The art students turning to sugar daddies to support their degrees

Seeking.com is the ‘luxury’ dating site offering free premium membership to those with a university email address. It’s a financial minefield for art students right now, but is sugar dating the solution? Dora Densham Bond explores

A collage of photographs from the seeking.com website for sugar dating
Seeking.com is a ‘sugar dating’ site that offers a free premium subscription to students

London is a city that can eat you up and spit you out. All you have to do is breathe and you’ve spent 20 quid. For many, financial precarity is just part of reality. Last year, London retained its status as the fourth most expensive city in the world. Most university students living in The Big Smoke won’t need statistics to tell them that. According to a 2023 study conducted by UCL, 68% of students say they can’t afford course material. These days, even getting a job in a bar is competitive. Without the privilege of financial backing from your family, surviving (let alone thriving) in London can feel like trying to make it out of Panem in The Hunger Games. For art students, combine living costs with a shopping list of expensive paints or sculptural materials and you’re heading for trouble, or a wanted poster on the wall of Cass Art.

What happens when you’re met with what, at first glance, seems like the easiest and most lucrative side hustle you’ve ever heard of? I’m talking about the fast-growing phenomenon of sugar babying (or sugaring). For the uninitiated, this is an arrangement whereby a financially successful person – usually older – dates someone who is less financially successful, and usually younger in exchange for money, gifts or expensive wining and dining. 

The best known platform for this is Seeking.com (formerly known as SeekingArrangement),  a ‘luxury’ dating site founded in 2006 by American entrepreneur Brandon Wade. It promises a “sophisticated matchmaking” service for “success-minded singles” where members “can make exceptional connections and find hypergamy” (that’s dating someone of higher social or financial status). Its 46 million users are separated into two categories: ‘successful’ members or ‘attractive’ members (AKA mostly much older men or much younger women), and offers a premium subscription to any user that signs up using a university-verified email address.

Subscription websites like OnlyFans have been on the rise over the past few years as a means for content creators to earn money from admirers. Although there are always dangers in engaging with strangers online, Seeking.com is a more involved arrangement than flogging anonymous foot pics behind the relative ‘safety’ of a digital paywall. The focus is on IRL liaisons, and with that comes higher risks, and much less protection. Let’s not beat about the bush: there is often – whether hinted at or brazenly demanded – the expectation of sex. 

Wade has previously admitted that economics have “everything” to do with Seeking.com’s membership. “We definitely see a surge in sugar babies signing up in times of economic crisis. 40% of female members are students who are looking for another way to pay for school,” he told The Irish Examiner in 2012.

The homepage of sugar dating site Seeking.com
Seeking.com homepage

When money and power mix with desperation and a need to survive, dating norms can undoubtedly become warped. Is the world of sugar baby-ing an empowering, easy way to hack the system, or is it a slippery slope dragging young people – mostly women –  into a world of exploitation? According to 2018 stats from Seeking.com, reported in Artefact magazine, collegiate art school UAL (University of the Arts London) topped the UK chart with the fastest growing sugar baby membership. Since then, spiralling costs of living, increasing university fees, expensive materials and scant job prospects have only made things harder for art students, but are sites like Seeking.com the solution? 

You know the lyrics: She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College…she wants to live like common people… On an art degree course, it’s a trope that students ‘cosplay’ as working class, even when they’re not. For them, the ‘poor artist’ is just a character to emulate and embody. But there are those who don’t have to pretend, so how do they keep up? “I’ve been in situations where it’s like, ‘fuck, my rent is due and I have no way to pay it,’” Bella*, a UAL student told me. “My student loan isn’t coming for another month. The reality is that using the site is the quickest way to make money if you’re a young woman, and I don’t think that experience is rare.” She signed up to Seeking.com when she got in trouble for missing uni for working overtime in her hospitality job. “I have pictures of me holding all the cash [the sugar daddies] gave me. I felt like a rapper. I’d never held that much money before.” Art degrees, unlike other subjects, are often largely self-directed, involving workshops, group crits, some lectures and tutorials. It can be demanding in time and energy. “Whenever you aren’t at uni you’re expected to be in the studio,” Bella explained, “[sugar babying] was an opportunity to have autonomy over my time”. 

