IU among leaders in number of sugar baby students on college campuses

Editor’s note: The Indiana Daily Student strives to avoid the use of anonymous sources. Because of potential negative consequences for Ginger if her real name were used, we decided the use of an alias was appropriate.

With the state of the economy during the past few years, many families have struggled to afford tuition for their college-age students.

But some college women have found an alternative solution.

More college women are becoming sugar babies, exchanging anything from time to romantic intimacy with wealthy men who typically reward them with a monthly allowance that can be thousands of dollars per month.

Typically, upon getting an official sugar baby, the man and his sugar baby sign a contract that dictates matters such as this monthly allowance.

With 62 sugar babies on campus, IU is No. 17 in the nation for number of collegiate sugar babies. New York University is No. 1 with 185 babies. This data was compiled by counting the number of .edu domain names used by babies on the site seekingarrangement.com, the leading sugar-baby website.

Jenn Gwynn, a public relations representative for Seeking Arrangement, said that as tuitions increased, so has the number of collegiate sugar babies on the site. College-age sugar babies now make up about 40 percent of site business.

“Because of the rise in tuition, and the feeling and economy of the country, I think more parents aren’t able to support their children through school, and women are going out there and finding their own ways,” Gwynn said.

Gwynn said every sugar baby looks for something different from the sugar-baby-sugar-daddy relationship.

“Sometimes, the girls are looking for a mentor as well as a relationship with an older person, and by older I mean usually the person is in their late 30s and 40s, sometimes 50,” Gwynn said. “And they’re looking for basically being able to live outside the means they would usually have as a college student.”

At Seeking Arrangement, sugar babies can sign up for free. The daddies on the site all pay a slight cost to be able to talk to the women, and they can pay more if they wish to upgrade to see better results.

Brandon Wade is the CEO and founder of Seeking Arrangement. He launched the website in 2006.

“When I first started the website, it was very much a motivation of wanting a better venue for my own dating life,” Wade said. “Being not very good simply with pickup lines, and I certainly don’t go to the gym every day, my method of competition is to stand out in other ways.”

Wade said he never really imagined Seeking Arrangement to be a sugar-daddy website when it first started.

“When the website was first started, I never even thought of branding it as a sugar daddy site,” Wade said. “What we’ve done is actually taken that term and over the years tried to make it suit what we’re trying to get at.”

An IU-Bloomington student named “Ginger,” who prefers not to give her real name, is a sugar baby on Seeking Arrangement. She joined several months ago after a friend from Purdue University introduced her to the site. She said she was skeptical at first.

“It’s initially very crazy, you know? It’s definitely something to raise your eyebrows at,” she said. “Obviously, it’s not normal. But at the same time, I think, I’m not looking on the site for love.”

She’s not looking specifically for a romantic relationship, either. Ginger said she’s looking for a way to support the lifestyle she was used to before college.

“Another reason I came to do it is that I’ve come from a good family,” she said. “I’m used to a certain lifestyle. I’m not on welfare or starving on the streets, but I’m living like an average college student. I’m used to being well-off and financially stable.”
Ginger said her close friends all know she’s on the site, but she hasn’t told
her family.

“They would probably be disgusted,” she said. “I think their initial thought is that I’d be sleeping around with different people that I’ve encountered, or question my judgment in life in general. But that’s not the case, and I mean, they would not be pleased. They would not condone it.”

Ginger has not yet found a specific sugar daddy to support her, but said it would be nice as long as it doesn’t go beyond her comfort level. She also said that although the idea of dating an older man is initially discomfiting, she might consider it.

“If it’s someone who’s the same age of my dad, I’m not going to just think that’s normal,” she said. “But if they have a lot of money and they like to have a good time, they’re interested in the finer things, there could be good conversation there. It would be worth it.”

Ginger is a sugar baby who said she would not agree to have sex with a man on the site to have him sponsor her. She has explicitly said in her profile it’s not going to be about sex.

Gwynn and Wade both said the negative connotations of the terms “sugar baby” or “sugar daddy” are something they’re trying to change.

“Everyone’s like, ‘This is just like legal prostitution,’ and it’s not,” Gwynn said, “It’s really not. I know some girls that haven’t had sex with anyone on the website. And then other girls who are having sex, it’s a relationship for them. They treat the sugar daddies like a boyfriend, so it’s just like if you were in a relationship that didn’t have any sugar or money involved and you had sex.”

She said many of the daddies aren’t open about what they do due to stigmas.

“Some of them are married. Some of these are extramarital affairs,” she said. “They don’t want, obviously, people to find out about them. And then other things we have are sugar daddies that are politicians and high-level executives who wouldn’t necessarily want to come out and talk about things like this.”

Wade said the sugar-baby-sugar-daddy relationship is no different than any other relationship and that his site is like any other dating website.

“I think we just live in a very hypocritical world where public opinion matters a lot, and unfortunately we associate negatively with some of those terms that people are quick to hurl,” Wade said. “But when you sort of rationalize it in a certain sense, what’s wrong with having a boyfriend who is wealthy?”