The Final Rose
Bachelors, Sugar Daddies, and Embodiment
Brittany newell
i.2018 was the season of me going places with men. The whole thing was new to me: walking with men, watching them talk to waitresses, letting them touch me when they said goodbye.
I tried to stay educated. I read vintage Playboys and watched trash TV. I went to Sephora and striped my hands with test lipsticks to ascertain which color made me look the most fun, a quality more than one man told me he liked. I went to Barney’s downtown on a Saturday and looked at perfumes, $250 a bottle, with their profiles typed out on cards: bergamot, jasmine, smoky, clean. A man in Denver had wired me money for this express purpose. I spritzed perfume after perfume on my shirt-sleeve until I felt faint. It was like cruising a dating website where you also pick between profiles: blonde, domme, smoker, clean. It wasn’t a matter of which perfume I liked best, but rather which projected my essence most lucratively. After an hour the shopgirls shooed me outside where I stood on the sidewalk emanating mixed messages: rank as a girl’s school, floral and harsh. I deposited the $250 into my bank account.
Jesus, Maria said when I hugged her, nose wrinkling. Who are you?
*
It was also the season of couples opening up. Everyone we knew, or so it seemed, was (mostly disastrously) sampling polyamory. Maybe the weather that autumn—freak fires, hailstorms—inspired us to experiment, with threesomes or mistresses or anonymous sex; there was a sense that things as they were couldn’t hold for much longer. Doomsaying has a sexy edge, like fuck it, let’s be bad. There were sex and toxins in the air, the former giving us a reason to withstand the latter. As the cherry blossoms died and the fog walled us in, we kissed friends of friends of friends at Hole in The Wall and invited guys over for a post-yoga fuck. After they left, Maria and I would talk shit.
He had a dick like a beer can. I placed my hand on my heart. He called himself Fuckleberry Finn. Weenie, our dog, watched from her pillow as we demonstrated their moves. She was confused by the traffic of tall, tattooed men. She didn’t like change. We got down on our knees and tried to explain it to her—we were happier now, we’d invited this violence, we’d created new rules, had she read up on compersion?—but she just shook her head. She was an old dog and these were new tricks.
iI.I joined SeekingArrangement (now more concisely known as Seeking.com) because the 19-year-old girlfriend of a former flame told me to.
It’s a dating site for sugar daddies, she explained as we sat in the garden of a dying house party. You should give it a whirl. Her sugar daddy was currently in the process of buying her a house in the Berkeley hills.
Call instead of text, she advised. Otherwise they’ll waste your time. You don’t always have to fuck them. Sometimes they just want a date.
No sex?
She nodded. Say you’re a student with loans. Guys like feeling useful.
I took notes. At 24, I still didn’t know much about men. To be honest, they embarrassed me. My politics went out the window when a crush came too close. In the face of desire, I felt irreparably girlish. I was a series of holes, like the mesh bags that hold oranges.
Still, I gave it a shot; being confronted with your 19-year-old replacement makes you bold. I took a picture of myself in a black knit bikini and selected the username i_was_an_angel; then, when my account was flagged for “escort terminology,” hungry_little_angel. Puzzlingly, men sent me messages saying Hey Hungry! just as often as Hey Angel! I rolled with the punches; both names felt fitting.
When creating an account on Seeking.com, one chooses between the designation Attractive (i.e. a baby) or Successful (i.e. a daddy). As a result of this categorization, men are quick to stress their sex appeal on their profiles, including the ones who don’t upload pictures. I don’t have trouble finding dates, they write in their bios. I don’t NEED to exchange money for sex.
Instead, they’re seeking “friends with benefits” or “travel buddies,” girls who “know how to have fun” and “stay active” (code-word for skinny). Busy execs sought partners-in-crime, former models, free spirits, struggling students, kinky freaks, party girls, open minds, tortured artists, third wheels, courtesans for the end times, professional sluts. Their profiles recycled clichés like, I want a girl who will be my escape from reality. Or, I’m too good to be true, but I promise I’m real.
“These men wanted dream bodies; I saw all bodies as dreams.”
