We've written previously about the popularity of "sugar daddy" dating website Seeking Arrangement.com, and how nubile NYU coeds are signing up faster than you can click "reply-all." The Daily News has a feature on the phenomenon today which focuses on 20-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student Lovely Phillips. Phillips, an aspiring celebrity stylist living in Chelsea, has been dating a 60-year-old she met online for the last seven months. But something smells funny here, and it isn't just her terrible clothing line: “I don’t call it prostitution, because you are not being paid directly for sex,” she says. “You are helped financially in different ways: You go shopping, you go out to eat, you go to see plays, you have fun. It’s just like dating.”
Now, we firmly believe that consenting adults should be allowed to do what they want within the bounds of the law and whatnot. But Phillips—who wasn't yet born when Nirvana's Nevermind was first released—doesn't seem to quite understand what she's involved in. “I am really strict with my sexual partners,” Phillips says, “and this is a monogamous relationship. We don’t use ‘sugar daddy’ or ‘sugar baby’ in our vocabulary. He calls me his girlfriend.” Just like how Brande Roderick, Izabella St. James, Tina Marie Jordan, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson all called Hugh Hefner their boyfriend.
According to Websters, prostitution is "the act or practice of engaging in promiscuous sexual relations especially for money." The old man is still "direct paying" if you are benefiting directly from him in every area of your life that you would have spent said money on. Or to simplify things, how about this: if you have to clarify that something is "just like dating," then it definitely isn't.
The News has a few more interviews with women involved with the site, including NYU student Minoo Mirsaidi who dated someone in his 70s (“He couldn’t always have sex because he was too old...but usually he was fine”), and 20-year-old Queens College student "Andrea,” who gave this confusing defense of the practice:
“I don’t see anything wrong with it, but just because it’s so many younger women — like 20- and 21-year-old girls — and a lot of older men, (other people) really see it as an exchange of sex for money, it’s not necessarily that,” she says. Although she admits that sex just, well, happens.“It’s an arrangement, but not prostitution. It’s more for companionship,” she explains. “They want to go out for dinner, or go to a movie. Honestly, we only spend time having sex for an hour, less than that; the rest of the night we’re out for dinner or for a show.”
Like Phillips, she gets to know her Daddy Warbucks over a couple of dates before slipping between the sheets. “Most of these guys just want to meet and have a drink,” Andrea says. “Usually we talk on the phone and text, and then we having a meeting first where we don’t do anything, and then we meet again. “You don’t just go straight to sex. You transition into it.”
Does the amount of time one is physically capable of having sex change the basic nature of the exchange of services and goods that defines one of these "sugar daddy/baby" relationships? Does a monetary transaction by any other name still smell like kareishuu?
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