Labor of Love Read Online Free PDF

come back.
    I ask whether it surprised her.
    She shakes her head. “For most of them, there was only one of me, and usually they were cheating. So I was this very big deal in their lives. I was seeing a dozen of them a week.”
    The Princeton Sugar Baby says that almost every one of her long-term Daddies has ended things because he says he is developing feelings.
    She laughs. “I guess I’m too good at my job.”
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    Ever since the invention of dating, the line between sex work and “legitimate” dating has remained difficult to draw and impossible to police. Around the end of World War I, the reformers who had vowed to stop the tide were starting to accept that they could not. Dating had spread far beyond the recognized vice districts. A waitress who had been arrested for making dates explained to an Illinois court how easily you could fall into it while working.
    â€œYou wait on a man and he smiles at you. You see a chance to get a tip and you smile back. Next day he returns and you try harder than ever to please him. Then right away he wants to make a date, and offer you money and presents if you’ll be a good fellow and go out with him.” If this was how a woman fell into sex work— smiling , and trying harder than ever to please customers—then turning tricks was just part of her job.
    When a Sugar Baby invites me to log on to her SeekingArrangement account to look at her messages, what strikes me are not the messages. Those actually seem like pretty standard online dating fare:
    What do you do in your free time?
    Write. I hike on weekends.
    What do you write?
    Sci-fi and fantasy, mostly. How about you?
    I like to sail.
    I’ve always wanted to learn! Maybe you can give me lessons. ☺
    What shocks me is the vanilla corporate language the company uses to tout itself as a kind of job-training center.
    All paid dating sites are laden with euphemisms. They have to be. This is how they stay on the right side of the line that divides (legal) escort services from (illegal) prostitution. But SeekingArrangement goes to extraordinary lengths to promote the idea that sugar dating prepares you for a career.
    The ex-dominatrix tells me she bluffed her way through interviews at several dungeons she applied to by alluding to “rope and needle skills” she did not actually possess. It did not matter. All that the people hiring cared about was your physical type: white, Asian, black, or Hispanic; short or tall; curvy or thin. Once she got hired, coworkers taught her during downtime how to stimulate clients to orgasm without directly touching their genitals. The dungeon did not pay for the hours that employees spent receiving this kind of on-the-job training or waiting for clients to show up. Like Uber drivers, the “girls” bore the up-front expenses of costumes and makeup and regular waxes, manicures, and pedicures, and they paid a portion of their earnings for the opportunity to work.
    SeekingArrangement encourages Babies to think of the site as a source of opportunity for personal development, describing the Daddy’s role as “mentorship.” Near major Sugar Baby universities it hosts meet-ups, where women are invited to talk about sugar dating as a route to financial empowerment over coffee and chocolate fondue. The last time I logged on to the site, the most recent post on its blog was called “Your Application Has Been Unsuccessful.”
    â€œConsider the position of an employer looking to hire new staff,” the anonymous author begins. “This is basically what the process of meeting a potential Sugar Daddy is like.” The 7 mistakes that make a profile a miss include “poor communication skills,” “poor presentation skills,” “asking the wrong questions,” and “no wow factor.” That is, the same things that would make you sink a job interview.
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    As