Slutever Read online

  Her name was Madeline. As it turned out, she lived only three blocks from me, which felt like a sign of…something. She was the sort of woman who, when she walked into a restaurant, people looked up from their kale salads to gawk at: a five-foot-nine double-D bombshell with platinum-blond hair (natural) and the sort of happily oblivious smile specific to someone who grew up in California. She was a beautiful perversion of the American dream: a working class girl who, through sheer sexual power, had transformed herself into a multilingual, world-traveling badass (with a Céline bag)—and she was just twenty-three. I was instantly in awe of her. Over Nicoise salads, on that first blind friend date, Madeline told me the story of how she got into sex work.

  Madeline grew up in Southern California, with on-and-off junkie parents who struggled to keep food in the fridge, making her own stale pizza bagels for dinner, taking it upon herself to raise her little brother, reading romance novels from Rite Aid while her parents drank cheap whiskey in lawn chairs—ya know, the classic white-trash American upbringing. (Well, minus the part where her parents got clean and joined a religious cult of hippies who followed Orthodox Jewish law despite not actually being Jewish, but whatever, minor detail.) As a senior in high school, Madeline knew she had to get the fuck out of Dodge, so she spent hours online in her school library, searching for a job as an au pair. Eventually, she found a family in some middle-of-nowhere town in Italy who were looking for a live-in nanny for the summer, one who could give their children English lessons in exchange for room and board and a small salary. She flew out the week after high school graduation.

  Over the next couple of years, Madeline country-hopped around Europe, learning languages while working as a nanny for various families. Until one day, while she was living in Paris, something unexpected happened. She was on her way to pick up the little boy she nannied from school, casually applying mascara in the rearview mirror while driving—as one does—when she crashed her host family’s car into a lamppost. Whoops? She was fine, but the car was totaled. Madeline knew that her bosses—gay dads—had been struggling with money after one of them had recently been laid off. She wanted to help them pay for the damages but had no savings. And so, in a moment of desperation, she went on whatever the French equivalent of craigslist is, looking for some sort of odd job to make quick cash. And that’s when she stumbled upon the ad: €500 for a “rendezvous” with a supposedly handsome thirty-two-year-old businessman. She thought, Fuck it.

  She met the businessman at a basic hotel. He was nondescript, nice enough, and “most importantly, not fat,” Madeline recalled. He poured her a drink, made some pleasant small talk, and then they had bland sex for like thirty minutes, and then she went home. Madeline said that maybe, if that first experience had been weird or scary or uncomfortable, she would have taken the €500 and gone back to her life as a nanny, disregarding her foray into hookerdom as a random one-off. But weirdly, not only was the experience of being a whore not traumatizing, it was actually verging on forgettable. The next day, she gave the €500 to the dads, admitting to them how she’d made the money (this is something you’ll learn about Madeline—she’s irrationally honest). The family took the money, but promptly fired her because they didn’t want a ho raising their son. (It was hard enough on the kid having two gay dads, they explained, and adding a whore into the mix was crossing a line.) But it didn’t matter, because Madeline didn’t need them anymore. She was a hooker now.

  Over the next six months, Madeline’s life changed drastically. After some Google research, she found out about the popular sugar daddy website SeekingArrangement. (To state what is probably obvious today, sugar daddy sites connect rich guys with younger women, who in turn go on to form “arrangements” that range from genuine romance to “the girlfriend experience” to pay-by-the-hour sex meetings.) Madeline used SA to find bored bankers and lonely dads to have more of these rendezvous with. After a few months, she started talking to a sugar daddy who lived in New York, a finance guy in his midforties. He offered her a deal: Come visit me in New York, and if we like each other, I’ll pay for you to move here and give you an allowance of $7,500 a month. Being the industrious twenty-year-old slut that she was, Madeline accepted the offer. Within a month she was living in her own studio apartment in Manhattan. She didn’t know a single person in the city besides her sugar daddy, who she only saw a couple of times a week, for dinners and sex, but she had a disposable income, which she used to buy friends. “When you’re twenty,” Madeline told me, “all you have to do is buy people drinks, and they’ll hang out with you. I felt so rich. I’d walk into dive bars in Williamsburg and buy everyone a shot, like a loser, but it worked. I felt like the twenty-year-old female equivalent of my clients: Essentially, we were both paying people to stand next to us. I love capitalism. It’s so perverse!”

