A look inside SeekingArrangement, a website that promises to help young women find 'sugar daddies'
GQ has just published a fascinating glimpse into SeekingArrangement.com, a "sugar daddy" dating website that lets older, wealthy men meet younger girls.
There's still a taboo around an older man paying lavishly for the company of a much younger woman, and the women are sometimes portrayed as either victims or prostitutes.
Writing for GQ, Taffy Brodesser-Akner has profiled a handful of SeekingArrangement users, both sugar daddies and their "sugar babies."
First, we meet the pseudonymous "Thurston Von Moneybags," an older man who once got scammed out of $800 before he even met the girl he'd been talking to on the site.
He justifies using SeekingArrangement with the argument that all relationships are, to some extent, transactional: “The whole concept of a sugar daddy intrigued me, because even if I were dating someone traditionally, I'd give them money anyway."
Then, there's "Tigress St. Fawn," an MFA student who booked a week of SeekingArrangement dates as an "immersive experience."
"I'm kind of pragmatic about the whole thing," she told Brodesser-Akner.
There are more women and men, and a couple. Largely they seem to agree on one thing: what they're doing on SeekingArrangement — meeting up and exchanging money and gifts for sex and companionship, primarily — is just another kind of relationship. Some critics have compared its services to prostitution.
"SeekingArrangement is like a sociology project that touches on anthropology," SeekingArrangement CEO Brandon Wade, who started the site in 2006, told Business Insider a few years ago.
"People don't want to come out and say 'Women like men with money,' but it's true," he said. "Think back to when men were hunters. The man who was the most successful hunter also got the most women. Women are looking for men to take care of them."
You can read the full GQ story here >>
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