The ‘broke art student’ is a cliché that ‘daddies’ seem to be lapping up. Olivia*, who is in her second year at art school in London explained how one ‘daddy’ asked to commission a piece of work for him “while wearing lingerie” after he found out that she studied art. “‘It made me think about the cost of my labour and how much I sell my work for. Imagine if my first commission was for this guy,” she explained. “I’d never take less for my artwork than what I’d sell my body for. My mind over my hole!” Katie*, a student studying Fine Art at UCL first felt empowered by using the men on the site. “I would definitely try and play on the ‘struggling artist’ trope. I think it added to the mystique for them,” she told me. “I got comments like ‘you need to sort yourself out’ and ‘you need to get a proper job.’”

A screenshot of a sugar daddy dating profile on Seeking.com
Profiles on Seeking.com are divided into two categories: ‘successful’ members or ‘attractive’ members

Browsing Seeking.com, there is a sense that male users justify their complicity by claiming to ‘help’ prospective dates. They use words like ‘mentorship’ which suggests a prejudice against sex work, and that sugar babies are different from their definition of an escort. “I think they [the men] definitely get off on this power trip, this idea that you’re relying on them,” one female user told me. “There was a guy I saw who hid money in the hotel room for me. He’d text me and be like ‘have you looked in the drawer?’ And I’d be scrambling around the room trying to look for it. It was such a weird power play.” 

But what if sugar dating could not only provide money, but also material for art? As Jennifer explains, “I thought that my experience in doing sugar dating would give me crazy anecdotes that would inform my practice. The whole time I used it I was performing, both as a way of self-preservation, and because you’re trying to act in a way that you know they [the men] want.” 

Cosey Fanni Tutti is an artist who long engaged in sex work before her career as a performance artist. When her show ‘Prostitution’ exhibited at the ICA in 1976, unsurprisingly, the conservative media metaphorically spat out their tea, confirming their penchant for dramatics and brandishing Cosey as a “wrecker of civilisation”. The conversation surrounding sex work in the mainstream has hardly progressed and this stigma surrounding it leaves people afraid to reach out or speak up about issues. On top of that, sites like Seeking.com could be seen to perpetuate the cycle of exploitation by leaving women in a dangerous grey area. Labelling itself as a ‘dating site’, but functioning more as a marketplace for sex work. 

In author Sophia Giovannotti’s 2023 book Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, she describes rationalising the beginning of her career as a sex worker as an “art project” in order to both justify a dangerous choice and protect herself from stigma – because “making art can justify a recklessness that making money doesn’t.” If anyone can do anything in the name of art, where do you draw the line? If art is the search for the truth, how far should you push yourself in order to find it?

Exhibition preview of 'Prostitution' by Cosey Fanni Tutti in the ICA Bulletin in 1976
Preview of ‘Prostitution’ in the ICA Bulletin for Oct/Dec 1976. COUM Transmissions, Prostitution, ICA (London), 1976. © Courtesy of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Cabinet, London

Celine*, who studied an art foundation course at CSM describes a more dangerous experience in the sugar world. She moved to London, struggled to balance work and her course and turned to Seeking.com after hearing about how ‘glamorous’ it was from a friend. Aged 21, she fell into a self-destructive cycle on the website and started seeing a 35-year-old tech bro who was earning a modest £800k a year. He invited her to do drugs with him at his flat, which led to five-day binges. “I was totally naive, I thought it would be like Pretty Woman. I thought maybe it would be interesting – a performance to see how far I could push myself – and I was desperate for money.” For many, the idea of young women meeting up with potentially dangerous strangers is concerning enough on mainstream dating apps. When money becomes part of the equation, the stakes rocket. “When I started using it, I definitely wasn’t thinking about my safety,” says Maria*, who was 18 when she moved to London to start her Fine Art undergraduate degree as an international student. “[Sugar dating] seemed like the perfect opportunity to be self-sufficient, but the reality was a lot darker and I ended up getting taken advantage of.”

Another student from CSM tells me that she’s currently involved in a police investigation against a man she met on Seeking.com. She woke up naked in his bed after blacking out on a night out with him. “I could’ve died, to be honest I’m shocked it hadn’t happened earlier,” she tells me. “I felt so alone. I’d mention things to friends but in a jokey way, like, ‘Omg, I’m so silly’”. 

There was a guy I saw who hid money in the hotel room for me. He’d text me and be like ‘have you looked in the drawer?’ And I’d be scrambling around the room trying to look for it. It was such a weird power play.