It was, to my surprise, pretty fun. Any qualms about how this might affect my psyche slipped away. These men wanted dream bodies; I saw all bodies as dreams. They seriously wanted their Ivy League sex kitten; I seriously wanted to be smashed and remade. In a way, just creating a profile on SA enabled me to get rid of my body or any invocation of its naturalness. I papered it over with euphemisms: I was a fun-loving yogi, a poet seeking patrons, a bookworm who loved senior dogs and high heels. My body was like a money transfer, ostensibly real but flavored with magic, like when $600 just appeared in my bank account. When I got drinks with these men, it all snapped into place, the latent semiology of babeliness. It was like acing a test I didn’t know I’d been studying for. I played with my hair, I drank a mimosa, we co-created a fantasy of who Hungry Angel would be. This was drag on an intimate scale, with far bigger tips.
Perhaps it was my cynicism about the heterosexual endeavor that enabled me to speak freely about what I was due. I never felt like I was selling myself, because my body always felt borrowed. A girl more at home in her flesh might’ve found the whole thing offensive, but for me, it was relaxing, this mutual acknowledgment of service and fees. It didn’t threaten my worldview to acknowledge that every interaction between a woman and man was an exchange of goods. I was once a waitress, smiling for tips. I was once a bartender, compulsively babbling—it’s happy hour somewhere, am I right ladiesssss?! In my working life, I’ve been paid in exchange for good vibes and long legs, for being the type of limp white girl who is easily projected upon. I’ve let men project all over me since my first job at fifteen, when I sloshed coffee for dads who asked if I modeled and tipped me their linty quarters without waiting for an answer.
HOW TALL ARE YOU? they always wanted to know. Sometimes they made a game out of guessing. By comparison SA made this exchange transparent; my height and weight were clearly listed on my profile, right under my age.
It’s like hacking, my friend Frankie said. Cracking the heterosexual code. In LA they were paid $60 to hug a man with no shirt on. He wrote about the encounter on his blog Scrumptious Tacos and commented on their oregano-scented pit hair. Years later we would domme dudes together, going over to a nudist’s house in Dolores Heights and pretending to strangle him. He filmed the charade with a camcorder set on a pile of magazines. The house was a beautiful seafoam Victorian filled to the rafters with trash. In the room where we filmed, a little clearing had been formed in the junk; a twin-sized mattress leaned against the wall, next to a baby grand piano and a filing cabinet full of women’s underwear.
I ordered them online, said the nudist, pointing to the thongs frothing out from the drawers. He had written FUCK TRUMP on his ass in black Sharpie (presumably for the occasion) and had DIRTY LITTLE WHITE BOY stick-and-poked on his thigh.
You’re a spy, Silk Worm said later. You have access to the private worlds of men we’d never meet otherwise.
It was true. Some of these worlds were sordid, some of them glitzy, all of them touched by the same quiet fury. In a matter of months, a whole new San Francisco opened to me, a city of wine bars and bistros my rattiness had prevented me from seeing as I walked from the beach to Pac Heights and jumped on the 1 without paying. SA was a crash course in the good life, in the slate and cream world of disposable incomes. It was also, in many ways, an ethnography of loneliness. What good was a five-star meal when eaten alone? I was paid to be impressed, to be easy, perhaps, but more so easygoing. I was paid to remind wealthy men what they had to be grateful for. I always pocketed the cash I was given for cab fare, preferring to look at the houses on my long walk back home.
*
In those early days of sugaring, there were few constants in my SA game. A cuck wanted to kiss me after I’d fucked someone else, which was logistically difficult. A sub with chronic fatigue syndrome wanted a queen to “keep him in line”; I told him to write “women are superior to men” one hundred times on a legal pad, but he could only do fifty. An octogenarian called me and said he was seeking a “Mistress in the French sense.”
What’s your bra size? he asked, exactly as if he were asking my star sign. And let me be clear: you will not be in my will.
I hung up.
There was King, a bigwig architect with no upper lip. We talked about transhumanism and Larry Ellison; he told me San Francisco might get cheap again soon. It just has to get to the point where no one can live here anymore. You know, like Detroit. Next he told me about the last girl he supported. She was sooooo my type, he sighed. An edgy brunette.
I gagged on my Manhattan. Ouch! I’d been ruthlessly summarized. In one fell swoop, he reduced me, and yet I was too drunk, too compliant, to refute the claim. When he finally kissed me, I was further dumbfounded: at 40, he still didn’t know what to do with his mouth. Yet it was he, in the end, who stopped texting me back.
There was Cody, the jovial bodybuilder who lived on Mount Tam. His freezer was full of steaks and tequila; his twin bulldog puppies (named Three and Four, after One and Two drowned) kept trying to sit on my face. He looked like Vin Diesel and told me lots of stories, like the one about buying his last baby a new pair of tits.
