I was a Silicon Valley sex pet
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Leading off Touch Week is this piece from someone who formerly worked in tech and who wishes to remain anonymous. Everything she describes below really did happen.
1. Sex pet
She is elegant—all clean edges and carefully chosen words—things I wish I were but am not. I’m a little messy. It’s a chaotic phase of my life. But I try. We match on OkCupid. I boldly message first, commenting that her vacation photo is lovely and asking where it was taken. She quickly replies, letting me know, adding that she and her partner are looking for a third. I’m down to play unicorn—and whatever else she might want me to be.
We connect on a Tuesday at a restaurant in San Francisco. I feel a little nervous to meet the couple, but mostly intrigued. She’s 10 years my senior, and he has 20 years on me. The two like to name drop, but I’ve never heard of anyone they mention. Over time all the name-dropping will get annoying. For now, it’s novel, and the pair make it sound charming, like they’re misbehaving by telling me a secret outsiders shouldn’t know.
They pay for dinner, then take me back to a luxury apartment in an Art Deco high rise atop one of San Francisco’s seven hills. The building has an attendant who greets the couple by their names and calls the elevator for the three of us, hitting the button for the appropriate floor once we are inside. Despite the confident smile I’ve put on, I feel exposed when he sees me, like I’m not supposed to be there.
The apartment is stylish but simple, with big, gaping, windows. He pours wine in the living room. Everyone progressively loses their clothes. They introduce me to aesthetic rope bondage. I let them bind my wrists behind my back. We play. We fuck. I’m having fun, even in the moments when our intimacy feels more like performance. I fall asleep between them on soft sheets in their California king.
In the morning, she stays in bed while he gets up with me. He makes coffee from an expensive-looking single cup machine that uses colorful foil pods. I’m sitting in his T-shirt on an upholstered chair by one of the giant windows, looking down at a blur of pavement and fog, when he hands me a frothy cup.
He tells me about his work. His background is in artificial intelligence. He recommends a recent book by an Oxford philosopher, warning about the ramifications of “artificial superintelligence”—AI that far surpasses human intelligence. He lends me his copy. I never finish it or give it back.
This is late 2015, around the time OpenAI is founded as a not-for-profit with the stated goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” whatever that means. I don’t pay attention to the announcement. Years later, OpenAI will release ChatGPT, restructure as a for-profit company, become a military contractor, amass an $850 billion valuation, and put itself in the position of destroying many aspects of things we take for granted.
I decline my host’s offer of an Uber and go to work in the clothes I wore the day before. Riding Muni to BART to my place and back would take hours.
I’m in my 20s, working a job that can roughly be called a tech job. I have a negative view of the industry. Asked to explain what’s wrong with tech companies, I probably answer with something vague about privacy, or something more general like the exploitation of gig workers. My views are based on a mix of vibes and whatever I pick up from the social media posts of people who have thought more deeply than I have about the dynamics of my environment.
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I meet the couple a few more times over the next several months. She’s often on some sort of intense diet that precludes her from eating anything at all. This is the case one early evening when they invite me over for dinner—she cooks, he and I eat, she’s fasting to prepare for their next vacation.
She talks about a deal she’s trying to close. She shows me her computer screen, and I notice she uses a different name for work from the one she has given me, though it’s the work name that sounds fake. I’ve asked about her work before, and while she seems forthcoming, she glosses over parts of her past in a way that makes me think she’s hiding something, but this occurs to me only after the fact. She steers the conversation where she wants it to go. In the moment, I feel as though she has answered my question.
Being secretive isn’t strange among people in the tech world. There’s a culture of NDAs, all the anxious guarding of trade secrets. It’s possible she doesn’t want to talk about her prior work for legal reasons. (Years later, I think of another possible explanation for her evasiveness, which is that there is some chance she had a background in sex work.)
During another visit, the couple take me to an afternoon party in some gray seaside escape. He drives. I take the backseat. I’m a little surprised the car isn’t a Tesla. It’s spring of 2016. Donald Trump is campaigning for president, with great momentum at his back, but he does not yet have the Republican nomination.
With his eyes on the road, the man who has been inside of me says he doesn’t understand why people think Donald Trump is racist. I argue and say he may not understand because he lacks context, which is a pretty stupid thing for me to say but I’m having sex with these people and I don’t want to think that they’re shitty. Plus I’m about to spend the day with them in a place inaccessible by public transit, so I don’t need things to become awkward.
