I’d been living with manageable vision issues when I went virtually blind overnight.
I had two four-year-old boys and I lived on my own with them when suddenly it felt as though my world came crashing down.
I was absolutely terrified and I didn’t know how I was going to cope with my sudden complete loss of vision, and with it my independence.
I’d had vision issues since my early twenties due to a condition called kerataconus, which makes everything incredibly blurry.
I had lost about 90 per cent of my vision in my left eye, but I could still read and drive because vision in my right eye was good.
In my early thirties I contracted glaucoma. It’s actually rare for someone to have both conditions and initially we managed it with surgical procedures.
I was living as a normal busy, single mum with my twins, Benjamin and Julian, when one morning I got up to go to a family function and I noticed that something didn’t feel right in my good eye.
It felt scratchy and sore, and my vision was incredibly blurry. Suddenly I could barely see out of either eye.
I thought I had an ulcer or something so I went to see my specialist who informed me that this was my condition worsening and it was permanent. It was only going to get worse.
The world as I knew it was over.
Karen with her twin sons.
Vision Australia sent an officer to train me how to do simple things that you take for granted, because suddenly I couldn’t even put a plug into a power point without a great degree of difficulty and frustration.
I couldn’t drive, and the thought of getting public transport was overwhelming. I became depressed as I just felt such a great amount of fear for our futures.
Initially, my family came regularly and helped us. They would stay over and ensure the house was clean and there was food in the house.
The council were also extremely helpful so I knew that the basics were taken care of, but my life had been so full before.
My world had become small.
I was so dependent on others and I felt incapacitated but it was my kids that kept me going. I told myself I could not just curl up in a heap.
I needed to be strong for them.
They were too young to really understand what was happening to me. I was still just mum in their eyes so for them it was just business as usual.
A mobility and orientation specialist from Guide Dogs Victoria and Vision Australia came to teach me how to use a long white cane. The cane took a while to get used to but as soon as I realised it was the key to my independence I embraced it.
Gradually, I became confident and I realised that I can go out on my own
Day by day, step by step, I realised that my life hadn’t changed that much. It was just different.
My biggest fear for my kids was being able to keep them safe. A mother’s instinct is to look after her children and I felt unsure if I could do it well now especially outside of the home.
Initially going out with them was frightening, but as I became more confident we were jumping on trains, and going on adventures together.
Now they’re nine and we are working better than ever as a team. They read me things, and help me as much as they can.
We recently went on our first overseas holiday together to Bali.
I’ve travelled a lot, and I truly desired my boys to have a full life and their excitement as the trip approached was incredible. All of us were just beside ourselves.
Bali was amazing. Everyone was so friendly and helpful. We stayed in a resort, and the boys had the time of their lives.
While we were there I’d hire a babysitter to come with us if we went out of the resort, just as an extra help for us and it worked so beautifully we’re planning another trip to the Gold Coast theme parks next.
Many people imagine going blind is the worst thing in the world and I admit, it has been hard, but there are many worse things that can happen to you.
After four years I’m now used to it I’m just getting on with my life with my kids.
October 15 is International White Cane Day. Visit Guide Dogs Victoriato find out more.
I met Kelly-Lee about three years ago when I was still living as Jon. I’d just come out of an abusive relationship and was not feeling great about my life.
Everything was different with Kelly-Lee immediately. She is very open minded and accepting and I just felt like I could be myself with her, even though I wasn’t 100% sure who that was.
After three months together I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. When we’d been together for about year Kelly-Lee went away for the weekend and I could no longer hide the feelings that had been welling up inside me. I sent her a text message and told her that I just wanted to feel pretty and wear a dress. She responded “ok, we’ll get you a dress.”
When Kel came home she bought a couple of dresses for me to wear, and she gently questioned me about whether I felt this was a comfort thing, or was it a transsexual thing?
At first I thought it was just a comfort thing. I loved wearing a dress, and felt very natural in women’s clothes but after about a week it bought up all of this stuff for me.
