Site: More students turning to ‘sugar daddies’

Connecticut students have some of the highest student debt in the nation — fourth highest overall, with the average 2016 state graduate owing $32,326, according to student loan refinancing website LendEDU — but some students and grads are apparently getting creative.

The website SeekingArrangement.com, which facilitates interactions between “sugar babies” and their “sugar daddy” benefactors, said its pool of students registered as members increased by 66 percent in 2017, with a total of 2,000,143 students. The site offers free premium membership to anyone with a valid email associated with a university. The “sugar daddy” pays a fee to join.

The University of Connecticut made the site’s year-end list of fastest growing “sugar baby schools,” with 82 new registered sugar babies, for a total claimed of 227.

Also, 17 students at Southern Connecticut State University are registered as sugar babies, the site says.

By comparison, the site lists the highest number of new registrations for Arizona State University, with 352.

According to SeekingArrangement.com, the “sugar lifestyle” levels the dating playing field by treating its sugar babies and sugar daddies as two partners, negotiating.

Members understand that sugar babies are seeking monetary allowances and gifts in exchange for companionship and intimacy, the site says.

“Forget reading in between the lines, our members know what they want. Users approach one another without worrying about false pretenses,” the site says. “Many traditional relationships fail because there is not enough

give, and too much take.”

SeekingArrangement.com reports the average monthly allowance for sugar babies is $2,800, the average sugar daddy’s age is 38 and average annual income is $250,000.

The site says: “Sugar Babies are an expense that must be accounted for.”

Under state law, “A person 18 years of age or older is guilty of prostitution when such person engages or agrees or offers to engage in sexual conduct with another person in return for a fee.”

When asked whether the sugar baby relationships could violate laws against prostitution, a spokeswoman for the site said in an email: “Sugar Babies are not sex workers because they are not working, charging rates or being paid for time.

“Sex workers are paid for sexual services. Sugar Babies are gifted by people they are in relationships with. Like in many traditional relationships, sex is not a requirement but rather a single component of the arrangement. Sometimes there is no sex at all, and that’s what separates the two.”

One of the site’s sugar babies, who goes by the name Jordan Taylor (not her real name), said she joined the site in her first year at Yale Divinity School. Although she has since graduated from Yale, Taylor, 28, still maintains her relationships with sugar daddies.

“I love being a sugar baby and I love being public about it. I find it very funny that it’s controversial and see it as an exciting opportunity to educate people on the basics of human interaction, because it’s not anything novel or new,” Taylor said. The interview was arranged by a public relations firm for the website.

She said she believes there is no one true path for a relationship, and doesn’t understand why there is a taboo about women seeking men with resources.

“In the animal kingdom, that is how it works,” she said.

Taylor, who pursued a focus in women, gender and sexuality at Yale, said her interaction with the site has been one of a sexual awakening and addressing an “asymmetry of experience” between men and women in the dating pool.

“Freud and Foucault are great thinkers, but they cannot tell me how to live as a black woman, and they can’t tell me how to live in Trump’s America,” she said. “I had to re-educate myself on what it means to be a woman. For a lot of women, (the sugar lifestyle) is a means to social mobility and financial resources and security.”

Taylor said she has two nonsexual relationships with sugar daddies and has been gifted three international vacations. For her, she said, the arrangements are true relationships, where both parties are responsive the other’s needs and derive mutual gratification.

“Dating is a market,” she said. “Women have a different burden for speaking out for what they want.”

Not all “sugar” relationships end well. A story reported by the Connecticut Post, for instance, said in 2010 that a former SeekingArrangement.com “sugar baby” who escaped jail time after pleading guilty in 2009 to extorting a Greenwich millionaire, was in trouble with the law again after allegedly violating the terms of her probation.

Lauren Sardi, associate professor of sociology at Quinnipiac University, said she believes sugar relationships involving students are thriving for two primary reasons: the advent of technology that connects people with greater ease and the rising costs of obtaining a college degree.

“Students have always tended to be creative to find ways to make ends meet. I don’t even think this is necessarily all that new, because you’ve always seen this gendersegregated vision of labor,” she said.

While Taylor said she believes sugar baby relationships are akin to evolutionary concepts like natural selection, Sardi said a sociological lens would favor culture, responding to human inventions such as financial currency.

“It shows that people want to be successful in many ways, and one of the ways people will go about doing that without the conventional means to attain material success is doing things like this,” Sardi said.

Although Taylor is adamant that she chose the sugar lifestyle, she said she viewed it as a way of keeping on top of the steep cost of her education.

“The cost of grad school is definitely crushing, as is undergrad, but I wouldn’t say it coerced me into being a sugar baby; it coerced me into finding a way to make it work, and this happened to be a way of doing that for me,” she said.

According to a 2014 study by Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists, a college degree does not guarantee career success the way it once did, either. In 2014, although the unemployment rate for recent college graduates was just over 5 percent, the study’s authors classified 46 percent of recent college graduates as underemployed, or working in fields that do not ordinarily require technical skill or a college degree.

Additionally, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports the workforce grew by 45.4 million jobs between 1983 and 2015, but union membership declined by 2.9 million in that same period. The Washington Post reported in 2017 that 70 million American jobs, or a third of the workforce, could be automated by 2030.

As entire industries are disrupted, making the financial future of college graduates less secure, Taylor said she sees the sugar lifestyle as a beneficial disruption of the conventional means of dating.

“The sugar lifestyle is mutually beneficial, and it’s disruptive because dating is not currently mutually beneficial,” she said. “We have to ask who is benefiting and in what way.”