sonyaany
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 Posted: 29 Jan 2016 07:15 Post subject: pandora charms cheap ebay |
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The cold mathematics of sugar daddy dating
I know you guys are shocked to see home video star Kim Kardashian gracing this list but she and hubby to be Kanye West have both made some sex confessions in their time.
During a 2012 chat with Oprah, Kim admitted that she was 14 when she lost her virginity to a "friend of the family" and that her mother Kris Jenner was supportive and put her on birth control.
Kanye, in a 2013 interview with W Magazine, admitted to a long held obsession with pornography saying, "The porn thing has never left since I was in high school."
Lady Gaga is known for her outrageous stage persona and kinky costumes so it was a surprise when she admitted to Grazia Magazine in 2011 that enjoying sex was somewhat new for her.
"I never actually enjoyed sex until two years ago," Gaga told the Pandora Sale 2016 publication. "It was a proper monogamous relationship in which I felt free enough to trust and I had enough self love . Sex is the ultimate expression of vulnerability and for me it was important to know that it was a proper relationship so it was sex as a source of love and nothing else.
This story was originally published in the November 2014 issue of San Francisco magazine.
Like many men who fall short of Jude Law handsome, Bruce Boston struggles on OkCupid. It probably doesn't help that his profile describes him as a "somewhat socially awkward introvert," his teeth as "crooked," and his tastes as kinky and nonmonogamous. In real life, too, the 44 year old data analyst would have a hard time competing with the other guys at this midweek house party in the Mission: clean cut tech bros who are grilling peaches and shiitake mushrooms in the backyard and wandering into the kitchen to get more Pacifico, their deep laughs booming. They're the alpha male types who get right swiped on Tinder. Yet Boston, sitting on the couch in the living room and nursing a ginger ale, has an advantage over most of his younger, svelter counterparts. As a senior theorist at Nest, the smart thermostat company bought by Google for $3.2 billion earlier this year, he has an income in the low six figures and rising and he's willing to spend a good chunk of it buying dates. Boston is one of a growing number of 21st century sugar daddies: well off men who unabashedly pay for female companionship, friendship, and sex. And he's probably getting more of the latter than most of the other men here.
Three years ago, Boston seemed an unlikely sugar daddy. A married Mormon with three sons, he had a Cupertino condo, an Apple paycheck, and a vanilla sex life. But then he started seeing a therapist about issues that had been tugging at him for years: his self identification as a sapiosexual, or someone who is sexually attracted to intellect, and as a polyamorist, drawn to having more than one romantic and/or sexual relationship. On the sly, he googled "married dating," and the search results opened Door B.
Boston was intrigued by SeekingArrangement, a website where so called sugar daddies can connect with "sugar babies" looking to be pampered and paid on an ongoing basis, and WhatsYourPrice, where men bid on first dates with women who can accept the bid or demand more. The site's blunt pitch to women: "Get Paid to Date." The more subtle appeal to men: SeekingArrangement claims to have more than 40,000 female Bay Area members, compared with just 12,000 men. WhatsYourPrice boasts a similarly favorable ratio.
Boston began soliciting dates with women aged 31 to 63, stating in his profile that he was married. "Winks" Pandora Charms Sale from women showing their interest in his profile some of them alarmingly attractive in a blow dried Laguna Beach way started rolling in at the rate of three to four a week. And so Boston became a dating machine, landing rendezvous with about 30 women so far. The leggy brunette in hot pink stilettos. The busty artist. The therapist. The real estate agent. The UC Berkeley student.
Boston makes a $40 bid for an initial coffee date or dinner to vet a woman for compatibility. His date may then design a fantasy night out for which he handles all expenses. He also compensates the date for her time if she asks, matching what he calculates as her overtime wages, sometimes $25 to $50 an hour. The woman can choose and Boston emphasizes in his profile that he respects her choice either "good clean fun," like hand holding and small kisses, or "friends with benefits."
Beyond the costs of the dates, Boston has helped with other expenses: an Ikea bed, a transmission, a Tiffany bracelet. "Some people spend money on cars or a vacation," Boston says. "I prefer to spend it on people I have a crush on."
