RSS
Home
Established Men Review: Do you need a Sugar Daddy?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.jpg)
Photo by Salvatore Vuono
You readers know I try to stay on top of the current dating trends. So when a sugar daddy dating service, EstablishedMen.com, contacted me, I was more than interested in interviewing their CEO, Simone Dadoun-Cohen.
I’m not really a trained journalist, although Simone kindly referred to me as such during our phone call. Thus, I didn’t really have an idea of what to ask someone who runs a website catering to sugar daddies and their “Perfect Princesses.” (I am not making that up, that’s what the women are called). Last night while talking to my boyfriend, I wondered aloud if I was attractive enough to be an escort and have my own Sugar Daddy. I noted that I would ask Simone. My boyfriend responded with “Are you sure you want to ask if you don’t know the answer?”
Well, screw you, sir. His response was enough to urge me into action. I created an EstablishedMen.com account to check out the other ladies and see how I measured up. And ha! I am at least attractive enough to be on the site (although Simone did tell me that any woman can sign up, because “attractiveness is subjective,” which did not make me feel any better). I also signed up as a Perfect Princess to see how the process would work if I did in fact want a Sugar Daddy.
Now, we could have a whole conversation about how we feel about women going out with men just for the money, but I’m not going to do that, and here’s why: If you think it’s perfectly acceptable or completely abhorrent to date someone expecting the person to give you money or lavish presents or support your lifestyle, you’re not going to change your mind. So I’m going to approach this as a basic dating site review.
Pro:
It’s very specific. I’ve always been kind of jealous of Jdate, Geek2Geek, and TattooedSingles.com, because those are very specific sites for people who know very specifically what they want. This is the same: if you are a younger attractive woman and looking for an older "more established" and "financially stable" or even a wealthy man, or vice versa, this is the site for you (in fact, I’m emailing it to someone later today because the last time we went to dinner she told me her perfect age for a guy was 52, and she is 30). In the first hour of signing up, I was sent matches that, if I was looking for a rich older man, I would have been very interested in.
Con:
You can’t really be sure the women, or the men, are who they say they are. In an interview with LeDrew Live, Simone stated that the men go through a rigorous vetting process, and they have to pay a fee, and just the fact that they are paying shows that they have a serious investment in it. To test this, I set up a fake account and was not charged. I couldn’t e-mail someone unless I had a picture, but luckily I happen to have my friend Bob’s picture from when he was at some sort of medieval war reenactment as a member of the SCA, dressed up like a Duke in a maroon floppy hat and tights and the whole bit.* With this picture, I was able to e-mail someone successfully, and my Princess profile could see Sir Bob’s profile. Simone legally couldn't say much about the vetting process, but the monthly charge for men (with some sort of premium account) is $49, or a lifetime membership for $700.
As Match.com averages $35/month, I don’t believe the difference in pay is enough to ensure the men subscribed do have a lot of disposable income. Simone did say that they constantly have staff monitoring the site to ensure people seem realistic and aren’t overtly advertising for sex alone.
Pro:
Both the women and men on the site are surprisingly good looking. I have frequented a lot of dating sites (match, eharmony, okcupid, plentyoffish) and the people at EstablishedMen are overall significantly better looking. ** Since the site doesn’t ban people from joining the site based on their pictures, that means that the men, in general, are probably more successful than your average man (good looks= better success, says science) and the women are probably capable of accurately judging their own looks and knowing whether or not they’d have success on the site.
Con:
It’s a little shallow. This is just my opinion, obviously. But you have a bunch of attractive women saying things like “I like nice things” or “I’m looking for potential help in starting my life” and a bunch of men listing off their possessions to prove how much money they have. Maybe it’s my Mennonite background, but the whole thing made me want to get drunk immediately, as I do when I’m in a Scottsdale bar surrounded by the same scene. The underlying suggestion is that the man provides and the woman looks pretty.
When I asked Simone what, if any, effect she thought that might have on a woman in our generation who has been raised to believe that men and women are equal in all respects, including relationships, she responded with this:
“It’s not about the money, it’s about what the money represents. I want to surround myself with people who inspire me to be better—educated, goal-oriented, very hard worker, and successful.”
It’s true, a sugar daddy can be those things, but someone who is not a sugar daddy can be those things as well.
Pro:
It’s just a dating site. From reading the profiles, some people on the site are looking for a sugar daddy or a perfect princess. But a lot mention relationships, long term relationships, wanting a friend, and so on. If you’re on the site, it doesn’t automatically mean you want a specific type of relationship.
Men usually listed their income and women usually didn’t, but I saw more than a few Established Men were making in the $75K-$100K salary range. To me, that person is not interested in being a sugar daddy, although Simone explained that person could have more disposable income than the guy worth $2 million. Many profiles didn’t mention money at all, and people would be forced to work out the details of their relationship on a case-by-case basis, as with any other type of mainstream dating site.
Con:
The Blogs. I liked Simone personally. I liked the fact that she said no woman should feel pressured to sleep with someone just because they met on a sugar daddy dating website and the person was buying them things. I liked that she is obviously an independent career-woman with a life of her own, in addition to her family. But Simone’s experience isn’t typical of what you’ll find on EstablishedMen.com. She met her husband when she was 20 and dancing at a club. He’s only 5 years older than her (I would not consider that a sugar daddy) and they got married at 21. Obviously, theirs was a romantic relationship. I asked her if she would have a different perspective on this if things with her husband hadn’t worked out, that is if over the past 9 years she had been relying multiple sugar daddies to maintain her lifestyle and gain connections. Her response was “That would be fine, as long as I kept my identity.”
Simone has a blog, called “The Princess Perspective.” In one entry, she cites a 28-year-old woman, Nadia, who works 2 jobs, as a book editor and goat cheese peddler, to make ends meet. Here’s a quote:
“I don’t need to tell you just how unappealing a 28-year-old boy who deems a day “f’n awesome” if he found enough time to scratch his overexposed balls while out farting with the rest of the guys, can be to a women of Nadia’s caliber. What Nadia needs, as do apparently 2 million other American women, is an Established Man. Why work at selling cheese all weekend long, when you can spend it enjoying an intimate cheese and wine tasting at the vineyard? Why forgo the pursuit of passion just to make a few extra bucks when you can actually live out your dreams with a well-paid top dog who’s got a passion for making you happy?”
Many people probably see Simone’s point as a logical and convincing argument. Why go to all this trouble with my career when there could be someone out there, sure, perhaps someone a little older, who can fix all that?
I guess I feel like making it on my own is, in itself, actually living out my dreams. But hey, the sugar daddy thing worked for Simone, so feel free to try out the site. Ladies, no charge.
*I took the picture down after emailing. Sorry, Bob.
**What site has the ugliest? Okcupid, but probably just because it has more people in general.
Related Articles:
Comments
