One of the friendships I value most in the world is with an ex-daddy turned bestie. Our conversations get quite candid and we offer advice to one another through a perspective that transcends age, class, race, and gender. On paper, we are total opposites but over the phone, we are just two humans trying to navigate the challenges of everyday life together.
On our latest catchup call, I gave my insights into how I think he and his wife should go about handling their adolescent daughter, who is currently struggling with an eating disorder — something I went through at the same age. Then came the juicy part: he wanted my unfiltered opinion about a hookup that had transpired with an on-and-off again sugar baby a few days prior.
The Backstory
Here’s the rundown: Prash met Anna several years ago through a sugar daddy site. According to him, the chemistry was instant. Being a man with a high libido and demanding sexual needs, he was transparent about the fact that she was not the only baby he was having sex with. As a bit of a flake herself, this was more than okay in her book. The pair hooked up between 5-8 times over the course of the next two years, and he paid her $800 each time. As a married man, condoms were non-negotiable.
When the pandemic hit, Anna moved back home to Florida and Prash accepted that the fling was over. But last month, she reached back out. She had returned to New York and was interested in seeing him again. Trying to cut back on sugar expenses, he was hesitant at first but ended up obliging. The two had a wild night out that started with cocktails at a bar and ended with blow and crazy sex in a seedy hotel room.
Both were blasted in the moment of intercourse and it was Anna, not Prash, who initiated sliding his cock into her without a condom on. He pulled out when he was about to cum and the two passed out together in spooning formation — a testament to the authentic intimacy that was occurring.
In Prash’s eyes, the connection leading up to the unprotected sex had escalated. This was why he and Anna had felt comfortable not using a condom. He was starting to catch feelings and thought that she might be too. The next morning, Prash was still feeling frisky. He started stroking her body and when she was fully awake, he initiated sex.
Figuring that he had already raw dogged her just hours before, he assumed that having another round of unprotected sex would be a non-issue. The sex for him was great. He gave her the agreed-upon allowance and they departed from the hotel and went about with their lives.
A day or so later, Prash followed up with a friendly, “I had a really great time with you. Let’s do it again soon” text. To his surprise, he was met with coldness. “Maybe she’s just running away from her feelings,” he surmised. But when the conversation all but fizzled out, he decided to be direct: “Hey what’s going on? I sense a distance between us and I’m a little confused because it felt like we were really vibing.” She responded with a block text. The overall gist was, “I did not consent to morning sex without a condom and I feel violated.” Prash was stunned. How could he have perceived their encounter so differently than she had?
An Intergenerational Divide Surrounding Consent
In asking for my advice, Prash was already well aware of the differences in what constitutes as consent across different generations. “I’ve fucked Get-Xers, millennials, and Gen-Zs and they are all so different about this stuff. I understand the nuance and I’m always mindful of respecting boundaries, especially amongst the younger, more sensitive cohort.”
Anna falls into the Gen-Z category. She’s grown up in a hyper woke culture, in which having sex when you’re too fucked up counts as sexual assault. Just a few years older than Anna myself, I struggle to accept this reality. Obviously if a woman is passed out or is significantly drunker than her lover, I consider it to be a non-consensual encounter.
But if the man and woman are equally drunk, then I believe the woman is accountable for her body and whatever happens to it. We’ve all woken up from a night of heavy drinking and felt a wave of shame wash over us, as we look at the person sleeping naked next to us in bed and ask ourselves, “How the hell did that happen?” It’s 100% valid to feel icky and regretful about a raunchy night out. But that doesn’t mean we have to snowball a less than stellar sexual encounter into a, “I did not give consent, therefore I was raped” conclusion.
It’s no wonder to me that men are scared of being cancelled. A predator is a predator but what about when there is simply a lack of communication that leads to one party feeling violated and the other party feeling confused about how they violated the other person? The interesting part about the Anna / Prash scenario is that Anna admits to fully consenting to unprotected sex the night of. It was the morning after, when she was totally sober, in which she felt she had been assaulted.
This begs the question, “Why then?” Did she have no recollection of the night before in which she had instigated the no-condom rule? Was she just not in the mood and therefore felt like she had to play along so she could get her cash and dip? Does she have past trauma that was somehow triggered only in that morning session? Or is she merely just a product of a society that gives women power through victimization (i.e “I felt disempowered by this so I am going to blame the man in order to absolve my regret and remain the faultless heroine in my narrative”)?
How Money Complicates Consent
Money only complicates already complicated matters such as these. To a degree, agreeing to have sex for money is a form of consent. I think in the realm of sugaring especially, sex workers are less likely to set and uphold clear expectations about what services a client can expect and for what amount of money.
