Dear Prudence: I Found My Stepsister on a Sugar Daddy Website

[likeaduck]

Dear Prudence,

I just came out of a toxic divorce. I messed around online and found out my 23-year-old stepsister has several profiles on “sugar daddy” websites. She still lives with our parents and has college loans. My mom thinks she does web design. In the most awkward email of my life, I told her she needs to clean her accounts and come up with an alias. This will haunt her later in life and ruin her reputation now, plus it will kill our parents. She never responded but her accounts vanished.

I tried to get back in the dating game but realized I have too much baggage. I want sex, but I don’t have the emotional capacity to commit to anyone. I emailed my stepsister and asked her if she had any “friends” she could recommend for a short-term sugar daddy situation. She called me a pervert and went on a ludicrous rant about my character. I told her not to be coy—she was selling sex. She doesn’t get the high moral ground here. She threatened to tell her father; I told her I would be there with popcorn. I told her that I don’t think what she was doing was “shameful” but neither was me asking about it. She cursed me out and then blocked me. Now our parents are wondering about the rift. I have told them to ask my stepsister. We didn’t grow up together, but I thought we had a fairly civil relationship. What is my next move here?

—My Sister’s Keeper

A good old-fashioned apology! Not an apology coupled with another request for a favor, and not an apology coupled with another justification of your behavior, and certainly not an apology coupled with any of your opinions on sex work—just a brief, sincere apology, followed by a respectful distance.

 

I think you know how very badly you have treated your stepsister or else you wouldn’t be working so hard to try to acquit yourself by first accusing her of being responsible for killing your parents, then by accusing her of coyness when she didn’t give you what you wanted. “If you’ve ever done sex work, you have to say yes to whatever I ask of you” is a repellant approach to a relationship. Trying to dress it up as who has the moral high ground just won’t wash.

 

If you’d like to pursue casual sex with no emotional commitments, you don’t need sugar-baby websites in order to do so. If you’d like to pursue casual sex and get paid for it, don’t seek advice from a relative you’ve recently scolded and ask them to set you up for free. If you’d like to have a peaceful relationship with your stepsister, don’t casually announce you’ve found her sugar-baby profiles and think she’s ruining her life forever via email, then call her up a few weeks later and say, “Do you think any of those people would have sex with me?” You behaved boorishly, hypocritically, condescendingly, cruelly, and with tremendous entitlement. You should apologize and then back off and give your stepsister time to decide what kind of relationship, if any, she wants to have with you. You’re both adults, and you don’t have to inform your parents every time you get into a fight. But if they ask again, and you do want to share something, you can always say, “I treated her badly, and she has good reason to be angry with me. I’m working on it.”

 

 

Comments

[likeaduck]

Is it just me or is Prudie reading the LW as a woman who shamed a family member for sugar babying and then turned to her for advice on how to be a sugar baby? I read the LW as probably a man with a somewhat younger stepsister he shamed about her work and then asked if her sugar baby friends might be available to him? (Not that that's...better? Just a much more common flavour of yuck.)

And just. The quotes on "friends". Fuck you, dude.

[minoanmiss]

Prudie is reading the LW as female, yeah. I wonder if there were bits snipped out that indicate either way.

Either way LW is awful, anyway. Sometimes I think we should all lay eggs we abandon to hatch alone in the desert.

[rosefox]

Huh, I read the LW as female too and didn't even think about there being another possible interpretation of "friends".

Either way, I can't imagine why the LW has difficulty maintaining long-term relationships...

[lannamichaels]

That's how I read it as well.

[redbird]

I noticed when I read this on Slate a few days ago that LW doesn't say how "messing around online" led them to looking at "several" sugar baby websites.

I suppose "how can you think you have the high ground, she might be selling but you were trying to buy" wouldn't work for trying to talk LW into apologizing and not harassing their sister. With or without the quotes around "friends," LW told their sister "it would kill our parents to know you were doing this, so stop, and now that I've gotten the scolding out of my system, please hook me up with someone who's doing what I told you not to, because it absolutely won't upset our parents if I buy what you shouldn't be selling."

Like likeaduck, I read LW as a would-be buyer of sex, not a seller. (If the LW was a woman who wanted to start doing that work, she already knows several sugar baby websites.)

LW needs a good therapist, a bunch of introspection, and a good vibrator. And to hope that their parents don't ask their sister what's going on: The sister could spin the truth as "He called me a whore because I wouldn't help him find one" or even "he was trolling online for sex, then got some kind of weird delusion about me and tried to blackmail me into helping him get laid."

[ashbet]

I read it as “LW is female and tried to undercut her sister’s (and others’) sex work by trying to scoop their clients and have sex with them for free, after shaming her stepsister for doing it for money,” but it’s even MORE gross if the LW is a straight man looking to have sex with sugar babies without paying.

I can understand KINDLY warning a younger friend/relative that they have too much easily-searchable identifying info on a sex work profile that you stumbled across (i.e., using their legal name in a way that future employers could find), but shaming them is totally unacceptable.

[green_grrl]

I didn’t realize this was a guy writing in until you guys pointed it out. Ew! Makes more sense now.

I don’t actually have a problem with the first half—it sounds like stepsister was way too identifiable and it would likely blow back on her personally and/or professionally.

The second half, though. Cree. Py. Good lord, you already know where the sugar baby sites are; just pick one. Don’t have your stepsister ... pimp her friends to you?! Just, all kinds of no!

[xenacryst]

LW, try this and see if you're still comfortable with it: substitute every implication of "sex work" in the letter with "acting" and see if it still feels like something you can stand behind. You discovered your stepsister had a profile on a theatre worker's web site (or heck, Model Mayhem, because a lot of actors also do modeling), and knew that the parents just wouldn't approve, so you told her off. And now you want to get in to the acting world - maybe you'd like to do a standup routine, or you think you can do some tech work for a community theatre and you'd like to have her introduce you to some leads.

See how that reads? That reads like you think acting is kind of a slimy thing, but you're not above using your family to make a buck. Sex work is professional work, and casting aspersions on someone's profession and then asking them for leads in that profession is either desperately slimy or actively harmful, especially when that profession has a troubled relationship with, for example, legal authorities who can use it as an excuse to ruin your life.