Seeking Arrangement is brought to you by the fine folks behind Ashley Madison. So I would take any of their data with a boulder-sized grain of salt. I'm surprised that The Atlantic would base an entire article on their data without doing better homework.
How right you are. Arrangementfinder.com is the company in this space owned by Avid Life. It simply didn't occur to me that there would be yet another company with such a similar name in this space.
Someone financially supported by a sugar daddy/mommy in exchange for a sexual relationship.
>What's a trophy wife?
A much younger woman married for looks usually after divorcing one's first wife.
>Are these terms sexist?
Probably not helpful to label the terms sexist (given that they describe real phenomena) but the mentality that seeks out those relationships might be.
>If I date someone with student loans then am I a sugar daddy?
If you cover/displace significantly more of their finances than in a typical dating relationship without reciprocation, yes.
>Some of my friends have wives who stay at home but don't have children. How do you define those relationships?
Childless marriages, distinguished from sugar daddy relationship by the expectation of permanence and more complex mutual obligations.
>Do all cultures fetishize the young? SeekingArrangements is in UK and Singapore too.
Young women, yes, for fundamental biological reasons.
Well the phrase "trophy wife" doesn't exist on this web page and I would say that the expression itself is not sexist (because you could also have a "trophy husband" and everyone would understand what it means), but of course the practice's prevalence suggests a cultural sexism where the expression doesn't.
The term "sugar baby" comes idiomatically from the opposite of the terms "sugar daddy, sugar mama" as the person who is the target of the affections of the latter. Obviously, "sugar baby" is not a sexist expression because it is not gendered. As for what it means, to be clear: Alice is Bob's sugar-baby (conversely, Bob is Alice's sugar-daddy) if Bob is an affluent older person who is both dating the younger Alice and is gifting her with financially-expensive gifts. The gifts could be as immaterial as "I have this car I never drive, you can use it as if it were your own" or as material as "I will pay off your student loan debts." Usually, if Alice has her own professional career and is providing well for herself, then we'd not call it a sugar-baby relationship even if the gifts are expensive and one-way. Furthermore if she is taking care of the household and/or kids, that would tend to mollify the judgment. The essence of the judgment is the belief that if the sugar-parent were not providing the gifts to the sugar-baby then the relationship would not persist; the very terms themselves suggest that the relationship is too uncomfortably invoking a parent-child dynamic in a romantic context.
A stay-at-home wife is generally not a "sugar baby" since they are married and not dating; you could potentially extend the term to cover married couples but even so, if there are no expensive gifts or they're of comparable ages you wouldn't normally say that he's her sugar-daddy.
Thank you for the detailed response. I feel most relationships have a large income disparity between the partners and would cease to exist otherwise. For example, if one childless partner stays at home then the other has to make enough for both. Does American society count housing and food as expensive gifts?
Have you seriously not heard the terms "sugar baby/daddy" and "trophy wife" before? They're not exactly new. Here's a google ngrams: http://tinyurl.com/zyohtp3
I don't know when to apply these terms. Most of my male friends have younger partners and make at least twice as much them. It happens when a software programmer dates outside of tech.
Do Sugardaddies and Sugarbabies publicly confess their activities??
Maybe I'm naive but I can't imagine that the average student goes this path except she has been already escorting semi-professionally or professionally.
Despite all the graphs, there didn't seem to be any real information in the article. Not one statement from anyone (older or younger) who has used the site. I would love to hear from someone who actually used the site. Is it purely sex? Is sex expected or even normal? After seeing someone else comment that the site is owned by the Ashley Madison people I doubt that there is much evidence behind those graphs.
Was having dinner with a Belgian friend, an older man that has seen a lot of life and is conversant in modern political economy. He didn't believe that: a. students in US mostly pay for everything with debt, b. those debts are impossible to discharge if students hit hard times.
For those clutching their pearls, I'm fairly confident that you can find an order of magnitude more sugar and/or exploitation based relationships in any large field that depends on a stratum of youth and/or beauty, and involves tiered access to attention. (Music, modeling, acting)
Partially because sites like this are nebulous black-boxes, and partially because power corrupts.
I hate to be pedantic, but: the size of the salt is directly proportional to the amount of the message you want to consume (because, as you know, in food there's a certain fixed ratio of salt to other ingredients).
So if you want a person to not accept the premise, you should say "take it with a tiny grain of salt", which implies "accept very little of the premise".
> the size of the salt is directly proportional to the amount of the message you want to consume (because, as you know, in food there's a certain fixed ratio of salt to other ingredients).
Hmm, where are you getting this idea from? It seems to me that the salt is meant to act as some sort of antidote and/or preservative:
> The idea comes from the fact that food is more easily swallowed if taken with a small amount of salt. Pliny the Elder translated an ancient antidote for poison with the words 'be taken fasting, plus a grain of salt'.
> Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, 77 A.D. translates thus:
> After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Mithridates, Gnaeus Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an antidote in his own handwriting; it was to the following effect: Take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day.
Fun fact: The word "salary" comes from salt, too– Romans greatly valued the stuff for its preservative qualities, and built roads for its transportation.
"Take it with a grain of salt" is an idiom. An idiom by its very nature has a meaning different from its literal meaning. You'll misunderstand an idiom if you try to reason about it from the literal meaning of the words.
A common example is "I could care less." When you see that phrase in a forum of literal-minded people like this one, someone is likely to reply that they should have said "I couldn't care less." Yes, of course that is what the writer meant - but this doesn't make the idiom wrong. The idiom is sarcasm - saying the opposite of its literal meaning. This is more clear when you hear it spoken out loud: the emphasis is on the words "I" and "care", indicating the sarcastic intent.
Or take the phrase "kicked the bucket", which obviously does not literally mean "died". In the movie It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, when Jimmy Durante's character dies after his car flies off the road, there happens to be a bucket next to his foot and in his death spasm he kicks it. What makes the scene funny is the use of the idiom's literal meaning - unlike the normal use of an idiom.
In fact, you might say they turned the idiom on its head. But idioms don't have heads, do they? :-)
The salt accompanies the message when the message should be treated with some amount of skepticism or something like that. If no skepticism is needed, no one mentions taking salt with it.
The amount of salt mentioned then increases with the amount of of skepticism needed.
So, if much more suspicion/skepticism is needed, we see that people mention much more salt.
The salt is like an antidote for the questionable sources, not just a flavoring.
Since this is a nerd forum and I am a nerd I will step up the pedantry by pointing out that a grain is a foundational unit of measurement of mass[0] equivalent to 64.798 milligrams, making discussion of both boulder sized and tiny grains of salt somewhat nonsensical.
