The week I started looking for D.C. summer housing to go along with my unpaid internship was the same week I set up an account on the website Seeking Arrangement.
Seeking Arrangement promises to match wealthy older people with younger people in “mutually beneficial relationships.” Younger ones give companionship, dates and maybe sex. Older ones pay up.
I couldn’t find any apartments that I could afford with my small budget, and suddenly and strangely, this site appealed to me. Why should I worry about working a part-time job just to survive when other, more lucrative options existed?
No, technically, Seeking Arrangement doesn’t peddle prostitution. To count as prostitution, the relationship has to be explicitly based on the exchange of money for sex. As long as other, nonsexual activities (like companionship) are involved – as are the majority of the arrangements on the site – it’s not prostitution. That’s how courts have ruled for decades.
Besides, as one of student interviewed by The Hatchet said this month, “All of your negotiating skills are gone if you’re a ‘sugar baby’ out of necessity.” Younger users usually don’t rely on the cash from their sugar daddies as a primary form of income. For most, it’s a fun way to earn some spare spending money, not a way of life.
My initial interest in the site was the same type that draws me to reality TV shows: a fascination with the seemingly ridiculous nature of other people’s lives. At first, my curiosity was mostly inspired by my friends who had read this month’s Hatchet article goading me to try it out.
Driven by that curiosity, I decided to become the 130th GW student to venture into the world of Seeking Arrangement. I came to the site to gawk. Maybe I could get a few funny tweets out of the whole experience.
What I found was a fascinating look at an otherwise taboo world where companionships are traded for monetary allowances.
With male “sugar babies” representing just 1 percent of the site’s users, I thought my experience wouldn’t pan out quite like those of my female counterparts. Actually, there was no shortage of older gay men on the site looking for a match.
While the site’s simple design doesn’t do justice to the wealthier clientele, it is otherwise what you would expect. The user base is mostly anonymous. People seem as likely to put their real face on the site as they are to talk about using the service.
But when they think they’ve found their match, users sure aren’t shy: Within a day of creating my admittedly lackluster profile, at least six men messaged me.
Once I got past the shock of having two different men, in their very first messages, offer to fly me across the country to live with them, I saw how enticing the site could be. Most of these men, if they were to be believed, were offering thousands of dollars a month for simple companionship (and sex).
I stopped seeing this site as a joke or social experiment and began to see its appeal. Plenty of people use this site for legitimate purposes, and it’s hard to blame them. We only assume Seeking Arrangement and the people who use it are strange because of our own narrow views about sexual relationships.
Seeking out older benefactors isn’t actually how I will be earning money this summer, but for some people it will be. And that choice is theirs to make.
While college is supposedly a period of life marked by sexual experimentation, many of us continue to uphold a rigid morality when it comes to sex. Our bodies, and the choices we make with those bodies, are ours and ours alone, so long as our choices are marked by consent and communication.
In the past week, I’ve heard many people joke about the site and its users. But that ignores the experiences of people who want to pursue a lifestyle some of us may find uncomfortable.
Many students would enjoy a higher standard of living than they may have, and if these students want to engage in relationships with older men for money, that’s their business – it’s not fodder for me or other prolific tweeters with voyeuristic tendencies.
Jonah Lewis, a sophomore majoring in political science and sociology, is a Hatchet columnist.
