“12 Girls for Each Guy… Spoil Them and They Spoil You Back” claims Sugar Daddy dating site Sugardaddycanada.com. “Who Needs Money? Beautiful People Travel For Free!” promises travel-sex companion website Misstravel.com. These websites offer beautiful, advantageous young people money in exchange for their companionship and presumably, sex. Seeking Arrangement offers what it describes as “mutually beneficial relationships,” i.e. rich, lonely, old men entice morally vapid young girls to hang around them by funding an allowance of up to $10,000 a month. Their companionship is loosely defined, but one can only presume sex is involved given the high price tag of certain ladies on the site. Eating at nice restaurants and participating in couples workouts at fancy health clubs can only go so far. Many organizations have slammed the sites for condoning prostitution. While the virtual world of Sugar Daddies is relatively new, the concept is hardly revolutionary. Years ago, before these new online opportunities to find sugar daddy soulmates, old rich dudes used to have to find hot girls to have a mutually exploitative relationship with IRL. For years, Toronto’s legendary sugar daddy, “The Yorkville Money Man” (also known as Moe) acted as the number one allowance upgrade of 17-year-olds, and drinking budget for college girls alike.
“Birds of a feather, flock together,” Moe would tell the gaggle of girls huddled around him, while he sipped espresso at a cramped cast-iron patio table. Here he would whisper sweet nothings in their ears, stroke their thighs. Girls would go in groups, locking eyes when things got overbearingly sexual. He would make sweeping, grandiose proclamations to his female audiences: “Life is too expensive for pretty young things these days!” he would shout. Here, discretely, he would slip them money under the table, handing them crisp, folded bills.
Moe was an overly-cologned and perfectly-tailored Armenian man. The girls were adolescent, overly made-up, and sometimes brace-faced. I went to see Moe once.
Moe was always easy to find. Often, he could be found sitting on the patio outside a Bellair St gallery, smoking, sipping espresso out of ceramic cups and reading the paper. He looked sixty-five, but spoke to girls as if he was thirty years younger. Impeccably dressed, his suits so ostentatious they could reflect Don Cherry’s face in it, cleverly hiding his Constanza-esque build and hairline. He wasn’t handsome by any stretch of the imagination, but he learned to command attention anyway.
He’s somewhat of an urban legend: a postmodern sugar daddy for the well-informed young. Girls ranging from ages 14 to well into their twenties would visit him. They would sit with him, and Moe would offer the girls coffee, or steak from Yamato’s, an upscale Japanese restaurant he claimed to be the property owner of. He would send his assistant to retrieve things for the girls, constantly refueling Moe with caffeine, keeping him at just enough distance while the guests were present.
“I’m pretty sure he was aware of what we were doing,” said Laura Zimmerman, who was familiar with Moe back in 2007, in her teenage prime of 17.
It’s unlikely his assistant didn’t know what was going on, girls were constantly dropping by to visit Moe. “A lot of people knew about him. Many times when we went there were either girls already there, or girls waiting to go in after us,” says Laura, “He must have given out over $1000 a day.”
And with so many lady callers, Moe was never able to keep track of each girl. Laura says that he never remembered them, but always tried to make it look like he did. His stories were repetitive. It felt like a performance that he would rattle off while stroking the leg of a young girl: he would talk about his lovely wife, his children, grandchildren, and how important it was to support the people you love most.
Moe’s demeanor was always calm, and he presented himself as a person of great wisdom and rationality. He would talk to girls as if they were his naive grandchildren, and he was their pervy, over the hill grandfather. Depending on his mood, (or whichever bill he retrieved from his wallet first) he would sometimes hand girls up to $200, telling them to spend it on “lady expenses.” One girl remembered him listing a detailed catalog of supplies he expected the girls to use their allowances for: “makeup, nail polish, fancy clothes, tampons, birth control…” Casual.
He always seemed to be waiting for something. Often, after he had handed girls their money, before they had mumbled a half-assed excuse as to why they had to leave (mine was piano lessons) he would proposition the girls: $1000 if they went into the back room with him. Here he would explain that men these days didn’t know about women, and if they followed him they would understand pleasure. None of the girls that I spoke to admitted to following him into the back room, though many suspected some girls they knew had subsided to his tantalizing cash offer.
When I met Moe, I was in the twelfth grade. It was 2007; I had braces and glasses. I had blown off my last class (World History) to get Frappuccinos and try on expensive flared jeans in Yorkville with my friends. They told me they had to go see someone, which sounded more mob-like than it turned out to be. We sat with Moe on the patio, and he immediately hugged me and told me how happy he was to see me again. He put his hand two-thirds of the way up my thigh and pulled my metal chair closer to him. I immediately regretted not sandwiching myself between my friends. He asked me how I was, and I remember the hotness of his breath. Sickly sweet, like moldy amaretto. I squeaked an answer, and my friends took over. They told him they needed money for rent and groceries. Simple lies: we were all living with our parents then. Next, his hand was pressed against mine and money was being thrust into it. We didn’t stay much longer.
After I left, I felt dirty, even though I had done next to nothing, I felt as if I had prostituted myself in a pathetic, half-assed way. So I did the next honourable thing: took my friends underage drinking on a Thursday night and fronted the bill.
Moe is still somewhat of an underground urban legend in Toronto, and while nothing he did was blatantly illegal, his notoriety increased so much that he’s essentially gone into hiding. Moe still owns many of the properties on Bellair, but he’s become much harder to find. All of my leads to speak with the Money Man himself turned up cold. He appeared to view himself as a wise elder statesman holding court in Yorkville, throwing out currency to young girls in need, but in reality, Moe just seems like a wealthy, perverse, and cripplingly lonely man.
Seeking Arrangement’s enrollments have “exploded” in the last year, and according to the site, 35% of its userbase are students. Based on high tuition fees, these facts aren’t surprising. What is surprising though, is the polarizing reaction it receives from girls who frequented the Money Man. All of the girls I interviewed said they would never engage in such a formal relationship. The Money Man was noncommittal, and although he was totally a sexual deviant, he had an endearing, well-meaning aspect to him. There’s no flirting with the facts. Relationships formed through Seeking Arrangements and Miss Travel certainly function with sex as a major medium, and in the most basic terms, it can be prostitution. When faced with the ultimatum of being a latte slave at Starbucks while living in your parent’s basement, or financial independence through advantageous means, the answer might not be so black and white.
Sugar daddy dating has gained immense popularity over the years, thanks to the convenience it offers to both the partners. While this kind of dating has given younger women (called sugar babies) an opportunity to gain some exposure and money, it has certainly helped older men (popularly known as sugar daddies) enjoy the company of a young person who has different opinions and tastes. According to statistics, sugar daddies in Vancouver have increased at an exponential rate. Canadian sugar daddies have become richer and now prefer exploring new things.
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