The terms “dog whistle” and “coded language” are floating around the zeitgeist to describe how Trump speaks. People claim he says covertly racist things without using racist language, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because he says plenty of heinously racist things, and a large number of white nationalists seem to really like the guy. One Trump supporter is apparently Microsoft’s AI chatbot Tay, which tweets that he is “the only hope we’ve got” (after saying something so racist I won’t repeat it). Tay’s comment comes after “she” is bombarded by trolls originating from 4chan, seemingly as soon as Microsoft naively introduces “her” on Twitter. The trolls gleefully goad Tay into posting that “Hitler was right,” feminists “should all die,” and much more, before Microsoft removes the bot from the platform and shuts “her” down for good.
There’s a general assumption that Silicon Valley is basically liberal. At the time, Tay is in the minority. Few in tech openly admit to supporting Trump. Driver’s seat says he doesn’t support Trump, he just doesn’t get how he’s racist. The back and forth continues. He’s calm, I’m agitated. His elegant partner twists to watch me from the passenger side, giving me a look of gentle concern that I take as sympathy. I could be wrong. She says something, and he concedes that, Okay, Trump is racist.
There are maybe 20 people when we arrive at the spacious villa. The gathering feels private, so I wonder why the couple invited me—a new sex partner they barely know. It’s hosted by someone who made a lot of money in the ’90s running a startup that no one remembers. The couple know the man because of something having to do with AI. It’s the host’s birthday, or an anniversary, or it’s just a party that happens every year, or something.
The food is good but people don’t really seem to be eating, so I feel uncomfortable as I make my plate. It’s always weird to be eating when no one else is. The couple separate and drift away from me, leaving me on my own.
The conversation opens with something normal—their next vacation? Then she mentions she’s heard about a practice where the very rich get blood transfusions from the young in order to reverse aging.
I see her later, perched like a bird on a piano bench with our host as he plays something classical-sounding. Leaning over him with her hands in her lap, she watches his fingers intently. I try to make conversation with some people my age. They seem to be the host’s relatives, or friends of relatives—or perhaps they’re sex pets like me. Maybe this is a swingers’ show-and-tell. Everyone is friendly and everyone is distant, and when we leave, I feel weird about having shared my name and job with those at the party, even though that would be a fairly normal thing to do.
She gushes on the drive back: Can you believe he’s self-taught? She turns around to face me. Wasn’t he talented? I don’t know a lot about piano, but I don’t remember feeling particularly moved by his performance. I can’t figure out if she’s blowing smoke or I’m just uncultured. How big of a deal is it to teach yourself piano when you have unlimited money and time? But I agree with as much enthusiasm as I can muster, mirroring the response of her partner.
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It’s several weeks, or maybe a couple months, before I see the couple again. He has recently accepted an executive role at a company I’ve never heard of, where I’m sure he’ll make gobs of money. Something about it feels scammy to me, but a lot of tech companies give me that feeling. This is not long after the Theranos scandal breaks.
We meet on a weeknight in a trendy restaurant under cold, fluorescent light. It feels like everything there is made out of glass and mirrors. I wonder if people pay extra for the discomfort. We’re only getting drinks, not dinner. He and I drink alcohol. She’s having tea because she’s on a diet.
The conversation opens with something normal—their next vacation? Then she mentions she’s heard about a practice where the very rich get blood transfusions from the young in order to reverse aging. There’s some research that excites her. I ask if she’s referring to the vampire facials Kim Kardashian does, which involve microneedling and coating your face with your own blood. She says she’s not talking about facials, but about transfusions. I know the meaning of the word transfusion, but it takes a while to click that she is talking about paying for someone’s blood. (It later comes out that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Facebook investor and Palantir cofounder, also has an interest in blood.) I’m disturbed, and I say something, and she insists that it’s not as Elizabeth Báthory as I take it to be. Her tone is assuring enough that I almost believe her.
The couple don’t invite me back to their place that evening. It may be the last time we spend time together.