I remembered how when I was 13 I read an article about a policeman in the UK that had transitioned from male to female and I remember thinking that I didn’t realise that someone could do that.
I remember how sad I was that I would never be able to do that.
I remembered going to visit my grandparents around the same time and I’d lock myself in the bathroom and experiment with her makeup. I pushed all of these feelings down through my teens because I knew that no one around me would understand, I was bullied enough as it was.
I was a bookish kid. I was a bit of an outsider. I was bullied for being different; tall with sticky out ears and NHS glasses.
Puberty was depressing, and I just remember wishing I could not be who I was.
It’s not like I consciously knew I was in the wrong body, but I always felt like something wasn’t right. It was hormones, it was not fitting in, it was feeling different. It was a nasty mess of soup where all of these feelings were integral and affected each other.
I got married a week after my 25th birthday to a lovely woman. I buried all my feelings and just got on with being the person that everyone expected me to be. I am attracted to women, so playing heterosexual happy families wasn’t hard for me until suddenly it was.
I realised that I had kinks and sexuality issues rising that I couldn’t discuss with my wife so we broke up.
It was different with Kelly-Lee, though. I felt like I could tell her anything. I told her I wanted to transition into my true self. I was a woman, and I couldn’t deny it any longer. I could not live as Jon for another moment, I was Jody.
Kelly-Lee went to bed for two weeks and cried. She was mourning the loss of Jon. The picture she had of our lives together was now different.
Within weeks, I had come out completely. I wasn’t working at the time so there was nothing holding me back from completely transitioning.
I threw away all of my old clothes and I replaced it with dresses and tights, and told my friends that I was now living as Jody. I just got on with it, and I felt good about finally being my true self.
Three months after I came out Kel had a real bee in her bonnet about going to a shop across town where they were serving free tea.
She seemed edgy and distracted. She made me look away at something and when I turned back she was down on her bent knee, with a ring identical to the one I proposed to her with, and she asked me to marry her.
I knew then that I was with the most amazing woman in the world who loved me and accepted me for who I was.
Since I started hormone therapy I’m less of an arsehole. I used to be arrogant, but now I’m more gentle and nurturing. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or now I just feel happier within myself.
Maybe a bit of both.
Although I think it I will always be transitioning in a way, I also feel like now I have made it. I look like a woman, I’m accepted as a woman, and I finally feel like I am the person I always wished I could be.
People often tell trans people that they are brave but I disagree. It’s not brave at all, it’s just being true to yourself.
Mitchell Doyle was just 11 years old and in year six when his battle with anorexia and bulimia began.
“I was bullied about my weight in primary school so I started monitoring what I was eating and looking at fat labels. I was really obsessive over it all,” he says.
For the next two years, his eating disorder consumed him, leaving him on the brink of hospitalisation. A trip to the doctor scared him into eating again, for a while, but when he reached year 11, he spiralled out of control.
“In year 11, we were doing fat caliper and BMI tests in PE class in a group setting and it was very confronting,” he says.
“I was not only starving myself, I was also binging and purging and exercising to excess. It was really a lot more intense mentally and physically this time. I remember at one point it was so bad that I felt guilty drinking water. I would drink a glass of water and think, ‘Oh my god, I’m fat!’”
Eating disorders are traditionally considered to primarily affect girls and young women, but almost one in three male year 9 students used fasting, skipping meals, diet pills, vomiting after meals, laxatives and smoking cigarettes to keep off weight, figures released by eating disorders organisation the Butterfly Foundation found.
At the age of 22, Mitchell weighed the same as he did when he was 12. Before long, he was suffering from depression and became suicidal.
“I had the mentality that if I ate, I was not good enough,” he says. “I was worthless, fat and disgusting so that cycle of constant blaming and constant berating yourself every minute of the day became too much … I remember once out at dinner and didn’t have access to a bathroom to be sick.