Yup, he said proudly. I own those tits.
As I sat beside him on the leather sectional, he FaceTimed a different girl. She appeared to have just woken up. Hey, darlin’, he said. His smile was genuine. Remember when you brought over those enemas?
Hi, she said, wiping sleep from her eyes. Of course I do. I couldn’t tell from this angle if her tits were real or fake. Good times.
iii.The fall that I became a whore is also the fall I got hooked on The Bachelor.
My friend Kyle introduced us to it. The premise for the hit ABC reality show is simple: twenty-odd women compete for the love of one man, who will propose to his dream girl in the season finale. It’s a case study in small talk and off-shoulder tops. Each episode consists of girls with ashy highlights (referred to en masse as The Women) crying Oh my god! whenever they enter a room. When not on dates with their collective boyfriend, The Women pace their taupe quarantine: they work out obsessively, braid each other’s hair, drink wine, nap, tan, and talk about their man. Contestants aren’t allowed to have phones or computers. Books are discouraged, though journaling and Bible study is OK. The Women are cooped up with nothing to do except feel. It’s almost polyamorous, this greenhouse of girlies sharing a lover and processing their emotions ad nauseam.
The Bachelor himself admits to getting different things from different relationships. I think I might be falling in love with two women! he admits, stricken. If the outcome weren’t fixed (The Bachelor proposing, in the end, to one winning girl), this show might threaten to undermine the monogamous project by documenting, quite addictively, love’s multiplicitous nature. In the 15th season of The Bachelorette, our manic and chatty heroine Hannah leaves empty-handed—the man she ultimately chose on a white-sand beach had a girlfriend back home the whole time.
Unsurprisingly, ABC’s definition of romance is pretty conventional. Girls wear gowns and shiver in the night air, men wear suits and want kids. They kiss, then do a little more. Courtship is portrayed as a series of outings—picnics, wine tastings, massages, safaris—followed by a moment of hushed revelation. Over champagne and tilapia (which they never eat), the girl “opens up” to her man. She adjusts her spaghetti straps and rehashes her traumas. Secrets are a form of televisual capital as contestants divulge tales of divorce and heartbreak; they are a limited resource that must be doled out with care. In a strange twist, the bad things that happen to a girl make her ever more eligible. Pain is a requisite for depth, for the sought-after status of real.
Serena got REAL tonight, The Bachelor tells the cameras afterwards, eyes wet. She is so much more than a pretty face.
At the end of each episode, The Women dress up and gather for the rose ceremony. The Bachelor calls his favorite girls forward and hands them each a long-stemmed red rose. Those who don’t get a rose are sent home—party over.
I gave him all of myself, the losers bawl to the cameras. They take off their heels and veer through the courtyard. It’s back to their lives as nurses or influencers, in Cleveland or Malibu, their closets stuffed with dresses worn just once. It hurts so bad. I have such shitty luck with men. They might as well blow all their secrets now; this currency, of woundedness and indiscretion, doesn’t convert well in the outside world. He didn’t want to let me in. No one ever has. I feel totally unlovable.
“They might as well blow all their secrets now; this currency, of woundedness and indiscretion, doesn’t convert well in the outside world.”
Maria and I binge-watched old seasons, propped up in her bed. The show is formulaic, thoroughly white-washed, but we had to love it for its incidental insightfulness: for how self-conscious it reveals the heterosexual endeavor to be. Romance is so serious that it becomes a big joke. Men say in earnest, I meant it when I said I loved you in Uruguay. Girls self-describe as wife material or empaths. They say they want a man who isn’t afraid to be silly; it’s important to laugh,they intone. The franchise itself is nicknamed, somewhat sinisterly, Bachelor Nation. In shades of eggshell and peach, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette reveal the perversity of something so ubiquitous: girls loving boys, bodies seeking affection. The more we watched, the realer it became to us. We got invested in multiple Jennifers. Romance was a ritual we cranky queers could learn too. Afterall, I liked to love, I liked to kiss on the beach! The show was a guilty pleasure, but also a blueprint. We even made scorecards to rank the contestants, with categories for Cleanliness, Kookiness, Potential to be a Karen and Most Likely to Try Anal.
Do you think the girls ever hook up with each other? Kyle asked.
