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Has anyone else read this designed-to-provoke piece in the Daily Beast about a young woman and her sugar daddy? “Melissa Beech,” as she calls herself, is a senior in college in Pennsylvania. He is a businessman with a seven-figure income and a profile on seekingarrangement.com, a “dating” Web site (a misnomer if I ever met one) for men and women seeking to enter into a relationship based as much on cash as romance. They meet cute when she interviews for a job (like, a real job), and he suggests instead that she join him in a…. mutually beneficial relationship. They meet and discuss it over dinner. She draws some lines (no sex till she gets to know him). He interviews her to find out what books she likes and whether she reads the newspaper. She seems to feel that this is kind of him. Soon they strike up a deal and begin dating and sleeping together; he spends, she estimates, $5,000 a month on her and takes her to places like the Borgata (the “poshest” hotel) in Atlantic City, N.J. She sees this as a “great career” and a way to score Christian Louboutins, to boot.
Now, I love Louboutins as much as the next girl. And as someone who didn't have a lot of money in college or afterward, I know just how good the money must feel. But what is troubling about the piece is the way the language of romance keeps intruding on Beech’s supposedly cool-headed business calculus. She writes that she is “swept off her feet” by the guy; she speaks about the possibility of seeing “the most amazing and beautiful places” with him; she describes waiting three months before she was “ready to make a physical commitment to him,” and describes him as a “lifelong friend.” The last may end up being true. But she has not made a physical commitment to him, and he has not made one to her. They have entered into a contractual financial relationship about sex, a relationship that’s gilded with the patina of romance but has none of actual density of it. Because what’s certainly true is that she is sleeping with a man who is willing to pay her to fulfill his needs while promising nothing in return, and as soon as his needs change, or she stops fulfilling them, the business arrangement will be over, and she’s going to be left feeling majorly alone with her bills, her heart, and her red-soled Louboutins. She’ll also have developed a habit of expecting this kind of material status in the world. Maybe she truly is the type of young woman who can see clearly that her Sugar Daddy’s ultimate withdrawal has nothing to do with her value in the world. But by putting a quote on her value, and selling it to him, she’s made it very complicated for herself, to say the least.
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