“I was on the train home and was thinking you piece of shit and began hurting myself. I then took painkillers and ended up in hospital. I felt so bad about myself that the only way out was to kill myself. That happened three times.”
Now 25, Mitchell acts as a spokesman for boys and men battling eating disorders.
“We need to remove that stigma that we have all inadvertently built inside our society that males shouldn’t talk about their feelings and that men don’t cry,” he says.
“That’s ridiculous because we are all programmed that way and we all have the capacity to have emotions so why should we keep quiet about them.”
With the help of a psychologist, the support of family and friends, the practice of yoga and the act of mindfulness, Mitchell has freed himself from the grips of his eating disorder.
“What got me out of those negative thought patterns is finding what works for me,” he says. “Finding what support you have available and being open and honest about your mental illness is very important.”
If you, or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, depression or suicidal thoughts, please visit the Butterfly Foundation or Lifeline.
A two-year-old girl was indecently assaulted by her carer as he rocked her to sleep at a childcare centre in Sydney’s inner west.
Max Rowe, then 24, was allegedly caught in the act by a co-worker as she walked past a playroom in May 2015, copping a “clear and unobstructed” view of Rowe’s hand on the girl’s vagina area, outside her tights.
“Upon the door opening, the accused very quickly moved his hand away from the victim and turned his head in the direction of the co-worker,” police alleged in a statement tendered to Burwood Local Court.
The co-worker reported the incident to Family and Community Services and six days later, Child Abuse Squad detectives arrested and charged Rowe.
Rowe has pleaded not guilty to indecently assaulting someone under the age of 16 and is expected to face court later today.
Boosting your child’s intelligence has been proven to be quite simple, a study has found. So what does it come down to? A mother simply talking to her children.
Academics at Stanford University in California, US, found that just by hearing their mother’s voice, kids’ minds become more engaged.
It triggers neurons involved in emotion and reward processing, social functioning, detection of what is personally relevant and face recognition.
The researchers said this kind of brain activity could help determine the child’s social communication skills and shed light on autism.
Psychiatrist Dr Daniel Abrams and colleagues used MRI scanners on 24 healthy seven to 12 year-olds while their biological mothers and two other random women spoke “nonsense words” to them.
Hearing the mothers’ voices made an area in their brain crucial for emotion light up, and children’s social communication scores were predicted by the connections between the superior temporal sulcus and brain regions linked with emotion, memory, face perception and reward-related function.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first of its kind.
“Many of our social, language and emotional processes are learnt by listening to our mum’s voice,” Dr Abrams said.
“But surprisingly little is known about how the brain organises itself round this very important sound source.”
“We didn’t realise a mother’s voice would have such quick access to so many different brain systems.”
The IQ of the participants involved were at least 80, had no developmental disorders and all were being raised by their biological mothers.
“In this age range – where most children have good language skills – we didn’t want to use words that had meaning because that would have engaged a whole different set of circuitry in the brain,” Professor Venod Menon said.
When the children heard the women’s voices, even if they were less than a second long, they could still pick out their own mothers’ voices with greater than 97 per cent accuracy. It has been found that hearing their mum’s voice is an emotional comfort.
The study also linked to children gaining stronger social communication ability, which can help to understand autism.
The same researchers will be doing further studies on children with autism.
“Voice is one of the most important social communication cues. It’s exciting to see the echo of one’s mother’s voice lives on in so many brain systems,” professor Menon said.
Trending video: Woman becomes first Zumba instructor with Down syndrome
I was at an appointment with a Chinese practitioner recently and he noticed the Chinese symbol I have tattooed on my upper back.
Before anyone goes off on a cultural appropriation rant about my totes inappropes actions, I got this tattoo nearly 20 years ago before cultural appropriation was even a thing, apart from the fact that it’s obviously a huge thing even if 96.5% of people don’t completely understand it fully.
I’m now considering ancient languages so as not to offend. This sounds like I’m being a smart arse but I’m deadly serious. I’ve had some sanskrit tatts designed and I’m just deciding whether or not I actually want more tatts because these have to go on my arms.
