Dating for Money
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As university tuition fees rise and rise, young female students are flocking onto online sugar dating platforms to find wealthy older men who can foot the bill. But where is the line between sugar babies and escorts - or indeed prostitution?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to the founder of one such dating platform. Brandon Wade is founder and chief executive of seeking.com, which claims 10 million members worldwide. And she asks Kavita Nayar, who is researching computer-mediated intimacy and erotic labour at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, whether these young women are being exploited, or liberated.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Young woman with an older man bearing a gift; Credit: Stockbyte/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.3 | Every baby needs a dad, dad, daddy to keep her worry free. |
| 0:12.3 | Coming up, the rights and wrongs of dating for money. |
| 0:16.2 | I will take a man who has taught me something over someone who has bought me something, |
| 0:21.5 | but I do like flowers and random gifts are very welcome. |
| 0:25.2 | But when does dating a so-called sugar daddy cross over into escorting or even prostitution? |
| 0:31.5 | Every baby needs a dad, dad, daddy. Could, could my Dad Daddy be you? |
| 0:38.2 | Blurred lines here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:43.9 | Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, so the old saying goes. |
| 0:49.7 | But in some cultures, while love may be a desirable outcome of marriage, it's not seen as a good |
| 0:54.9 | reason for getting married in the first place. Even in the West, the ideal of marrying for love |
| 0:59.8 | is only a couple of centuries old. Of course, people fell in love before then, but it was the German |
| 1:04.9 | literary titan Gerta in the 1700s who popularized romantic love as an ideal. |
| 1:14.2 | So what are we to make of an increasing number of websites today that encourage people to get together for financial reasons? |
| 1:18.1 | One of them is Seeking.com. |
| 1:20.7 | Wikipedia describes it as a site where sugar daddies meet sugar babies, |
| 1:25.0 | in other words, where wealthy older men meet younger, less wealthy women. |
| 1:29.7 | Seeking.com claims to have 10 million members worldwide and bills itself as a site where, in |
| 1:35.8 | its words, beautiful, successful people fuel mutually beneficial relationships. |
| 1:41.2 | When someone asks you for a first date, you can choose one body part to show off. So |
| 1:45.4 | if you have really nice long legs, you can wear a shorter skirt, but then you should be covered up on |
| 1:50.3 | top and vice versa. So not to dress in an overly sexual manner. That's not really going to get |
... |
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