Opinion

With unemployment rates at an all-time high and with college tuition continuing to inflate, students are faced with the conundrum of what to do once May comes around and they find themselves jobless and drowning in student loans. Some people bite the dreaded bullet and return to their vapid suburban towns while others fly off to distant countries to teach English and get a breath of fresh air. Recently, many female college students have taken an alternative route in approaching the postgraduation slump by dating the super-rich.

SeekingArrangement.com is a dating website catered toward creating mutually beneficial relationships between a financial benefactor — the sugar daddy — and a younger, attractive sugar baby. Although anyone can identify as a student, sugar baby members who can confirm a .edu email address are given a free upgrade to premium membership. Following the economic downswing, the number of college sugar babies has jumped from 38,303 in 2007 to 179,906 by July of this year.

According to Brandon Wade, founder and CEO of the site, UC Berkeley ranks at 13 in terms of confirmed college sugar babies, with NYU passing Cal at first, UCLA at eighth and Harvard at ninth.

In this realm of digital matchmaking, wealth, success and beauty are the magic charms for compatibility. Whereas eHarmony may connect potential couples based on personality and shared interests, the search engine of Seeking Arrangement is focused on income and age. On a sugar baby’s profile, expected monthly allowances — ranging anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 — are specified, and on a sugar daddy’s profile his monthly budget, annual income and net worth are enumerated.

Because the actual details of each mutually beneficial relationship are left ambiguous and to the discretion of the involved members, the rising popularity of the site is, in many ways, a brutally honest reflection of our culture’s preoccupation with superficial values and is yet another example of the way money is used as a means of oppression.

Unlike a healthy relationship, in a situation where monthly or bimonthly allowances are the basis of the arrangement, the balance of power is skewed before the two even first meet.

“I don’t think I could ever have a real connection with these guys because they are condescending and patronizing,” says a 22-year-old sugar baby who goes by “Julie Healy” on the site.

This lack of respect should be of no surprise, though, because the nature of the relationship positions sugar daddies to fully embrace the objectification of women and see them as just another purchase or a bill that needs to be paid off. Men enter the relationships with an overt sense of empowerment and entitlement. Desensitized to the point that they regard something so intimate as human companionship as a commodity, they consider young women disposable and interchangeable.

The most unsettling aspect, however, is the voluntary self-degradation of the sugar babies and how they are allowing themselves to be stuck in this type of parasitic lifestyle.

“When we stopped talking, I was left with an addictive spending habit and no desire to take on a part-time job,” confesses Julie, who eventually started dating another sugar daddy to help with credit card bills. And although the way two consensual adults choose to lead their lives is a private matter, it is problematic when more and more women become so dependent on a stranger that they begin to doubt their self-worth, intelligence and ability to be successful on their own. This type of attitude seeps out of personal relations and into everyday life. And if a large portion of the site’s members are college-educated women on their way to receiving degrees from the world’s top universities, what could this possibly mean for the rest of our generation?

Even if the concept of Seeking Arrangement sounds absurd to some of you, I think the feeling of being trapped and helpless in these daunting times of economic tumult is something most people can relate to. And as easy as it may be to point the finger at the website, the culprit is not solely the system but all the individual members who are helping to perpetuate this suffocating cycle where money is constantly used to control human bodies and people are made to forsake personal values for the lure of wealth.

Instead of running scared, forgoing our dreams and marginalizing even more the already decreasing value of college degrees, we should be making the best of our education by creating strong networks and trusting our initiatives as young people to take innovative risks. Even if it all fails and comes to an end, I’d rather we have tried our best in creating our own path in life instead of wasting our youth immobilized as corporate whores.

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