This is where things get tricky. Whereas an escort might have a menu of services — something like: $500 per hour of sexual intercourse and an additional $250 for a blow job, a sugar baby is far more likely to just go with the flow and bend over backwards to make sure her Daddy leaves feeling satisfied. If he doesn’t, how can she expect that he will become a long-term provider?
There’s an unspoken agreement between a sugar baby and a daddy that paying an allowance absolves the daddy from having to feel like he is engaging in a transaction. More times than not, it’s the cherry on top of a genuinely enjoyable date — not some invoice of sexual positions and corresponding dollar amounts. In the case of Prash, it makes sense that he would assume that morning sex counted as spillover from the good times before, without feeling an obligation to double his allowance. Daddies don’t pay for the number of loads they blow after all.
When he came to me for advice, I told him about a similar situation I once found myself in. An unknown daddy was in town for the weekend and was willing to pay twice as much for a pay-per-meet than anyone I had ever met before. As such, I felt obligated to give him whatever he wanted, which ended up being no condoms and anal sex.
The night of, I felt okay with it. But the next morning when he started to insert his dick into my asshole again, I froze in panic. I was still sore from the night before and didn’t want to do it again. I totally detached from my body, staring blankly at the wall as I held back tears and whispered into the pillow, “Please stop.”
He kept going until he was done. Afterwards, I went to the shower and had a total breakdown. I managed to pull myself together, put a smile on my face, and bid him a fond farewell. The huge wad of cash he tucked into my purse on the way out made it all worth it – or so I told myself at the time.
Looking back, I don’t think this man intended to rape me, but the end result trauma. When I relayed this to Prash, I said something along the lines of: “I’m not saying this was you. But you have to understand that when a sugar baby finds herself in a position like this, she feels like she has to go along with whatever the daddy says or else he will get upset and refuse to pay her.”
“I get where you’re coming from,” said Prash, “But your thing was a one-and-done. You had never met the guy and so it’s understandable that you couldn’t trust him to compensate you fairly even if you failed to sexually satisfy him to his liking. With Anna, she knows I’m a good guy who would never not pay just because she didn’t want to have sex a second time.”
“You might feel that way, but there’s an unspoken power dynamic between you two which probably contributes to her sense of powerlessness, even if that’s the last thing you want her to feel,” I countered, “Money, age, and status dynamics were all wrapped up into this fleeting moment of passion. I’m not saying what you did was wrong. I’m just saying that Anna probably has a lot of conflicting feelings about the situation and so it makes sense that she’s jumped into the victim role. That’s how modern-day feminism has conditioned her to react.”
Turning Lemons into Lemonade
“You’re totally right, thanks for that perspective,” Prash said before continuing to fill me in on how the confrontation had played out. He had apologized profusely, insisting it was never his intention to make her feel uncomfortable, while getting real about his feelings for her and the guard he had let down around her for the first time since getting his heart broken a couple years back.
She admitted that she had past traumas that were undoubtedly souring her view of both Prash and the situation at hand, but that even with this newfound awareness, she had no interest in hooking up again. The damage had been done – a reality Prash accepted graciously.
Going forward, he strives to be more verbal when it comes to asking for consent and is proud of himself for not only issuing an authentic apology, but for baring his soul to her with regards to his own intimacy issues. It wasn’t the outcome that he had hoped for, but he took the whole thing as a lesson on how to better interact with women going forward.
Now I can’t read Anna’s mind, but I like to believe that she has also grown from this experience. For starters, she held space for Prash to talk about his feelings and point of view, demonstrating her ability to be open-minded and give a man the benefit of the doubt – something toxic modern-day feminists tend to avoid at all costs. Secondly, she was able to forgive while also staying true to herself by maintaining her boundaries.
It would have been so easy for this to have escalated into a situation where neither party felt heard. Had this been the case, both Anna and Prash would have walked away doubled down in their respective point of views and angry at the other person. Instead, an uncomfortable conversation became an opportunity for growth.
In an ever divided world, we need more frank conversations like these – where people can actually listen to one another and adjust their actions accordingly. In the words of Turkish scholar, Fethullah Gulen, “Mature people never make difference of opinion a means of conflict.”
Jules
Based in Brooklyn, Jules has dedicated her twenties towards harnessing her pussy power, exploring the muse, whore, and wild woman archetypes along the way. When not blogging, you can find her sweating the toxins out in a hot yoga class or sipping a matcha latte at a pretentious coffee shop, whilst she scribbles away in her journal.
