As many as 82,000 Australian university students have reportedly signed up to be “sugar babies” and fund their education through relationships with wealthy “sugar daddies”.
The mercenary dating site SeekingArrangement.com has released new figures on the number of “student” members in Australia, and say young women are using the service to offset the costs of university.
The company calls it a “Sugar Baby Scholarship” and offers students, who sign up from their university email accounts, free membership on the site.
“College Sugar Babies receive an average $3,000 per month allowances and gifts from Sugar Daddies,” Seeking Arrangement claims on their website.
The company says in Australia, around 36 per cent of what sugar babies earn is spent on tuition, 23 per cent on rent and the rest on various other expenses.
What you “earn” as a sugar baby is up to you and your sugar daddy to determine, apparently.
“Lola” told News Corp that she had earned around $75,000 from her sugar daddy since finding him on the site about a year ago.
A 19-year-old student at Curtin University in Perth, Lola is seeing a 51-year-old consultant, and said she is very happy with their mutually beneficial arrangement.
“You wouldn’t be in it if you didn’t want something out of it, so you can’t complain about a guy wanting something, because you’re also wanting something,” she said.
“You have to give him the love or companionship, anything he’s after.”
The company claims to be helping students out at a time when the Federal Government is seeking to uncap university tuition, although that legislation is currently on hold, and unlikely to go ahead anytime soon.
“A Sugar Daddy is a great alternative to accumulating crippling debt, allowing Sugar Babies to graduate debt free,” Brandon Wade the founder and CEO of SeekingArrangement.com says.
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No, I wouldn't. I see nothing wrong with others doing so, though!
Articles like this remind me of Noam Chomsky's position on porn: “The fact that people agree to it and are paid,” Chomsky replied, “is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favor of sweat-shops in China where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day and the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but that doesn’t make me in favor of it." Even as a consenting adult, I'm sure many of these women would not turn to a site like this if they were not in need of finance, and felt like they had few other options available to them. The fact that many women view arrangements like this as empowering and somehow mutually beneficial, for me, shows how indoctrinated we are as a society to entrenched sexism. How Brandon Wade could say his site is a "great alternative" to accumulating student debt only highlights this: women are seen as a sexual commodity to buy by men and it's "great" for them because they get easy money! This is a message women are told throughout their lives (through the existence of porn, prostitution, websites like seekingarrangements), which, at its worst, means children - girls - become vulnerable to exploitation by these same men that tell them how empowering it is to be able to enter such an arrangement. Tragically, this is exactly what has happened recently in the UK, where Doug Richard, an ex-Dragon from Dragons Den, has just this week been (mind-bogglingly) cleared of child sex offences despite admitting he had sex with a 13-year-old girl he met on this very site. It's a sorry state of affairs that this is somehow "lawful", yet it could only be reality in a society that is fundamentally sexist, and where websites like this only serve to keep women in a subservient position.