“Is that a Chinese symbol?” he asked.
Yep
“Can I have a closer look?”
Sure
“What does that say?” he asked very slowly….
I told him the Chinese word, and then I translated it –
Integrity
“You think it says that?” he asked incredulously and my mind dashed to all of those pictures of dumb-ass bogans who get ridiculous tattoos without researching first.
“Are you saying it doesn’t?”
“Let me look again”
Then he laughed. And I laughed a nervous laugh because he was laughing and it could only have been eggier if one of us actually farted.
“Tell me!” I demanded.
The next few minutes were so awkward that they are hard to describe. He blushed, he tried to use his phone voice recognition and perform charades rather than actually speak the words.
I remember the exact moment I decided to get ‘integrity’ written on my body. I was on a bus in India. I spent a lot of time on buses for a few months in my early twenties and it gives you much time to reflect.
I had been thinking about the times I had been less than honest. I worked in bars, with drunk people everywhere and often I was drinking too, or worse.
Sometimes there was some loose ‘accounting’ that went down. Sometimes drunk people forget their change, or leave their wallet. I wasn’t always my best self in those moments.
One day one of my colleagues who I worked beside for months got busted fleecing the till. Her loose accounting involved taking a little bit extra and collecting it up over the night and taking a skim at the end… Clever if you can keep track so the till balances, not clever if you get caught.
I was shocked that my friend was a thief.
I was thinking about her in the dusty landscapes of India and I realised that any time I was less than 100% honest, I was no better than her and I decided that I would live my life with 100% honesty.
I would get the word integrity tattooed on my body to remind me that I could not live any other way.
When I told my mum about what I was doing and why she had a tear in her eye and she asked if she could get the same marking. I took her to The Illustrated Man where a huge, tattooed bearded guy inked my mum in the same spot.
Over the years, if I have been tempted to do something that I would not be proud of, I try to think of that mark on my back.
“Just tell me,” I demanded, cracking up at the ridiculousness of this situation.
“You have my full permission no matter how inappropriate it is to say to a client, what does my tattoo actually say?”
It still says integrity, if you look really closely. And squint a bit.
The thing is an almost 20-year-old tattoo that sees a lot of sun blurs like an old sailor’s tattoo and the blurring can make it look different.
He was too embarrassed to tell me what it means, but he indicated it means to kick someone somewhere.
“The bum?” I asked
“No, not the bum”
“The penis?” I thought by being anatomically correct he may spill the beans.
“Uh uh”, he replied shaking his head.
“The vagina???”
” I can’t tell you,” he said and the conversation was closed but he did not confirm or deny that I may or not have ‘vagina’ written in Chinese on my body.
I reckon it’s fairly safe to say that my tattoo that once had such a strong meaning now says something along the lines of “I want to kick you in the vagina” however knowing my luck it’s probably not vagina exactly but some fantastic Chinese slang for lady parts that is shocking to the average bear.
Hilarious.
If you can translate this tattoo and you can confirm or deny this, please, please, please, help me out!
PS My mum’s tattoo never saw much sun so is still in pristine condition in case you are wondering.
Danielle Colley
*Danielle Colley is a writer, blogger and mum. She is a regular contributor to The Weekly and other online and print publications.
Almost 90,000 young Australian women are turning to wealthy, older men to fund a lifestyle of pampering, designer clothes and international travel. But at what price?
Jessica is a 20-year-old beauty college graduate with a secret. Although she’s only just completed her diploma and didn’t have a job while studying, her tuition fees of $17,000 are already paid and she’s enjoyed a tax-free income of more than $300,000 over the past three years. While other students struggled by on baked beans and cheap wine, she dined at Sydney’s finest restaurants, went on lavish shopping sprees and had her hair done at top salons. And unlike most of her peers, she is not in debt.
But Jessica doesn’t have a trust fund; nor is she from a wealthy family.
“People ask, ‘where do you get all this money?’” she says. “But I don’t tell them; I just laugh it off.”