How could they not? They were horny and bored, overflowing with feeling. Their three weeks in the mansion seemed comparable to Milgram’s prison experiment. I heard a rumor that producers tracked contestants’ menstrual cycles to know when they were at their most emotionally volatile (I’ve yet to confirm this). Personally, I would love it if The Women passed the hours by fucking, so long as they didn’t lose sight of their goal. They were playing to win and we were deep in the game. I had my money on Jennifer M.
IV. My longest-standing arrangement was with a man we will call Jack, a retired schoolteacher who lived in a distant ski town. He paid my rent for nine months. We never so much as hugged. Instead, we exchanged book recommendations and cheerful blurred selfies as he drove between states, chasing powder. He showed me pictures of the girls he met up with in Salt Lake City and Denver, all with glasses and bangs. I teased him about having a thing for gay chicks. Over dinner in a low-lit pub, we seriously discussed why this might be. I asked him how he felt when he transferred me money.
Good, he said plainly. It makes me happy to help you.
If you say so, I murmured. I didn’t have glasses or bangs.
His username was KindandCaringDenver. I thought he was the nicest man I’d ever met. He laughed when I told him this. Just you wait.
After six months of texting, he invited me to his condo in Tahoe for the weekend. Of course I don’t expect anything to happen, he wrote me. I know we’re platonic. Up to this point, we’d met in the flesh twice, though we communicated almost daily. I went to Tahoe for two reasons: as a person, I liked him; as a writer, I couldn’t resist. Everything about him was too good to be true. Now was my chance to be proven wrong in a cinematic fashion.
He bought me a ticket from Oakland to Reno. I overdosed on my weed tincture and spilled the rest in my bag, arriving to Nevada improbably stoned.
Jesus, Jack said when he saw me. Oh, you.
We strolled through Reno’s dank network of casinos, looking for something to comment on. He was easy to talk to, which mattered the most. I was immediately soothed by the smell of smoke trapped in carpet; he pointed out the glass ashtrays built into the slot machines. Eventually we sat in a piano bar called Roxy’s that boasted 121 different types of martini, somewhere inside the Eldorado. I joked about getting The Gold Digger but settled on The Salty Dog. I drank too quickly and felt moved by the piano. We watched elderly couples in stretch pants slow-dance and wondered if they wondered about us. This bar felt important to me, a sullen cousin to my Frisco haunts, with its rose-printed carpet and insomniac waitstaff, proffering purplish darkness at all times of day.
After drinking, we gambled a little, but it made me uncomfortable. I wanted to pocket the twenties Jack gave me. That’s how I was as a sex worker, outwardly crazy but inwardly strict. If I was a contestant on The Bachelor, I have a hunch who the editors would make me out to be: the wildcard, the iffy one, the so-called edgy brunette. They always include one contestant who dares to question the process, who worries aloud if you can really fall in love with a man you barely know. I would be the worrier. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t, by mistake or design, fall in love. A suspicious heart is still breakable. Who among us doesn’t melt a bit when given flowers and called pretty? That’s the evil truth of The Bachelor, that it destabilizes healthy young starlets with the promise of love. Other reality shows advertise their evilness but The Bachelor is no better—the goal, in the end, is to watch kids go crazy in a house on a hill.
Jack and I were startled by the sunset when we walked back to his car. The Biggest Little City was beautiful, a lilac-lit grid of pawnshops and flophouses, commerce ringed by alpine peaks. The gold paint was peeling on the squat, ugly buildings where one went to win big, where one chain-smoked and ate steak for $6.99. It was seedy and earnest, a place where my SF friends could fall, laughing, in love. In the car, I talked stupidly about the semiotics of casinos, how everything was an advertisement including our bodies, and wasn’t that a better way to be under late capitalism? Jack smiled and didn’t take the bait.
We drove thirty minutes to his family’s condo in Tahoe. It was modest and cozy with wall-to-wall carpeting and pilled flannel sheets. I had the ground floor to myself and he had the top. We convened in the middle, where he’d hidden plastic Easter eggs all over the living room, each containing a $20 or $50 bill. If I were to have kissed him, it would’ve been then.
I can’t believe it! I cried, cracking one open. He drank a bottle of beer and watched me hunt, both of us wearing thick socks, laughing like kids who have done something clever. Our physical contact peaked that evening, when I lay down on the sofa and he spread a wool blanket over me.
Can I give you a peck? he said, pressing his lips to the crown of my head. You just look so cute!
He sprang back to his armchair before I could protest. It was not the kiss but the word-choice that shook me. I never thought of myself as cute. I lacked the requisite rosiness, I was too horsey and sly—right? It scared me to think I’d misunderstood my appeal.
