CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Sugardaddies, sugarmommies, sugarbabies  Fri Jan 25, 2013 7:27 pm | |
| In Rwanda, government-sponsored billboards at the university’s entrance warn cash-strapped students against being lured into prostitution by a “Shuga Dadi” or a “Shuga Mami.”
In the United States, Brandon Wade has made a fortune through websites such as whatsyourprice.com, seekingarrangement.com and misstravel.com (which offers free travel to single women willing to accompany allegedly rich guys who apparently can’t get a date on their own).
Wade is now pitching the “Sugar Baby Lifestyle” in Canada as part of a marketing campaign for his website that matches students with supposedly deep-pocketed sponsors and then lets them make their own deal.
The company claims there are already 1,747 ‘Sugar Babies’ attending 20 Canadian universities and two million members worldwide, of whom 40 per cent are married and 95.6 per cent are heterosexual.
In a news release with a Victoria placeline that I got earlier this week, the Las Vegas-based company refers to the disappearance of personal and financial records of 583,000 students with loans from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
“It’s evident that the Canadian government can’t be trusted with your information,” Wade is quoted as saying. “Why pay interest on a loan and possibly lose your personal information when you could get a Sugar Daddy instead?”
Why? Because at least with a student loan, you know exactly what’s required to pay it back – money, nothing more. And with a student loan, you know when your debt is repaid.
“Sex is not an expectation on our site, and isn’t a part of every arrangement,” company spokesman Leroy Velasquez said in an emailed response to my question.
He says he doesn’t know what percentage of the arrangements include sex; the company doesn’t track that “because the terms are set privately.”
And Velasquez primly added, “We respect the privacy of our members, no matter how casual or serious their relationships are.”
It’s up to the Sugar Daddy and so-called Sugar Baby at their first meeting, he says, to “state what they are looking for: friendship, companionship, love, short-term, long-term, etc.”
But because they are private contracts, the company doesn’t monitor them to ensure that Sugar Daddies comply with the terms.
Sugar Babies can report deadbeat Daddies to the website administrators, who will investigate.
So then what? “The administrators have the power to suspend or ban any accounts.”
And, Velasquez says, any deadbeat Daddies also face the prospect of being shunned by others who use the website — “We have a very active and close-knit community, so the member are often aware of deceitful members and avoid those who take advantage of the website.”
A huge comfort, I’m sure, to any of the young women or men who had been promised what Velasquez says is an average of nearly $4,400 a month only to get stiffed (so to speak).
It’s hard to know whether to be angry or sickened by Wade’s firm belief that every relationship is just another form of financial transaction – a belief that seems, at least on the surface, to be shared by a lot of other guys.
It is also discomfiting that the combination of a degree from MIT and running a virtual bawdy house has earned Wade enough respect, credibility or notoriety that The Huffington Post gives him space to dole out relationship advice.
His blog makes it clear that while his matchmaking methods may be 21st century, his view of women is not.
In one post, he advises that successful men don’t like women with “unkempt locks” or “unnatural color or style” of hair.
What they value, he says, are women with a good “gait,” good posture and good spelling. Successful men have told him they prefer verbal communication to texting and emailing and “misspellings or inappropriate abbreviations were deal breakers. The ability to hold a conversation is vital when dealing with men of high power and wealth because most meetings and deals are still handled face to face.”
But what is, frankly, more depressing to me is that in a wealthy country like Canada, where young women have more opportunities that women at any time in history, they still fall into the Sugar Daddy trap.
These are not generous men — even if the company’s claim is correct that the average Sugar Daddy is 39 with an average annual income of $263,589, a net worth of about $5.6 million and willing to spend an average $4,357 a month on his ‘baby.’
These men are not philanthropists with a student’s best interests in mind.
As the Rwandan government has recognized, people like them are predators.
If they weren’t, they’d give the $52,800 a year to universities or other organizations to provide bursaries, fellowships and grants to students who need it most.
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Daphne+Bramham+There+nothing+sweet+about+these+sugardaddies/7868884/story.html
OP is hopeless... |
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