
Where the Sugar Babies Are - samsolomon
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/where-the-sugar-babies-are/384547/?single_page=true
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marcusgarvey
Seeking Arrangement is brought to you by the fine folks behind Ashley Madison.
So I would take any of their data with a boulder-sized grain of salt. I'm
surprised that The Atlantic would base an entire article on their data without
doing better homework.

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icedchai
The two sites and companies are actually not related. Do your own research.

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marcusgarvey
How right you are. Arrangementfinder.com is the company in this space owned by
Avid Life. It simply didn't occur to me that there would be yet another
company with such a similar name in this space.

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icedchai
The demand for sugar is pretty high, I guess!

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kelukelugames
So many questions.

What's a sugar baby? What's a trophy wife?

Are these terms sexist?

If I date someone with student loans then am I a sugar daddy?

Some of my friends have wives who stay at home but don't have children. How do
you define those relationships?

Do all cultures fetishize the young? SeekingArrangements is in UK and
Singapore too.

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drostie
Well the phrase "trophy wife" doesn't exist on this web page and I would say
that the expression itself is not sexist (because you could also have a
"trophy husband" and everyone would understand what it means), but of course
the practice's prevalence suggests a cultural sexism where the expression
doesn't.

The term "sugar baby" comes idiomatically from the opposite of the terms
"sugar daddy, sugar mama" as the person who is the target of the affections of
the latter. Obviously, "sugar baby" is not a sexist expression because it is
not gendered. As for what it means, to be clear: Alice is Bob's sugar-baby
(conversely, Bob is Alice's sugar-daddy) if Bob is an affluent older person
who is both dating the younger Alice and is gifting her with financially-
expensive gifts. The gifts could be as immaterial as "I have this car I never
drive, you can use it as if it were your own" or as material as "I will pay
off your student loan debts." Usually, if Alice has her own professional
career and is providing well for herself, then we'd not call it a sugar-baby
relationship even if the gifts are expensive and one-way. Furthermore if she
is taking care of the household and/or kids, that would tend to mollify the
judgment. The essence of the judgment is the belief that if the sugar-parent
were not providing the gifts to the sugar-baby then the relationship would not
persist; the very terms themselves suggest that the relationship is too
uncomfortably invoking a parent-child dynamic in a romantic context.

A stay-at-home wife is generally not a "sugar baby" since they are married and
not dating; you could potentially extend the term to cover married couples but
even so, if there are no expensive gifts or they're of comparable ages you
wouldn't normally say that he's her sugar-daddy.

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kelukelugames
Thank you for the detailed response. I feel most relationships have a large
income disparity between the partners and would cease to exist otherwise. For
example, if one childless partner stays at home then the other has to make
enough for both. Does American society count housing and food as expensive
gifts?

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glossyscr
How does The Atlantic get all their data?

Do Sugardaddies and Sugarbabies publicly confess their activities??

Maybe I'm naive but I can't imagine that the average student goes this path
except she has been already escorting semi-professionally or professionally.

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jccalhoun
Despite all the graphs, there didn't seem to be any real information in the
article. Not one statement from anyone (older or younger) who has used the
site. I would love to hear from someone who actually used the site. Is it
purely sex? Is sex expected or even normal? After seeing someone else comment
that the site is owned by the Ashley Madison people I doubt that there is much
evidence behind those graphs.

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banku_brougham
Was having dinner with a Belgian friend, an older man that has seen a lot of
life and is conversant in modern political economy. He didn't believe that: a.
students in US mostly pay for everything with debt, b. those debts are
impossible to discharge if students hit hard times.

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rdlecler1
I wonder tonwhat degree this affects graduation rate disparity amongst man and
women.

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lips
For those clutching their pearls, I'm fairly confident that you can find an
order of magnitude more sugar and/or exploitation based relationships in any
large field that depends on a stratum of youth and/or beauty, and involves
tiered access to attention. (Music, modeling, acting)

Partially because sites like this are nebulous black-boxes, and partially
because power corrupts.

Have fun stigmatizing.

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discardorama
I hate to be pedantic, but: the size of the salt is directly proportional to
the amount of the message you want to consume (because, as you know, in food
there's a certain fixed ratio of salt to other ingredients).

So if you want a person to not accept the premise, you should say "take it
with a tiny grain of salt", which implies "accept very little of the premise".

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dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006793)
and marked it off-topic.

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discardorama
Apologies... I don't know what got into me, to bring this up.

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dang
It gets into all of us sometimes.

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roflchoppa
i mean shit, id be down to have a sugarmomma. that stay at home dad life,
10/10.