So who does fund her indulgent lifestyle? Wealthy, older men. “Sugar daddies” to be precise. For Jessica is part of a rapidly growing group – known as “sugar babies” – who are prepared to enter into “arrangements” with men in return for dates, gifts and money.
And she is by no means alone: there are nearly 90,000 young women registered in Australia on the dating website Seeking Arrangement (seekingarrangement.com.au) – a figure that has more than quadrupled in the past three years. There is, however, plenty of competition between them, with just 11,300 sugar daddies to choose from. In other words, for every cashed-up, older guy, there are almost eight pretty young women. Even taking into account that some sugar daddies like to have several sugar babies on the go at once, the odds are in tipped overwhelmingly in the men’s favour.
There is, of course, the obvious question of what these young women are expected to do in return for the money. Although it’s ostensibly a dating website, surely sex comes into it? Yes, says Jessica, but it’s not a simple cash-for-sex transaction – and it varies according to the deal negotiated between the couple if they decide to proceed after meeting up. “You would go out for drinks and take it from there,” says Jessica. “It’s not like you have to have sex at set times or anything.”
Gerard*, a financier in his late 40s from Sydney’s eastern suburbs, has had four arrangements since joining the site two years ago. “Mostly it’s companionship,” he says. “I enjoy spending time with beautiful ladies. But sex is very important too – it’s a culmination of it all.” So how does he ensure there’s no misunderstanding? “I am quite upfront – I say it’s about intimacy, I want to be with you physically as well as being intellectually compatible.”
In some cases, the relationships aren’t physical – or at least not to start out with. Sammy, 23, who is studying to be a teacher at the University of Newcastle, received $600 per date while she was seeing but not sleeping with a sugar daddy for six months. The Sydney-based arborologist, aged in his mid-40s, also covered the cost of their meals, drinks and activities. “It was amazing,” she says. “I wasn’t attracted to him or anything but he was such a lovely, generous man who wanted to spend his money on someone young and pretty.”
After six months, however, he told her he wanted to take their relationship to the next level. “I had always felt it was going to come to this,” admits Sammy. “I’m not proud of it but I did [have sex with him] because I felt I owed it to him. It was after that.. when I got home that I freaked out a bit and wanted to examine my morals and work out if what I was doing was wrong.”
Seeking Arrangement is, unsurprisingly, an ethical minefield. Critics argue it’s little more than prostitution – and anecdotally, some members appear to treat it as such. “The lines can be quite blurred,” admits Gerard. “There are some who will set the price by the hour. I met one lady.. who said ‘let’s just skip dinner and you can give me the $200 you would have spent on it and add it to the [agreed cash gift] and I will spend two hours with you.’” He declined to go ahead.
But the US-born company insists it is simply introducing people who can form “mutually beneficial arrangements”, in which each partner gives as much as they take.
Founder and CEO Brandon Wade, an ex-IT nerd who used his own site for dates before tying the knot with his youthful wife Tanya last year, argues it’s simply “a brutally honest” way for men and women to lay out on the table what they can bring to a relationship.
On the website’s registration, prostitutes and escorts are explicitly instructed not to join. Whether members are nevertheless engaging in a veiled form of sex trade – irrespective of whether they’d accept the label – is a matter for debate.
Buster, a debonair investment high-flier who splits his time between Switzerland and Sydney and joined the site 18 months ago, believes it is far more efficient and symbiotic than “civilian dating”, which he says is encumbered with games and hypocrisy. “Every relationship between a man and a woman has a financial underpinning,” he says. “Typically in our society, the male is the breadwinner and the female is financially subservient. I’ve looked after all my girlfriends and my two [ex-] wives, it’s just instinctive, so any attempt to reduce [sugar babies] to cheap gold-diggers is very foolish.”