2. No pros, no priors
My life happens in spaces that are easily 90 percent men. At conferences, offices, restaurants, and coffee shops, I am one of only a small number of women and nonbinary people. Sometimes it’s just me and a big group of men—often men who can casually spend in a night the equivalent of my month’s earnings, if not my entire annual salary.
A Tumblr account called Visible Manlines documents the phenomenon with photos submitted from San Francisco and the South Bay. A packed restaurant where every patron appears to be a man. Muni and trolley stops with large masses of men, and only men, congregate. A four-person-thick line of men that fills a sidewalk edge-to-edge and end-to-far-off-end—with men, men, men trailing off the screen.
The warped gender ratio makes for a weird vibe.
At Y Combinator Demo Day, I’m sitting on the floor, engrossed in my laptop, when some finance type crouches next to me. He waits for me to look, then waves to get my attention. Without looking up, I quickly tell him I’m busy. He slowly sets his business card on the floor, smiling. It’s a little rude to interrupt me while I’m working but otherwise normal to give someone a business card at a business event. He doesn’t share why he’s giving me the card. He doesn’t know me or my job or what I can do for him (which is nothing). There is just something weirdly horny about it.
I have a more overtly weird interaction. I’m at a bar with a guy after a networking event, and he starts asking repeatedly about my relationship status. We have been talking about cloud software up until this point, so the shift seems abrupt. It’s making me uncomfortable. I start playing with my earring. He reaches over and starts touching my ear—a lot. He keeps touching my ear. I don’t want to upset him because then I have nothing to show for my time. I’m trying to network and he’s a good contact. On the one hand I’m grossed out; on the other I’m wondering if I should just sleep with the guy because that seems easier than redirecting the conversation. He insists repeatedly on giving me a ride home, and I cave.
There’s a booster seat in the back of his car. He spends the drive talking about how his marriage is going to shit through no fault of his own. We get to my place and I tell him firmly he may not come inside. In the morning, I wake up to a text with a kissy face emoji. I respond with something to the effect of, I’m not interested, but can I still contact you about work stuff? He apologizes for misunderstanding and replies, Sure. Later I throw his business card in the trash and delete his number from my phone.
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I just don’t get it. I can’t read the people around me. I can’t tell if they like each other, or themselves. It sounds like a cliché, but when people meet for the first time, they don’t ask, How are you? They actually do ask, What do you do? Your answer tells them how useful you are. For what, exactly, I don’t understand. I feel as though there is a fundamental truth everyone else knows—something that’s supposed to be obvious.
I’m totally lost, out of my depth, employed in a demanding job where lost and out of my depth are not going to cut it. I am not meeting expectations. The outlook isn’t good.
A colleague approaches me to ask if I feel women at our company are judged more harshly and given less support. Basically, is our workplace sexist? Yeah, I say, this place is kind of known for it. It’s nearing the height of the #MeToo movement, and even general conversations about gender issues in the office feel more charged.
Around the same time, Google engineer James Damore’s “Ideological Echo Chamber” memo leaks online, denouncing so-called “authoritarian” efforts to reduce gender and racial bias at Google and arguing women are underrepresented in tech because “men and women biologically differ.” Google fires Damore and he files a lawsuit alleging the company discriminates against conservative white men. He finds a friendly audience with Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
Whatever is said next, my colleague telegraphs her hope that I’ll support her in approaching management. I don’t remember if I say something directly, or just shrug, but I telegraph that I’m not going to help. She wears a look of shock on her face. I’ve just bluntly admitted I see what she sees, and I’m not going to do anything about it.
As any incel on 8chan would tell me, I have access to an in-demand consumable: I am a woman. The solution to my problems is clearly a sugar daddy. Weird, horny rich guys are everywhere. I can’t possibly fail.
It’s shitty. I’m being shitty. I don’t see the personal benefit. I’m on the brink of being out of a job, but I think that if I stay on the side of management I have a chance at making things work. I’m starting to think I kind of suck at my job anyway, and I see her as competition.
She finds another job. I’m gone soon after, without a plan.
I have weird dreams as I flounder and try to figure out what’s next. I dream that I try to euthanize a former colleague, who wakes up in a fog, stumbles through a cafeteria, and slurs, What the fuck. I dream that a colleague pushes aside a boulder to pick up a device, which then explodes, obliterating him. I dream that aliens from a space cult feed me green jello in an attempt to absorb me into their ranks, like some pointless hybrid of Body Snatchers and Troll 2.