Back in Tahoe with Jack, we drank tea and watched Big Bang Theory. A lot of the female characters, I noticed, had glasses and bangs. By the time we retired to our separate floors for the night, I felt like myself again. I lay in bed and I texted my friends: Still alive! Then I turned out the light and thought about games. I remembered that video games had hidden messages known as Easter eggs, inside jokes for deep players, a network of perks to uncover. For the past six months I’d been uncovering my own network of perks, the bonuses to having this body—flavored martinis, steak dinners, Tom Ford perfumes. A Foucauldian definition of gender might be a network of perks and concomitant risks. Jack and I would talk about this the next morning, a bit shy in pajamas, holding our mugs with both hands.
It’s not calculating in the bad way, he said of SA, but there are calculations.
It’s a delicate balance, I agreed. If I don’t thank you enough, I look like a brat. But if I thank you too often, I look like a fake.
Just be you, he said, touching my knee. That’s enough.
This was why I watched The Bachelor: for strategies of grace, for disciplinary clichés. I watched for tips on how to shine, on how best to just be me. The Bachelor is, of course, a game show. You can win, you can lose, you’ve signed up to be shattered. Desire necessitates risk. Reno knows this, as do the polyamorists: you can follow the rules, you can play a good game, but there are no guarantees. You give up control. All you can do is be graceful when the gig is up. The heart is a casino, purple and scarred.
The next morning, I rolled over and found two more eggs, each containing $100, under my pillow. Jack and I skied all afternoon and went to the spa in the evening. For dinner, we had leftovers; he ate one slider and a slice of pizza. I had never been around a man who ate less than me. We talked about books and went to bed early, tuckered out by a day that felt wholesome in its bounty. As a present, I gave him Sex at Dawn (which he already had) and he gave me The Piano Teacher (which I already had).
On our last morning, he drove me to the airport and hugged me goodbye. He had talked about coming to San Francisco with me, but the snow was too good in Tahoe; besides, there was a bi girl in Utah he wanted to see. I had the lingering feeling, as he drove away, that my response to his peck on the first night hurt his feelings. I had, truth be told, recoiled. I know he felt me flinch.
Moseying through security, I counted the slot machines in the airport. They were everywhere in Reno, more slot machines than women. I had the Hot Chocolate song stuck in my head: Everyone’s a winner, baby…. In my SA life, I’d often felt like a winner, far more often, in fact, than in my regular sex life. I hoped Jack felt like a winner as he drove back to Tahoe, though I still wondered what exactly he was winning with me. I was too cynical to accept that it might just be my friendship. We’d joked about me wearing a Playboy bunny costume while I hunted for my Easter eggs. In reality, I spent 80% of the trip in my puffer and jeans.
On the flight home, I compared my weekend with Jack to my most recent evening with Cody, the peppy bodybuilder in Marin. He’d texted me to come over at 11:30 pm on a Wednesday. I threw on a trench coat and ran after the Uber he’d called prematurely. At his house in Mill Valley, we made out in his hot tub while a light rain scrambled our senses. This reminded me of a game I used to play as a kid: stand naked in the snow, then jump in the hot tub, shocking the system. Cody ate my pussy while his dogs ravaged the garden. Later, they kept licking his face.
Group hug! he said merrily. Bad boys.
Wait, I said. I’m wearing a tampon. I swung it over my head by the string and flung it off the deck. We laughed at the sound of it landing in the bushes.
I wish I turned you on, he said dolefully. But I know I’m not your type.
I couldn’t lie; ours was a contract of benign, cokey candor. It turns me on how much I turn you on, I offered. I sat on his knee, holding a cigarette I didn’t really want over the water. You know?
He halfheartedly strangled me, a puppy balanced on each shelf-like shoulder, before getting bored. I’m just not that mean, he sighed. In this secluded garden on a mountain in the middle of the night, it was a scene at once hot and preposterous. The combination of boiling water, cold mist, heavy hands, and dog kisses was adjacent to orgasm, equally as disorienting.
At 5 am I asked him to call me a car back to the city. We stood in the kitchen, dripping on the floor. Is that the time? he gasped. The puppies were finally sleeping. I’m sorry, darlin’! God, I never shut up! It’s because, well, you know… He smiled with disarming sweetness. It was a smile that had probably closed many deals. I hate goodbyes.
He gave me my money and smacked my ass in farewell. That was the last time I’d see him. He wired me money to get a Brazilian wax, then found a girlfriend and texted: thanks a lot! it’s been real.