There are other moral dilemmas. Neither Jessica nor Sammy will enter into arrangements with married men because they don’t want to be party to cheating on another woman. Some draw the line at threesomes: Sammy first heard about the site from a girlfriend who was in an arrangement with a wealthy Melbourne couple who used her as a “plaything on weekends, showering her with gifts”. Others don’t mind as long as it’s NSA (that’s “no strings attached” to the uninitiated). Either way, there’s no guarantee members will have been truthful about their relationship status.
Married with a teenage daughter, Gerard decided to become a sugar daddy to “spice up” his life. “I work really hard,” he says. “I had lunch with someone who was talking about it and it sounded like a fairytale to be honest.” He says he isn’t proud of cheating on his wife but claims it has helped his marriage. “If you have an outlet like that on the side, it takes off the pressure when you’ve been with the same person for a long time.”
So how does he keep his two lives separate? His family don’t know about his extra-curricular activities; as far as they know, he is working late or travelling on business. “I normally don’t tell [sugar babies] my surname unless I get to know them very well,” he explains. “I use a private email address and I have a second phone, which I keep at work in a drawer.” And what if he is recognised while out in public with a sugar baby? He would say she was a client or that he was interviewing her for a job or internship.
Jessica managed to keep her sugar daddies separate from her ordinary life until her boyfriend discovered her Seeking Arrangement profile when she forgot to log off her email. “He went in and read all my emails,” she says. “We broke up over it. But I’m young – I wasn’t going to marry the guy so it doesn’t really bother me.”
Clearly it’s in Seeking Arrangement’s interest to help maintain users’ privacy. As well as offering background checks, it assures potential sugar daddies that their credit card statements will never show the full name of the website. Sugar daddies pay for membership; for sugar babies it’s free.
There are many stereotypes about rich middle-aged men and their trophy girlfriends. But what do we really know about the members of Seeking Arrangement?
Spokeswoman Jennifer Gwynn says the average Australian sugar daddy is 41, earns an annual income of $259,000 and is prepared to spend $3,000 a month on his sugar baby.
Scroll through their profiles, however, and you glean a more colourful picture. Physically, there are all types: from the muscle-bound Adonis to the average Joe and very overweight (some of whom optimistically describe their body type as “athletic”). Many are old enough to be the average sugar baby’s father or, in some cases, grandfather.
The average sugar baby, says Gwynn, is 22 and also seeks a monthly allowance of $3000. This sum, however, varies within a range of $1,000 to $20,000 a month – presumably depending on their attractiveness, what they’re prepared to provide and level of interest.
The age difference is significant: all have anecdotes of being mistaken for fathers and daughters. Gerard is uncomfortable with it and seeks out women in their late 20s to early 30s. Buster embraces the fact his dates are often 30 years his junior: “Most 21-year-old women have the same emotional maturity as a middle-aged guy. These are biological cues that basically settle the argument they are destined to be together,” he says authoritatively.
Undoubtedly some online interaction is smoke and mirrors. Members typically don’t use their real names or details. It’s likely at least some shave a few years from their biological age, are over-flattering in their descriptions and liberal with Photoshop. Others perhaps don’t try hard enough. But, given the truth will come out when they meet, it’s probably not worth pushing too far.
Buster claims Seeking Arrangement’s method is based on sound anthropology, mirrored in the animal world with Alpha males. The 52-year-old, who coyly describes his estimated worth as “eight figures”, shares his theory that “innately, women are very charmed by and beguiled by successful men – they’re just following their hard-wired biological dictates. She is looking for a competitive advantage for her genes.”
In return, continues Buster, women provide “exquisite, intoxicating female charms”. His first arrangement was with a 23-year-old classical pianist. “It was just extraordinary: the cadence, the sort of dance where you go through the profiles, contact them, talk or Skype and then you meet,” he gushes. “It’s like pouring a nice bottle of white Bordeaux into two glasses – it just flows.”
Not quite as sophisticated, however, are some of the suitors who have approached Sammy. “No-one in their 20s is going to want to be with a man if [his profile picture] is a big fat, hairy body in his undies,” she says. To prove her point, she sends a screen grab of a message she received with an accompanying picture that is, indeed, of an overweight and hairy male torso in underwear. It’s hard to imagine even Alpha male magnetism will prevail in his case.
