A SEX WORKER’S ADDENDUM*
In other words, the primary category of women on What’s Your Price tends to skew towards those with a level of privilege who can afford to use it for fun and earn a little extra spending money on the side.
The piece acknowledges the comparably low cost-benefit of sugar daddy dating, averaging $250 for a 2-4 hour evening date, compared to dancing at a strip club, or providing services as an escort on sex worker-run sites such as Tryst, where it’s not uncommon to see providers charging as much as $1500 for one hour of full-service intimacy. But I wonder whether the world of sugar daddy dating, and the websites which facilitate it, function mainly as platforms for women with an already high level of social capital to benefit from an industry that sex workers built, without affording protection to sex workers themselves?
Sites like What’s Your Price and SeekingArrangement involve a lengthy and time-consuming process for providers, whose time is mainly spent emailing clients to agree on a price. This involves sifting through a huge number of time-wasters who usually want to “meet first and see if there’s a connection!” before paying anything at all.
To be able to work the system effectively requires, at the very least, a command of the English language in order to sift through the bad clients, and find or manipulate the ones who are willing to pay into meeting for a higher-paid date. Women who work the system best, tend to be English speaking, college-educated, can converse comfortably with rich men, and notably, those who are conventionally beautiful with the social capital to fit in a restaurant serving escargot.
What’s Your Price and SeekingArrangement, both founded by Brandon Wade, are intentionally designed to be fuzzy on the commercial aspects of the dating experience, which is obvious for countries like the US where prostitution is illegal, but shouldn’t be necessary in the UK where prostitution is legalized. Their terms of use explicitly prohibit users who seek to use the sites for “commercial purposes” involving the selling of sex. By marginalizing users who are “actual” sex workers, these sites leave the majority of power in the hands of men who can have the seamless, and legally blameless, experience of using a site designed to feel like a “regular” dating site, who can access “everyday women” who don’t rely on the industry as their primary source of income.
In other words, the site protects its clientele but not its service-providers. It marginalizes actual sex workers whilst allowing women who can afford to dabble in it and who profit off of the industry without having to define themselves as sex workers. What these sites have proliferated is an entirely new domain of what I call “amateur” sex work, which allows women to engage in activities that are normally classified as some form of sex work, but without the load of calling oneself a “sex worker.”
To be clear, I have nothing against sugar daddy dating. If you can find men to pay your rent, more power to you. Happy_Blonde’s experience, which I’m sure mirrors that of so many others, is testament to the fact that more women are turning to sex work in the current economic climate. But interestingly, the kind of sex work that hovers around sugar daddy dating is often less accessible and affords less protection to the vast majority of sex workers.
Crucially, it is the fundamental error of these Brandon Wade-founded sites that operate as sugar sites but deny the fact that the women on these sites are, in fact, engaging in sex work, and without providing legal protection afforded to sex workers, even in countries where sex work is decriminalized.