Art student and ex-Seeking.com user

But not every experience is negative. And there are other options for users aside from the heteronormative relationships – older women looking for younger men, queer relationships –  but these tend to be a minority on the site. The reality of sex work is convoluted and there is no binary to people’s experiences with it. “I would use Grindr, Seeking.com, even Craigslist to find clients”, explains ex-sugar baby Jack*, who now works for a London-based arts magazine and began engaging in sex work straight after sixth form and throughout university.  Unlike other testimonies, Jack describes his journey through the world of sex work as one of the times in his life when he felt “the most in control.” Everyone’s experience is different, Jack entered into the job with some understanding of its realities, something that he feels offered him more agency. “I’d always been curious about the world of sex workers. As a kid, I was interested in the queer imaginary of rent boys. It’s quite a cultural thing, and I was big into books by Alan Hollinghurst and films by John Waters.” So you’re young, you’re hot and people want you. It’s a quick way to make money and if you know what you’re getting yourself into, why the hell not? Jack describes a scenario in which making shmoney from rich men can be simultaneously empowering and degrading. “To me, it was great because I felt like I held the power, being the object of desire and taking their money.” But the reality is that these people may have stark ideological differences to you and because of financial dependence, you just have to put up with it, even if your views are progressive. “One of my clients was a banker and he spent the whole time talking about Thatcherite economics,” he says. Some of the people Jack met with didn’t even want sex, just company. One man even paid for him to attend a funeral with him as his “protégé”, and then just “dropped off the face of the earth.” He goes on, “I learnt to detach myself from any responsibility for them. People are stranger than anything you could conjure up”.

Whilst every case is different, Jack believes that the majority of his clients became sugar daddies because they were lonely. Though this may also be true for heterosexual users, that reason could carry more weight for a person who knows they’re gay but are unable to come out in their real lives. 

A screenshot of a sugar daddy dating profile on Seeking.com
“People are stranger than anything you could conjure up.”

I attempted to reach sugar daddies who have had relationships with art students to contribute testimony for this article, but (perhaps predictably), the practicalities proved more difficult than hoped. Although it would have been interesting to hear their perspectives, whether it be down to their too-busy schedules running riot around Canary Wharf (or just being downright journo-phobic), they weren’t biting. I also gave Seeking.com the opportunity to offer comments but their PR company declined on the opportunity, or to provide us with any updated data. Perhaps less expectedly, I requested statements from a number of art universities for this article, and while some have publicly acknowledged that their students use services like Seeking.com, they declined to elaborate for this article. Instead, they directed me to vague, sometimes out-of-date statements already available on their websites. Although UCL is among a minority of universities who acknowledge sex work on their website, the vague statement that they “support a student’s right to choose to engage in sex work” didn’t appear to be backed up by any practical advice, and they declined to comment on the specific issue of their students using sugar dating sites to support their studies, along with Central Saint Martins who also turned down the opportunity to comment. 

Those involved in sugar dating are left in a murky grey area, navigating the realities of the site and the stigma surrounding it. It’s clear that sugar daddy-ing is not a quick, easy fix to financial problems. The burden can be great, the repercussions long-lasting and the risks huge. But the truth is, the financial problems that students are facing appear to be worsening, with university tuition fees recently rising by 3.1% from 2025. So what’s the solution?

Charities like Beyond the Streets aim to end exploitation and the stigma surrounding sex work. When I reached out to them, a spokesperson explained that they’ve supported a number of female students who are sugar daddy-ing through websites such as Seeking.com or are involved in other parts of the sex industry. Those reaching out for support may be unaware of hardship funds they may be eligible for, or may have been hesitant to apply “due to a sense of shame around needing money,” they said. “Covering their tuition fees, meeting their living expenses or wanting to avoid debt after university have been important motivators amongst those we’ve supported… The lack of adequate financial support with tuition fees and living costs has been a key factor. This can be especially so for those who are not in contact with their family, or their family doesn’t have the financial means to provide additional support.”

None of the testimonies suggest sugar daddy-ing is advisable, but this doesn’t mean there should be shame in it. After all, under capitalism, isn’t every form of labour a form of exploitation? It definitely doesn’t look like Keir will be enforcing rent controls anytime soon. Hasn’t a girl gotta do what a girl’s gotta do? 

Is it any wonder that art students are turning to sugaring to survive in a world seemingly designed to work against them? Whether it’s for an art performance, to pay for art supplies, or simply to cover rent costs, or even set themselves up for post-graduation, where the scarcity of art jobs means no guarantee of a career without free labour. The pressures are immense, but so too are the dangers. I asked one of the women what advice she would give to someone who’s considering using the site. She looked at me, drew a deep breath and exclaimed: “Don’t do it.” 

*The names of some sources in this article have been changed at their request.

Credits
Words:Dora Densham Bond

Suggested topics

Suggested topics