Then there’s the crude, explicit and downright creepy. Sammy has had approaches from a US sugar daddy who wanted to fly her over to be his maid and a Queenslander who wanted to pay her to live in a Playboy-style mansion, where wealthy men would pay to stay at weekends. Adds Jessica: “I had this guy [contact me] who said, ‘I want you to pretend to be my daughter and force yourself on me.’ I blocked him straight away.”
Jessica is realistic about the intentions of sugar daddies – and vets them carefully. “I’ve met a lot of arseholes on the site who’ve had no respect for women,” she says. “But out of a couple of hundred, there are some good guys, who will take you out and treat you like a princess.” Her sugar daddies have included a Melbourne surgeon, the owner of a Mercedes-Benz dealership and a man who she identified as a well-known American performer when he appeared on Channel 7’s Sunrise show the morning after she’d been with him.
Both Buster and Gerard believe arrangements are mostly about good company and enjoyment. But for at least some sugar babies, it’s more about the money.
Being a student is the most cash-poor period of our lives. At the dawn of adulthood, we are suddenly confronted by bills, rent, tuition costs and a host of discretionary outgoings that we don’t want to give up. With little or no income, it can be a stressful juggling act to avoid plunging into the red. And being young and a bit less worldly means many are on the lookout for a quick buck.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, universities have become a ripe recruitment ground for sugar babies. A list compiled by Seeking Arrangement shows more than 1,400 female students have signed up in Australia. As an incentive, students get a free upgrade to premium membership by registering an email address ending in “edu”. It begs the question: is this clever marketing or targeting young, inexperienced and financially insecure women?
Jessica and Sammy insist they don’t feel exploited – indeed, they’d argue the balance of power lies with them. “I’m intelligent,” says Sammy, “I felt I was manipulating the situation to get cash.” While she says she would treat an arrangement like a regular relationship if things heat up after a couple of dates, she wouldn’t be shy about making counter-offers on money because “at the end of the day, it’s what they have joined the site for. It’s why I joined as well.” She has paid off her HECS debt and bought a new car.
Jessica’s favourite gift is an $800 designer dress from her first sugar daddy. “He would say, ‘I like buying things for you, I like making you happy’,” she recalls. “And I could make him happy. I think it’s pretty fair.”
Gerard believes it’s sugar daddies who “control the action”. But there are tales of both sugar babies and sugar daddies taking their dates for a ride – whether it’s taking off with the money or refusing to pay up. Perhaps, in the end, like most human relationships, the balance of power varies according to the individuals.
Personal safety is an important issue for sugar babies, who are advised by Seeking Arrangement to get to know prospective dates first, meet in a public place, be cautious and always trust their instincts. Jessica always arranges for first dates to be somewhere with surveillance cameras, such as a coffee shop, and gets her mother to keep an eye on her from another table. “I am really cautious – if something sounds dodgy, I don’t go,” she says.
Despite the obvious risks, like sugar itself, many find the instant gratification of Seeking Arrangement addictive.
After a six-month break following her moral crisis, Sammy resumed a sexual relationship with her first sugar daddy. She took a break from the site when a concurrent relationship with a guy in Newcastle “became a bit too much to juggle”. But now that’s ended, she’s back online. While she has “still got her youth”, she’s also planning to use Miss Travel – an offshoot of Seeking Arrangement that matches attractive wannabe travellers with wealthy sponsors – to see the world.
Buster and Gerard, meanwhile, show no sign of wanting to quit.
And, although she hasn’t yet celebrated her 21st birthday, Jessica already accepts that after getting a taste for the finer things in life, she will probably end up with “an older guy” who can keep her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.
This feature was originally posted by Bauer Media in 2012.
.jpg?resize=380%2C285)
.jpg?fit=650%2C367&resize=650%2C367)
