would if you were just looking for a lover in nominally unpaid circumstances.

An ideal sugar parent is going to be a somewhat unusual person. They'll need to be someone who can be better at asking for what they want and talking clearly about what they can offer than most people in unpaid romantic relationships, someone who is interested/interesting enough and compatible enough to make a long-term arrangement mutually pleasurable, someone who can regularly spare enough resources to make the whole deal worth your while and someone reliable with whom you can can build enough trust to allow a business relationship to flourish.

C) Figure out exactly what you want and what you want to offer, when and how.

Being a sugar baby in theory offers some stability and simplicity relative to (for instance) having to negotiate with multiple people about your limits, boundaries, rates and services. How does this actually manifest as a stable, simple income? Does it show up as direct payments of school, housing or other bills for you, and what access does that give a sugar parent to information about your life? Does it show up as cash in hand, as money sent to your email or paypal account, as shopping trips together, as deposits in your bank account regularly (in what increments? when?) or does it show up as gift items the sugar parent chooses, delivered when they feel like it? What happens if/when it doesn't show up? How much of a tab will you run for the sugar parent in between payments? How do you figure out being gentle with the egos and the privacy of everybody involved while not setting up a dependency that could impact painfully on your life if the sugar parent doesn't follow through as promised?

How will the sugar parent's role impact on or be impacted on by your relationships with other your lover(s), clients, etc., if those relationships develop or already exist? What are your non-negotiable boundaries around some commonly asked-for elements of intimacy (spontaneous availability, unprotected sex, other specific sexual acts, access to information about your real personal life, genuine care, unrushed cuddling, visits to your home, visits to their home, demonstrated interest in their personal life, public time together, travel together, spending nights sleeping together, etc.)

On what time frame do you want to proceed? How does the prospective sugar parent demonstrate their trustworthiness to you? What proportion of your overall monthly needs do you hope they will meet? In what form? Cash, goods, travel, access? How (if at all) does this show up on your taxes? On theirs? When you choose to end the arrangement, what will that look like, and how much knowledge of you will the sugar parent leave with vs how much knowledge you have of them?

Hope this helps. Good luck!