Personal

One of my biggest fears, when I was growing up, was that no romantic prospect would ever be able to see past my looks and love me for my personality. Popular media had hammered home the idea for me that appearances mattered more than anything else, and I considered myself to have a mediocre face and a mediocre body at best, so it seemed impossible that I would ever be loved or desired in the ways I wanted to be.

Of course, I grew up and discovered that the reality of dating was a bit different than I’d been led to believe. Not only do personalities matter as much as, or more than, looks for many people, but it turns out that plenty of folks actually think I’m hot and pretty. Who’da thunk!

That being said, the hangups that plague us at a young age often stay with us for a long time, even if life experience and self-reflection have both taught us that those hangups are unhelpful and based on falsehoods. So it still surprised me, well into my twenties, when someone I thought was attractive would express that they also found me attractive. Hell, even now, at 31, I sometimes still narrow my eyes when someone cute expresses desire for me, like, How do I know you’re not lying, though?

I still vividly remember the moment I received an initial email from the man who would become my short-lived sugar daddy, because it soothed these insecurities like an ice pack held to a bruise. I was at my optometrist’s office, of all places, sitting in the waiting room.

The email was wordy and polite, explaining that he had heard my podcast and read my blog and followed my Twitter for quite some time, but had only just learned that I offered audio-chat sessions for a fee. (I don’t think this is something I’d still do now, BTW, unless the remuneration was significant, but back then I still had the time and energy for such things.) He was interested in setting up a phone chat to discuss “our relative perspectives on sexuality,” and also to do some phone sex-type stuff if I was up for that. He lived in New York and I lived in Toronto, so our dynamic would be limited to the phone for the time being, though the possibility of in-person meetups was later floated, provided we hit it off via audio.

He’d included some photos and personal details and I found him quite handsome and impressive, in a way that awakened my impostor syndrome from its intermittent slumber. This man wanted to pay for my time? Seriously? I wasn’t a smoking-hot porn performer, or a finessed escort like the ladies at https://www.toronto-escorts.com/, or one of those slim, blonde, well-manicured women you might see on a sugar-dating website. I was just… me.

And here we arrive at one of the central lessons I took away from my time as a sugar baby, which ended up lasting only about a month before he called it off due to jealousy about my other partners (a bummer at the time, but ultimately for the best). I learned that not only was I desirable, but I was desirable enough to be worth spending money on.

That may sound like a weird distinction to make, but money is, in many ways, far more tangible than much of the other attention I’d received from suitors in the past. That’s not to say it’s better – I’d generally rather receive a well-tailored, flirty compliment from someone cute than a crisp hundred, although frankly it depends on the day – but I found it more believable, because money is… well, it’s currency. It’s cold hard cash, and it tells the cold hard truth. Someone might give a compliment they don’t really mean; people do it all the time. But if someone decides to pay me money for the privilege of spending time with me, or seeing photos of me, or whatever, then it’s extremely unlikely that they’re faking their enthusiasm for any reason. Money, as they say, doesn’t lie.

There’s a lot of Discourse™ about whether sex work is “empowering,” which I generally think is ridiculous. Few other professions are held to that standard, of needing to be ~empowering~ in order to be valid, respectable, and worthy of rights and protections.

But at the same time, few jobs I’ve ever had have felt as actively empowering to me as being a sugar baby did. I was being paid to be myself, being paid because someone liked who I was, inside and out. Not much else was required of me, besides the emotional labor of being in a relationship-type-thing, which I’d long given away for free to Tinder fuckboys and Twitter crushes who didn’t necessarily deserve it. During our phone calls, I could wear the things I liked wearing, and tell the jokes I’d normally tell, and be as nerdy as I’d normally be, and get paid for that. I could even get paid to receive pleasure, paid to listen to a handsome man describing in detail how he would touch me if we were in the same room. I felt high on the attention, the flattery, and – yes – the money.

I’m very good at talking myself into the belief that no one actually wants/likes/loves me, even when there’s ample evidence to the contrary. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’m married to the love of my life now, who courted me relentlessly even while we were living 500 miles apart (they incidentally also live in New York – actually I met them on the trip that was supposed to be my first meetup with my sugar daddy, planned and booked before he ended things with me), and even now, I still have times when I feel deeply undesirable and can’t understand why anyone would ever want me.

But I know that someone did want me, because he was paying me hundreds of dollars a month to make me giggle on the phone. And that means that I could be (and, in fact, am) wanted by other people – not only now, but in the future. And it’s hard for me to explain that away, even on my most insecure days.

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.