Sugar Baby Dreams

Mary Cassatt, "Portrait of a Little Girl"

I can't say that I've ever been one to put much serious stock in the whole Protestant work ethic dealie. As a child, what I wanted to be when I "grew up" changed about every five minutes. I could never settle on one dream for longer than a month or a year. Nothing ever held my fancy for long. To this day, my dreams are constantly on rotate, each holding a place of high importance as they come into my mind's eye one, two, even three at a time. I am one of those people who posseses many skills but no specialties. When I was a recent college graduate whose dreams of working in the progressive non-profit world failed, I became depressed and despondent. I sat in my room for almost a month, jobless, watching rented Sex and the City dvds in my room, giving myself makeovers and wondering where my life might go next.

A year or so later, several jobs and a lot of frustration behind me, I came to the realization that I didn't have to put so much stock into what I did for a paycheck. Sure, it'd be great if I was paid to do rich and rewarding work, but the chances of that happening seemed slim. So I decided that what I did for a living didn't have to contribute to my sense of self-worth; rather, I could define that by what I did in my non-work time. There are fates far worse than a boring job, after all.

So here I am today at my current office job. It's fairly dull, but I am much happier now that I've allowed myself to let go of that capitalist notion that one's money earning potential defines one's worth.

All of this background, my dear readers, is to preface my excitement over the possibility of finding a sugar daddy. I would love nothing more than get paid to look pretty and smile. Your knee-jerk reaction might be to recoil in horror. Lusty, I can hear you exclaiming, how in the hell could that be reconciled with your dedication to feminism?! The answer is simple, I tell you: it doesn't have to. I'll spare you any far-reaching rationalizations about taking money from "The Man" (literally or figuratively) as a way to subvert the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and tell you honestly that what I do for money has nothing to do with what I believe in my other life. I firmly believe that having a job that is always in line with your feminist/progressive/anti-racist/anti-corporate/anti-capitalist principles is damn near impossible. And if you do have one, consider yourself among the fortunate few. Meaningful choices are functions of privilege after all (and I acknowledge that I do have some choices). So while I may believe that acting like a simpering sex toy for money is kinda vomitous, I also know that the pay and the benefits for that position far outweigh the many retail jobs I've had where acting like a simpering corporate pawn is a condition of employment.

Of course, as one might expect, the market for sugar babies is flooded. We are a dime a dozen, us girls and boys who'd love to take Daddy's cash in trade for sex and company. I've always figured that one had to be either extremely attractive or very good at manipulation to score such an arrangement. And since my looks are unconventional, because I am the worst salesperson you'll probably ever meet, and because I am really very shitty at pretending to like someone I don't, I didn't figure myself a very good sugar baby candidate. So, it's not like I'm putting a whole lot of stock into one email sent to me by some random guy who is as likely (if not more so) to be penniless as he is a millionaire, but the unexpected message sent me reeling into a fantasy world where the cash flows freely, leisure time is a staple, and the piña coladas keep on coming.