Boston views his munificence as a sort of philanthropy, a horny twist on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's call for tech workers to give back to the region's less fortunate. He prefers to pay for things that contribute to his dates' careers, like tuition, or that "help them get from a bad place to a good place," like taking someone who's feeling glum out for Valentine's Day.
Boston's new lifestyle has had consequences. His wife divorced him (she dismissed his claim of being polyamorous as Pandora Charms Sale just an excuse for cheating), he says that he was excommunicated from the Cupertino Mormon church, and he's living in a trailer. But he evinces no regrets when he talks about his new life: booking as many as three dates a week and nurturing three to four ongoing liaisons, including one with a dominatrix from Oakland to whom he pays $1,000 for four dates monthly. He even seems excited about a date who pickpocketed him. "She was amazing! You get to see a part of life you never get to see! How would I ever get to date a person like that? You think they work at my business? They don't work at Google."
At happy hour, Boston's coworkers pump him for details: How is going out with a sugar baby different from hiring an escort? He answers that he hires escorts, too, but that sugar babies are more like real dates. He doesn't care if his peers judge him he is transparent (Bruce Boston is his real name), awash in women, and, frankly, effervescent about it. Sugaring, he says, has changed his life.
Is sugar dating just a genteel form of prostitution, the latest incarnation of an age old pay to play tradition? Or is it a form of erotic efficiency, a cut to the chase innovation in a supercharged culture with no time for the dance of courtship? "When I look at OkCupid, it takes 20 emails, five minutes each, to get a response," one tech industry sugar daddy tells me. "That's too long. My time is more valuable than that."
Whatever it is, sugar dating is on the rise. The sheer amount of money coursing through the region is largely responsible: Sugar daddy sites started popping up on the Internet about a decade ago, but the top three sites in the Bay Area have reported a dramatic acceleration over the last three or four years of Tech Boom 2.0. On SeekingArrangement, the top three self reported job categories are entrepreneur (20 percent), high ranking executive (18 percent), and software engineer (16 percent). Two of the sites claim Bay Area memberships of more than 100,000 members, though only a fraction of those profiles are visible; the sites say that they don't want to overwhelm users with choices and that members often choose to be invisible. (The membership numbers are self reported and impossible to verify.)
The sugar daddy universe at its most lurid made headlines in July, months after married Google X executive Forrest Hayes died on his yacht of a heroin overdose allegedly injected by Alix Tichelman, a woman he'd hooked up with on SeekingArrangement. After Tichelman was arrested for manslaughter, her attorneys told reporters that she was receiving good money from Hayes and had every reason to want to keep him alive.
The Tichelman story cast a tabloid esque, tawdry light on paid dating. And in the progressive Bay Area, with its feminist, antipatriarchal ideals, the sugar daddy phenomenon seems weirdly out of step, a march backward toward a class stratified sexual world reminiscent of 19th century France or Gay Pandora Charms Gold 14K (18)90s San Francisco, when well off married gentlemen installed their mistresses in swanky apartments. Yet some (a few sugar babies among them) argue that the sites are harbingers of a clear eyed future in which women take control of their romantic, or at least their financial, lives. Given the Bay Area's growing income disparity one that often divides along gender lines and the increasing cost of living here, sugar dating can be seen as a pragmatic move for women. If you're already dating online, adding a financial filter doesn't seem like such a big deal.
Despite that, there's something intrinsically creepy about sugar dating. It seems to turn the most basic of human needs the desire for companionship into a calculation in which men use money to buy intimacy, and women sell their time (and potential access to their bodies) to the highest bidder. But interviews with men and women who post profiles on sugar sites reveal individuals who are far more complex than the stereotypes suggest.
Online profiles of sugar daddies reveal a spectrum of the stressed, the bored, the insecure, the sexually voracious, and the commitment averse. There's the 53 year old Silicon Valley guy who says that he could find a girlfriend on his own, but that "not many women would accept the fact I'm focused on my career at the moment." There's MasterRaj, a 35 year old beefcake from Palo Alto who rakes in more than $300,000 and claims to be "sexually dominant in the bedroom." And there's the 34 year old "business tech geek" looking for "a relationship that turns on and off with the flip of a switch."