  Her relationship with the finance guy lasted four months, at which point he told her that he wanted to start paying a different random girl from the internet to be his fake girlfriend. Madeline, being the airheaded twenty-year-old slut that she was, hadn’t saved any money—she’d spent it all on mojitos for her fake friends—and needed a new way to pay her $2,350-a-month rent. So she went back on SA to look for another sugar daddy. This time, however, it was harder to find a guy willing to pay her in large monthly installments (the first guy, she realized, might have been beginner’s luck). Desperate and with an overdrawn bank account, she decided to see multiple men at a time, even if they couldn’t promise her more than a one-off. It was at this point that Madeline began thinking of “sugaring” as a business, rather than just a potentially problematic thing she did on the side for money while primarily focusing on “finding herself” or whatever. Having sex, she decided, would be her job. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she was really fucking good at it.

  To some, Madeline’s story might sound remarkable—a fluke, an exception to the rule, maybe even a stroke of bizarre luck. But in reality, she’s not that special.

  Today, an increasing number of young people (primarily women) are using their bodies to make money. This might not sound so revolutionary—clearly, women have been subsidized by men in exchange for companionship since pretty much the dawn of time. (We used to call this dynamic “marriage,” though now we call it “sex work”—but whatever, minor detail.) What’s different is that today these so-called mutually beneficial relationships are facilitated online, through sugar daddy websites.

  The sugar world is not a small subculture. These websites boast literally millions of subscribers, many of whom are women at top universities. As of 2016, more than 1.2 million American college students were signed up to the most popular sugar site, SeekingArrangement, and that number is growing rapidly. On average, 2,000 new students with an email account belonging to an American university sign up to the site every day. According to SA’s 2016 membership data, 1,486 students were registered to SeekingArrangement at New York University alone. But of course, not all members are students. In 2016, SeekingArrangement reported having 5.5 million members worldwide, and 3.25 million members active in the United States. Here’s a crazy statistic: Approximately 2 percent of adult females in the U.S. are sugar babies. It’s funny to think that 2 percent is also the estimated percentage of gay people in America. And yet, no one cares about sex workers’ rights.

  The sugar phenomenon has been reported on everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to CNN to Vanity Fair to the BBC. Most reports have cited the increasing burden of college tuition as a primary catalyst (on average, American students today graduate $35,000 in debt). Others say it’s the result of wealth inequality, and the crushing cost of cities like New York, L.A., and San Francisco for young people. Others blame the websites themselves, for making these types of arrangements easier than ever to find. To me, the most interesting stimulus of sugar culture (as well as other forms of consensual sex work) is the radical sexual freedom of today’s young woman, who fucks who she wants, and might as well get paid for it, too.

&nbs
p; In essence, sugaring is a modern, increasingly visible form of prostitution, which has been dressed up and repackaged in such a way that it’s become nearly socially acceptable (key word being “nearly”). Some sugar babies don’t consider themselves sex workers at all, feeling that sugar arrangements fall into a gray area, as opposed to clearly transactional, pay-by-the-hour sex. Other women are happy to interchange the term “sugar baby” with “prostitute.” When asked why they sugar, many women will reply with some version of: “I have a lot of sex anyway—why not get paid for it?” Or “Why would I work at a coffee shop for ten dollars an hour when I could make eight hundred dollars to sleep with a banker who’s not even that bad?” Many women have reported in magazine interviews and documentaries, on social media and elsewhere how being a sugar baby has enabled them to travel, support an artistic career, pay for higher education, buy beautiful clothing, eat at fancy restaurants, and basically avoid living in a cockroach-filled converted loft in Ridgewood with seven roommates who all create awful performance art. If you ask me, I’d rather suck the 1 percent’s dick than watch someone make art with their period any day.