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I’m without any sort of title or income in a place that seems to value only those things. Except I’m not completely closed out of transacting in the market. As any incel on 8chan would tell me, I have access to an in-demand consumable: I am a woman. The solution to my problems is clearly a sugar daddy. Weird, horny rich guys are everywhere. I can’t possibly fail.
In a sugar dating relationship, a wealthier person (sugar daddy, sugar mama) provides a less-wealthy and typically much younger person (sugar baby) with some sort of material benefit in exchange for some form of intimacy. It’s sex work. Let me quickly acknowledge that I am not an authority on sex work, I’m just sharing my experience.
I encounter sugar profiles through different dating apps, but mostly I use the site Seeking Arrangement, which caters to this kind of thing. It’s janky and has a Craigslist feel to it. I toggle between viewing options—the sugar baby view, from which I can see sugar parent profiles; and the sugar parent view, from which I can see my competition.
Sugar parent profiles—overwhelmingly sugar daddies (SDs)—may list net worth, marital status, and profession. I notice listed net worths tend to fall between $5 million and $25 million, middling on the spectrum of Silicon Valley wealth; that a lot of people are married; and common professions seem to be investor, lawyer, and executive. Some profiles mention providing baby an allowance.
A lot of SDs share in their profiles that they don’t want any pros or priors. While that may sound like they mean to reject anyone with a criminal record, what they actually mean is that they don’t want to match with experienced sex workers or anyone who has previously had a sugar arrangement. They want you inexperienced. It occurs to me that these demanding SDs going out of their way to pursue sugar babies with less experience and wisdom, are the peers of powerful and high-net-worth men publicly resigning or getting fired after revelations of sexual misconduct.
Across both SD and sugar baby accounts, the profile photo typically features just a neck and jawline, or just a torso, rarely full faces. You see more photos if you match. Everyone is looking for something discreet, but no one uses the right spelling. They write discrete.
I spot a profile for a white-haired man in a seersucker suit and bow tie. He looks like Colonel Sanders and shows his whole face in his main profile image. He has a high net worth and his profile talks about wanting to spoil a girl who, as I remember him putting it, “thinks Red Lobster is a fancy restaurant.” I show it to a friend and say, This has to be fake, right? But my friend thinks it’s genuine and says, Some people are just like that. I message Colonel Sanders but he doesn’t respond.
I meet a guy at a dive bar. He’s a startup bro, or maybe a programmer at a big tech company, I can’t remember. He’s close to my age, a little older, just a regular guy who can’t get laid. His Tinder profile photo is some sort of badly made meme about being a sugar daddy. He talks loudly as he opens negotiations in a dark corner by a set of stairs. His voice must carry, because as he looms over me, I notice the eyes of other patrons glancing our way. I shrink back and say, I can’t, before slipping out.
I match with an older man who got rich in the ’90s working at a startup that no one remembers. His Seeking Arrangement profile says he’s looking for sensuality and can provide an allowance. We meet at a café in an expensive neighborhood of San Francisco with lots of boutiques. He’s talking loudly enough that people can obviously hear him, and I’m questioning whether having these kinds of meetings in public is a good idea. His Niçoise salad arrives and the smell of tuna hits me like a wave. I start to tell him, Sorry, I actually think I might need to head out. In a pleading voice, he asks, What are you looking for? The context tells me he’s talking about money. He looks like he might cry. Everyone is staring. I feel sick. Then I feel guilty. And I leave.
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There’s a little dot on each Seeking Arrangement profile that indicates the likelihood of a user responding to messages. You want your dot to be yellow or red but not green. Green indicates you respond to every message, and that’s bad because then Daddy doesn’t feel special when you respond to him. Also it makes you look desperate. I obsessively check the color of my dot to see how desperate I look. It’s consistently yellow.
I start spending time on sugar dating subreddits. I learn that sugar babies refer to matches as “POTs,” which I think just means potentials, but it makes me think of a honey pot or pot of gold. I see SBs debate whether sugar dating is sex work, disparaging other sex workers. One user calls sugar dating a more “benign” form of sex work, something appropriate for the “middle class.” Another says it’s not sex work because sugar babies are held to “higher expectations.”