Some sugar daddies are looking for under the table liaisons that require discretion: People can choose "married but looking" as their relationship status on SeekingArrangement. Others are looking for ongoing sex or just young arm candy. One married man on the site told me that sugar dating wards against relationship "scope creep" that is, getting too serious. Others like the clarity around the monetary needs of the woman. ("I don't view the whole trophy wife thing as significantly different," one sugar daddy told me.)
Chris, a video game designer, is definitely not an exploitative john; in fact, if anyone's being exploited, he seems to be the one. I meet him in a cheap SoMa coffee shop he's a hip looking guy with black nerd glasses and stylized black hair swooping about his temples, scribbling monster cartoons in a black notebook. Like many sugar daddies, the 33 year old is a decidedly non alpha male. Speaking in sporadic and sometimes not quite linear bursts, he admits that he has never had a girlfriend. He says that he decided to engage in practice relationships with sugar babies in hopes of someday graduating to nonpaid courtships with women. (Chris's name, like many others in this story, was changed to avoid stigma and Google searches. Now is also a good time to disclose that many of the websites mentioned here, eager to promote themselves, offered their members upgraded memberships, and in one case $500, in exchange for being interviewed.)
In retrospect, Chris says, he should have seen the warning signs about 23 year old Sarah. There was her SugarDaddyForMe profile, which read, "I like shiny things like gems and diamonds." And there was the fact that she stood him up on New Year's Eve. But when she texted one Sunday that she needed a ride to her job at a jewelry shop, Chris obliged, and he "was blown away by how beautiful and exotic she was." Sarah stared at him intently during the ride in what he considered to be an "interesting but kind of creepy" attempt at seduction. Getting out of the car, she said she was having an "existential crisis" at work and needed a $3,000 Bottega Veneta purse.
When Chris agreed to buy it, Sarah blew off going to work, and they went to the Bottega Veneta store near Union Square. He also treated Sarah to a high end haircut and took her to dinner at Hamano Sushi in the Castro. "I felt we were on some kind of an adventure in the city, trying to help this young lady I befriended attain a certain level of class, so she can become the person she wants to be," Chris wrote me in an email. "I felt like we were a couple as she held my arm and gave this falling in love look in her eyes to me. I've never had that happen to me, so it was quite an eye opener." The two returned to Sarah's Noe Valley apartment, Chris hoping that he might be about to get lucky. But at the door, Sarah claimed to be worried that someone named Craig would find out. As Chris walked away despondently, Sarah blurted out a parting "I love you!" Chris never saw her again.
Many sugar daddies are not exactly Casanovas. "Let's be honest, a lot of those guys are kind of nerdy and didn't do too well with the ladies until they got a little bit of wealth," says Gautam Sharma, SugarDaddyForMe's founder. San Francisco sex therapists Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel say that men on the sites often have lagging self esteem. Harel says, "I have a client who doesn't believe he can find a date otherwise. He's doing it so he doesn't need to deal with being rejected." Hirschman adds that many sugar daddies are resigned to the fact that women are attracted to them partly because of their wealth. "These men know that women will choose them because they're able providers."
But the simple knowledge that money not looks or charm or chemistry is the factor that secures a date doesn't mean that some men aren't hoping for more emotional nourishment. In fact, there are cases when sugar daddy arrangements end up being just as fulfilling as typical dating relationships.
A 56 year old South Bay computer engineer from South America, whose screen name is Captain Harlock, joined SugarDaddyForMe while in a sexless marriage. (He is now separated.) Captain Harlock, who prefers women over 35, describes the money driven motivations of some of the younger women on the site as "sordid." He says that when one woman who had advertised herself as 35 confessed on their first date that she was actually 10 years older, he "was so relieved she couldn't understand why." They started an 18 month liaison during which he paid her $1,600 to $2,000 a month, usually in the form of checks to PG Verizon, and San Jose State, where she was earning a nursing degree. They became quite close and eventually did have sex. "I helped her because we liked each other, and not the other way around," Captain Harlock says. "It's hard after a certain point to know what is a sugar daddy and a sugar baby." He likes the clarity of the financial expectations on SugarDaddyForMe, noting that on OkCupid, where he also dates, women can be just as money motivated but are less up front about it.
Captain Harlock's observation has merit: Studies have shown that people who use mainstream dating websites make their decisions based largely on the very criteria that sugar sites make explicit. On average, women are looking for men who make more money, and men are looking for women who are more attractive." |
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