  But back to Madeline. After that first enlightening lunch, she and I became fast friends. I just loved listening to her talk—we’d meet for drinks or take long walks along the East River, and I’d record her with my phone while she told all her best whore stories—like the time she helped a disabled guy lose $30,000 in Vegas, or the time when she blew an eighty-year-old man who was hooked up to an oxygen tank. It all sounded so glamorous. But aside from the entertainment factor, what amazed me about Madeline was how openly she talked about sex work. The cheerful, casual nature with which she discussed hooking made you forget that anyone would consider her lifestyle shameful or taboo. Instead, it just seemed really, well…practical.

  At the time we met, I was sleeping on a gross futon mattress pad in a curtained-off section of a lesbian’s living room. While I was grateful that the rent was super cheap, this was obviously not the ideal living situation. But a few months into our friendship, Madeline’s roommate moved out of their converted loft apartment. The room had no windows and was basically a dank cave made out of scrap wood, but at least it had walls (the bar was pretty low for me at that point). And so, Madeline and I officially became roomies.

  The first weekend that we lived together, Madeline flew to Paris to bang a Saudi prince. Obviously. He flew her first-class and booked her a room in a five-star hotel. They had only communicated via email at this point, and had never even spoken on the phone. I’d always ask Madeline if she was worried that one of these guys was going to go all Gary Ridgway on her, but she would always just shrug it off, saying she felt safer meeting someone through a website—specifically, one that requires a monthly credit card fee—than she did picking up a random guy at a bar. “People just don’t get killed at fancy hotels,” she’d say with a smile.

  When she arrived at her Paris hotel room, there were four dozen roses on the bed, next to a bottle of Dom Perignon from her birth year. I got a text from her that evening: I love him! He gave me $5,000! And he looks exactly like Aladdin! The text came in while I was working a shift at the crappy Chinese restaurant where I waitressed, and for a second I seriously considered walking out of the restaurant and into oncoming traffic.

  About a month or so into our cohabitation, I was lying on Madeline’s bed, watching her cut up a kitchen sponge and insert a piece of it into the depths of her vagina—a little DIY hooker trick that allows you to have sex while sneakily on your period. She was getting ready for lunch with one of her SDs—a fiftyish businessman and ex-CIA agent named Edward. He was “a genius,” according to Madeline (although this is how she describes almost everyone she meets). Edward had been married three times, and following his second divorce, he promised himself that from then on, he would only cheat on his wife with multiple women at a time. The reason for this, he told Madeline, was that he’s a hopeless romantic. If he’s alone with a woman, he can’t help but fall head over heels in love with her. So to prevent that from happening, he now only had extramarital sex in threesomes or more. “It makes sense, when you think about it,” Madeline said with a shrug. She was chugging a Diet Coke and plucking her eyebrows, her pupils dilated to the appropriate size for someone on 20 mg of Adderall. “You should come with me next time,” she said. “I’m sure he’d love to meet you.”

  It was a bizarre moment. I’d been watching Madeline’s life admiringly for months; I’d been both fascinated and turned on by her stories; I had worked as a dominatrix; I was by anyone’s standards a dedicated slut in my personal life. And yet, in complete honesty, I’d never thought to myself, I should just become a hooker. As soon as she said it, I was actually annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

