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Sex

My Life as a Sugar Baby

What started as a desire to sleep with experienced men spiraled into some form of sex addiction.
Not the author. Photo via Flickr user Silentmind8

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

When I was in high school, my life was like that of any other teen. I wasn't exactly a nun, but nothing foreshadowed that a couple of years in the future, I'd feel the urge to fill my days with sex. I studied hard, I smoked, I drank, and I had sex. My sex life was relatively unbridled, but in hindsight, it would be fair to say that I was already a bit bored with it at that time. The boys I slept with were hopeless, and I quickly grew tired of them. The sex never lasted more than five minutes, and after that boy would ask me something like: "Was it good?" and I'd lie every time.

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I sometimes cringe when I think about all the embarrassing moments you go through when you're a sexually active teenager. Explaining to a boy that he can't penetrate your clit, him trying anyway, no foreplay. I think I truly lost my patience when some guy started fingering my navel.

I moved to Montpellier in the south of France for college. Most of the students there were misfits studying the humanities, and in this more relaxed environment, I gradually learned to listen to my instincts. In this city where I knew no one, I felt free to do whatever I wanted without anyone finding out. In the bars my girlfriends and I went to, I never met any guy I liked. I wanted to find some older men—with more sexual experience than my male peers—and I didn't want any of my friends to meddle in that. So I decided to start looking for older men online, and not through regular dating sites.

I signed up to sugardaters.fr—the biggest website for French sugar daddies, sugar mummies, sugar babies, and toy boys to connect. A sugar daddy is a man of a certain age who maintains a girl much younger than himself—the sugar baby—in exchange for sexual services. A sugar daddy and a sugar baby establish a sort of relationship when they meet—more like that of a traditional couple than of a sex worker and a client.

After signing up for the site, I was immediately bombarded with messages—all from men in their 40s and 50s. You can find any type of guy on the website. Most noticeable are the guys who are gagging for it. They accost you by telling you that your photos give them a hard on, and they're a right pain. But for the most part, it's guys who write you a nice message trying to make you believe that they're interested in your personality.

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The idea of the millionaire sugar daddy with four yachts and nine villas who sweeps you off your feet and takes you away every weekend doesn't exist. Or if he does, I've never met him. Generally the men on the site are affluent but not to an extreme extent. They're usually managers, engineers, or doctors. I have no doubt some of them are married and want to escape the routine of married life without having to find a proper girlfriend or file for divorce.

The first guy I met invited me to go to Aix-en-Provences—a student city in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. He said he had a vacation home there, where he'd often go for the weekend to relax. Or, more likely as evidenced by the tan line left on his ring finger, to fuck a woman who wasn't his wife. It didn't bother me—it had been clear right from the start that I hadn't come to play Scrabble. And neither had he.

After the introductions and about 15 minutes of mandatory chit-chat, we went to the pool. I didn't bring a bathing suit, so we quickly skipped to the reason we were there in the first place. The guy wasn't half-bad, and while it was just the first time, I didn't have to fake an orgasm. Sleeping with someone like that is a bit like taking a line of coke: the supply creates the demand. We fucked all weekend, and I got a new handbag and like $400 out of it.

People like to describe sugar dating as a form of prostitution, but I really never did it for the money. It's not like I turned up my nose at those benefits—I often asked for a little perfume, a handbag, a massage, or just a nice weekend away. Those little things spiced up my life a bit. I never had the means to move into a bigger apartment—and I never intended to.

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After my first positive experience, I decided not to stop at just one man. I wanted to meet as many as possible. Back in Montpellier, I wrote to about ten men whose profiles were pretty similar to the one I had met in Aix-en-Provence. Pretty soon, I began to meet a new one every week.

I've never made a list, but I think I must have met between 80 and 100 men through the site. In the beginning, I mostly fucked them just for fun. I'd talk to a guy a bit before meeting with him, to know what kind of person he was before I slept with him. But it quickly became a routine, and that routine went from doing it whenever I felt like it, to doing it whenever I had the opportunity. It became just about sex, and I didn't really care to know who it was with. If I wasn't having an orgasm, I was bored.

The endorphins that gave me such an immense rush after an orgasm worked like a drug on me. The moment when I realized I might be taking this sugar baby thing a bit too far was when I one day found myself undressing even before the guy I was meeting had gotten to my house. So I decided to try something different: swingers clubs.

During the first months I frequented one, I would get off on all sorts of new kinky stuff, but I soon shifted to threesomes, gang bangs—and I recently participated in a double gang bang, where I watched another woman get fucked by a group of men until it was my turn. For a while, I was very drawn toward glory holes—getting penetrated by a penis coming out of a hole without even seeing the face belonging to the penis was an ideal way to get a quick fix.

That craving of a quick fix has been a part of my life for about a year now, and I know I won't get rid it easily. Other people kill time playing video games, but I sleep with strangers in their 40s and 50s. What started as a desire to sleep with experienced men spiraled into some form of undiagnosed sex addiction.

I guess I should soon want a different life. I should, at some point, get over my craving, grow up, get married, buy a house, have some children, get a dog, and finally file for divorce like everyone else. I sometimes feel weird and guilty that I don't live my life in a way that's judged conventionally sexually healthy, but the pleasure I get from it still outweighs the shame. I'm 22 now, and I know it has to stop some time. I might have to go find help to get over it. But it seems a terribly boring prospect to me now.

The author writes for VICE France under a pseudonym.