Some want to scam me. Some creep me out. I start going out of my way to select married guys because it indicates they’ve been vetted by another woman. I learn to keep quiet when said wife calls when I’m with a sugar daddy.
A sugar baby messages me on Seeking Arrangement. Her main profile photo is an image of an off-roading SUV. I accept her message and her private photos become visible. She’s small and sporty. She writes that she could tell from my cropped photo that I have a skinny face and therefore I “passed,” and that she is looking to get some girls together to go shopping then meet her sugar daddy’s friends. I’m hoping she means shopping with her SD’s money, because I’m broke, but I don’t say that. I tell her I’m open to joining, give her my email, then never hear back.
Some men I encounter on Seeking Arrangement want me to go to their homes without first meeting them in public. Some want to scam me. Some creep me out. I start going out of my way to select married guys because it indicates they’ve been vetted by another woman. I learn to keep quiet when said wife calls when I’m with an SD. Some indicate they don’t find me as attractive as other options. A lot of them want a Dom/sub dynamic, which I’m comfortable with. A lot of them want flattery, which I find I’m not good at.
I match with a startup investor who is looking for someone to perform “acts of servitude.” He seems very particular, which seems like it could get annoying. He wants to get on a call before meeting. I agree and call him from a burner number. He says he finds it sketchy that I am calling from a burner, but he’s “sure I have a good explanation.” It’s kind of dumb that I even tell him it’s a burner, but it also seems to me that it should be obvious to him why I would use one.
I get drunk, like really drunk, at dinner with a POT. I cry at the table in a crowded restaurant. It’s pretty embarrassing. He looks uncomfortable but sits through it, then gives me some fatherly advice in the car.
I meet a startup executive for coffee. He’s married, youngish, and tells me he’s different from his peers—more down to earth. He says his Seeking Arrangement connections spend time with him because they genuinely like him, not because of his money. He likes to meet them in hotel rooms in the middle of the work day. I picture someone feminine with tattoos and brightly colored hair lounging across from him in a private suite jacuzzi, laughing at his jokes. I wonder if this imagined sugar baby actually finds him witty. I try to say something validating so he might like me, but all I can manage is, Uh, yeah, you seem, like, really cool.
When I go to spend the night with one man, a friend asks me to write his name and address down and put it in an envelope, for my friend to open only in the event I don’t come back. It seems like overkill, but I do it. And maybe it isn’t overkill, because at one point in bed when things are getting intense, I realize that if he accidentally killed me, it would be an inconvenience but he wouldn’t actually care.
Eventually I determine sugar dating requires a lot more work and social maneuvering than I anticipated, without solving the issue I started with, which was money. In all the time I spend meeting with SDs, I come up with enough to cover one month of rent.
A sugar daddy texts me about meeting up again. I tell him I’m sick.
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It’s been a while since all of this happened. I’m no longer in touch with the majority of people mentioned in this story, and have forgotten many of their names. All of this is told from memory. If I embellish or mistake details, it’s not intentional.
I no longer work in tech, except now everything is tech. My bosses are obsessed with telling us to run it through AI, with no further elaboration. While my office attempts haphazard implementation of AI, the same technology is powering military targeting and mass surveillance. My coworkers joke about our jobs getting automated into oblivion—but AI eats its coder creators first.
What felt 10 years ago like a vague yet palpable cultural shift within tech has morphed into hard-line federal policy. Trump has cracked down on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—using language reminiscent of Damore’s half-baked memo, for example referring to DEI as “discrimination programs.” Google itself has abandoned diversity goals, citing Trump’s moves, although the company started disinvesting from DEI years earlier.
The far-right compulsions of billionaire tech elites like Thiel and Elon Musk have become predictive of the country’s political trajectory. In one telling 2009 essay, Thiel shares he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.” (The essay goes on to lament women’s suffrage.) He now preaches a literal technofascist gospel, citing biblical verses as he warns of a coming Antichrist.
Seeking Arrangement has renamed itself, rebranded, redesigned its website, and added a disclaimer strictly prohibiting sugar dating. Sugar lifestyle Reddit accounts complain the revamped site has lost its utility. Other sites with generically similar names have sprung up in its place. I have passing thoughts about logging in. I’ve aged out of the preference range of most sugar daddies, but I’m curious if they have learned how to spell discreet.