Seeking Arrangement: Young Women Dating Rich & Old

Last September, in Belgium, ten trucks displaying huge, eye-catching billboards, toured Brussels’ universities with the purpose of delivering a single message: « Hey les étudiant(e) s ! Romantique, passion et pas de prêt étudiant. Sortez avec un sugar daddy ou une sugar mama. » (Hello students! Romantic, passionate and debt-free. Go out with a sugar daddy or a sugar mama.)

In October, the trucks reached France, where they parked in front of the Parisian university of Pierre et Marie Curie, provoking ire among members of the City Hall and many French student associations.

Within a week, the French government condemned the company responsible for the ads— Rich meet Beautiful, or RmB—for encouraging prostitution and going against public order. Soon after, the billboards were dismantled. Likewise, in Belgium, the government was swift to remove the ads and the trucks.

Organizations such as JEP, the Belgian jury pour l’éthique dans la publicité (committee for ethics in advertising), ruled that the RmB ads perpetuated "stereotypes on women and men that go against the way society is evolving” and violated the principles of “human dignity.”

In France, prostitution is not a crime, but pimps face up to seven years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros. Furthermore, organizations that aid, abet, or procure prostitution can face sanctions of 3 million euros.

Websites like Rich meet Beautiful, however, avoid such repercussions by explicitly condemning prostitution on their welcome page. This legal loophole allows them to fake ignorance of any sexual relation practiced by their members.

Technically speaking, sex is neither compulsory nor tariffed—only “mutually beneficial relationships” between sugar babies and their daddies or mommies are on the agenda.

"It's a classic misunderstanding," Vedal (the RmB boss) claimed to the news agency AFP. "We are like a normal dating site, but financial [sic] is part of the checklist.”

Perhaps this is an indication that governments should seek to prosecute clients instead. In France, for example, men and women using the services of a prostitute face criminal charges. But unfortunately, bargaining for sex only happens through private messaging, making it impossible for the competent authorities to find out which members are indeed paying for it. Seizing the data through legal means is impossible as the websites, like Rich meet Beautiful, which is run from Norway, are all hosted abroad. In this way, sugar dating websites remain in the legal limbo and prosper; RmB believes it can expand its membership base in Belgium to 300,000, and Seekingarrangement, the most popular website in France, boasts 40,000 sugar babies.

One possible reason for the popularity of these websites is that sugar dating does not look or feel like the trashiness and desperation we expect from “classic" prostitution. Becoming a sugar baby does not entail kneeling on the side of a road in the Boulogne Woods, where most Parisian sex workers gather, while an unknown man unzips his jeans and fishes out fifteen euros. The young women meeting their older dates at restaurants for dinner might view themselves as mistresses or actresses rather than crass hookers. "Every “Real Housewife of Some Place” dated and then married for money,” points out the Huffington Post, before asking: “how about the several rags-to-riches stories we read every year about some student, maid or waitress who married a millionaire shortly after meeting?”. An ex-sugar baby, Chloe, argues that “If I meet a rich man tomorrow at the cinema and he decides to help me out financially, it doesn’t mean I’m a prostitute.”

SeekingArrangement describes sugar babies as “individuals seeking mentorship”, which could mean anything from coaching to help for employment and business contracts. “Sugar dating was a very positive experience for me,” explains Rachel, a British sugar baby, in an interview with Konbini. “I met a lot of very smart and successful men who are now part of my professional network. Meeting these inspiring people opened a lot of unexpected doors.”

She adds that the people who think sugar dating is only about money are “very narrow minded” and “judge without knowing.”

There is also a glamorous, Channel and Louboutin side to sugar dating. Some sugar babies earn close to 6,000 euros a month—twice the pay of a university professor in France— along with getting invited to expensive dinners, luxury hotels, and black-tie events. “And you get addicted to the money,” laments Chloe. She further explains that “at first, [she] didn’t go on so many dates, but then it got to the point where [she] hesitated to stop [her] studies and[AJ1] work full time.”

Young women like Chloe often register on websites like Seeking-Arrangement because they can not afford to feed themselves or are crippled with student debt. “If my parents could have supported me, I wouldn’t have done it,” says Chloe.

The High Council for Equality between Women and Men, a French institute, has repeatedly found that job insecurity and poverty are the leading causes for prostitution. Unfortunately, in France, women are both more likely to occupy unskilled jobs and be unemployed than men. In other words, they are likelier to be poor. Evidently, this reveals the motives for Rich meet Beautiful to target college students and why the majority of the young people registered on these websites are sugar babies and not “toy boys.”

As such, sugar dating is not a testimony to how sexually liberated young women are free to choose any means they please to succeed. Instead, it demonstrates how destitute young women are left with no choice but to suck on old pigs for survival.

“I was sleeping with a guy as old as my father who had at least ten extra kilos, and I had to make him believe that I was getting off when in reality I was thinking about which bills his check was going to pay for,” relates ex sugar baby Pauline T. Sugar dating websites institutionalize relationships where one party concentrates all the power and the wealth while the other is impecunious. “These sites exploit hardship: financial hardship [and] emotional hardship . . . But in no way is [sugar dating] about pleasure,” says Paris-based attorney Henri de Beauregard. This type of prostitution remains hidden under a glamourous veneer most likely because sugar daddies are extremely wealthy and discrete.

Addressing sugar dating and prostitution requires directly targeting and resolving the issues that cause poverty, but aiding the poorest classes of France is not on President Macron’s agenda. His government has just enacted housing benefit cuts affecting more than 800,000 students whereas major labor laws voted in parliament have simultaneously made it easier to fire workers and toughened access to unemployment benefits. Additionally, despite making gender equality one of the “great cause[s]” of his years in office, the “feminist” president not has added any new funding to the previously approved 2018 national budget. Women will remain disproportionately poor and vulnerable in France—expect sugar dating to be a lasting phenomenon.