  One week later I was riding the 6 train uptown on my way to my first professional threesome. Madeline had helped me pick out my outfit, vetoing most of my wardrobe for being “too hipster.” Apparently my chunky platforms, meticulously smudged eyeliner, and semi-ironic mock-lace Rainbow skankwear were not the right look. “This is not the moment to subvert the male gaze or to fight the patriarchy or whatever,” Madeline told me, rolling her eyes. “If you’re going to do this, you have to appeal to a standard of beauty that the most basic, white-bread, man-baby finance bro finds attractive.” This became a sentiment that Madeline repeated to me many, many times over the coming months. At first it kind of weirded me out, because I’d never seen myself as someone who was trying to subvert any gazes—sure, there was a somewhat satirical element to the way I dressed (“Elle Woods at an art school gang bang” was my style reference), but I still certainly looked feminine and—at least in my mind—attractive in a way that wasn’t actively fighting any social norms of beauty. Also, I was incredulous that all rich guys only wanted to see women wearing Louboutins and a push-up bra. Surely beauty is subjective, even when it comes to the 1 percent, right? “No,” Madeline insisted. And so I gave in and let her dress me up like a horny senator’s wife.

  On the subway, Madeline briefed me on what was about to go down. She said her meetings with Edward generally followed a similar pattern. He invited her for lunch at a nice restaurant in Midtown. He would be seated at the table waiting for her when she arrived, smiling too hard, wearing a suit, and sipping vodka on the rocks. Another woman always appeared at these lunches, invited by Edward, and Madeline usually didn’t know anything about her until she arrived. These women were generally smart—“in law school or something”—and pretty, but not “obnoxiously pretty.” Together they would eat a nice meal and have a couple of drinks, and afterward Edward would walk them to a nearby hotel, one girl on each arm, and they’d go up to his room and fuck. Each girl left with $1,000. It seemed easy enough. In the week leading up to this, the thing that had weirded me out the most was that we were meeting at 12:30 p.m.—oppressively early for a threesome, in my opinion. However, Madeline seemed unfazed by it. She said she preferred to meet SA guys in the daytime, because it left her evenings free to fuck guys from OkCupid. Naturally.

  By the time we got off the train at Grand Central, I was so nervous that I became genuinely worried I might have a panic attack. But I didn’t really understand why I was freaking out. Threesomes were nothing new to me—I’d even had one with Madeline, actually—so that certainly wasn’t the source of my anxiety. I’d also slept with multiple men in their forties and fifties, so the older-man thing wasn’t the issue, either. And, like anyone who’s ever gone home with someone they met in a bar, I had no moral qualms about fucking someone I barely knew. In fact, I’d actually been in a very similar situation to this only a few months before. A friend of mine, who’s in an open marriage, had invited me over “for drinks” with her and her husband, who I’d never met. I’d understood what was unspoken in that invitation, and while taking the train to her Upper East Side apartment, I was well aware that I was on my way to bang both my friend and a man who I knew almost nothing about. And sure, I was sort of nervous on tha
t train ride, too. But that was more of an excited nervousness. This time, I was breaking out in a rash.

  There was no other way to look at it: The only thing that separated this situation from the many others like it in my lifetime was the money. So what was it about getting paid that changed the vibe so much? Was it about expectation—feeling like because I was being compensated I had to look a certain way, act a certain way, be more agreeable, fuck more generously, laugh louder, come harder? I posed these concerns to Madeline. “You can just laugh at your regular volume,” she said, only half paying attention to me, mainly trying to stay upright in her four-inch stilettos. “But maybe,” she reconsidered, “if you can’t actually come, you should fake it…for good measure.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m good at that,” I assured her.

  “But just so you know,” she said, “I would never fake it with a guy who wasn’t paying me. They just don’t deserve it.” Good advice.

  Just as Madeline said, Edward was waiting for us with a smile. He wasn’t bad-looking—fiftyish, Latino, in shape, teeth a couple of shades too white. I wouldn’t go out of my way to talk to him in a bar, but I’ve fucked worse. He told us that he could hang out for exactly two hours, because he was sleeping on the Da Vinci rhythm and 2:30 p.m. was his nap time.

  “What’s the Da Vinci rhythm?” I asked, practically chugging my martini.

  “It’s an alternative sleep pattern,” he explained. “You sleep for fifteen minutes every three or four hours.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” I said.

  “I suppose I live dangerously,” he said with a shrug. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  “So Madeline tells me you only have threesomes.”