*
The truth is that I loved them both, Cody and Jack. It was not a deep or powerful or significant love, but it was there, like baking soda in the pantry. These men were different levels in the same strange game. I didn’t feel dirty or cheap when I was with them; in fact, it was in their company that I felt the most at ease, the most in charge of my light. I laughed a lot and felt pretty, got happily smashed. Folding my blouse over a kitchen chair so that Cody could snort coke off my tits, I was at my least hungry, most angelic. I was playing a game, sure, but I wasn’t gambling. We both knew exactly how everything would end. Real life was the gamble, with its crossed signals, hurt feelings. Intimacy is so often a murder-mystery; with Cody and Jack, it was an ad. For an evening or two, we both knew the score. We blinked and blazed, like all those neon signs in Reno—
STEAK DINNER $6.99!HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO! (That’s what people always say about going poly)
LOVE IS THE DRUG
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
LOVE SHOULDN’T HURT (an ad for vaginal itch cream)
IT’S ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR SOMEWHERE
iv.After seven months on SA, something strange started to happen. It all began to feel real. Specifically, at the end of a date, when a man handed me a wad of cash, I felt exactly as if I were being handed a rose.
Thank you, I would say, enunciating for the hidden cameras.
It was a full-body hallucination: I seriously felt like Hannah or Demi or Vanessa or Jennifer, quivering in my low-back gown. I felt the thrill of being chosen. Counting my money in the Uber ride home, I thought, Maybe he’s a good guy, which didn’t seem so different from the contestants thinking, Maybe he’s The One. I leaned against the window and listened to music, feeling spinny and drained. I felt the relief of an audition gone well. I couldn’t wait to take off my heels and slide into the bath, to put my hundreds in their secret box at the back of my closet. It was as if the ritual of being paid by strangers for abstract qualities of girlhood (lankiness, chattiness, cleanliness, cheer) chemically mimicked, for me, the rush of falling in love. I couldn’t tell if this was funny or sad.
On The Bachelor, outsiders always question the contestants’ ability to fall for a man they’ve just met. Editors make a point of showcasing this skepticism. Worried parents ask, But how do you know it’s really real? Who IS this guy anyway? The Bachelor himself smacks his forehead. I can’t believe this is happening to ME!
Incredulity is another currency in Bachelor Nation: it’s important to say things like, I never thought I’d fall in love on TV, the same way I found myself, on the flight from Oakland to Reno, gripping the armrest and murmuring, I never thought I’d do something like THIS. The less likely you are to have done it, the more your value goes up: both The Bachelor and The Sugar Daddy want real girls, waitresses, students, unjaded souls. They want a girl in a T-shirt who will shrug and say, I thought I’d give it a try! It’s more interesting, perhaps, to watch a heart break for the first time, to zero in on that inaugural rupture. Experienced hearts elicit suspicion; the worst thing to be, in both worlds, is an escort and/or an actress. Most SA profiles specify: No professionals!
You know Britni works in MEDIA, right? the girls on The Bachelor whisper cattily. She’s just here for TV. She’s a professional actress.
The media-savvy Britni would understand, then, what The Bachelor is really about: infrastructure. With the right framework, the right lighting and setting and codes and cues, one can be led to desire anything. The prize itself is irrelevant; locked into a game, we all want to win. On sugar dates I want the men’s money and then something more nebulous. I want to be Their Girl, not The One exactly but maybe Their Favorite. This desire to win feels unassailable, predetermined by forces far larger than me. At least I’m not in the dark, like the girls on The Bachelor. When I put on a dress in preparation for a sugar date, I know roughly what will happen, what infrastructure will beckon.
“The media-savvy Britni would understand, then, what The Bachelor is really about: infrastructure.”
The media-savvy Britni would understand, then, what The Bachelor is really about: infrastructure. With the right framework, the right lighting and setting and codes and cues, one can be led to desire anything. The prize itself is irrelevant; locked into a game, we all want to win. On sugar dates I want the men’s money and then something more nebulous. I want to be Their Girl, not The One exactly but maybe Their Favorite. This desire to win feels unassailable, predetermined by forces far larger than me. At least I’m not in the dark, like the girls on The Bachelor. When I put on a dress in preparation for a sugar date, I know roughly what will happen, what infrastructure will beckon.
Recently I’ve found myself asking: what are we playing for? It’s easy to forget. In Reno we play for the jackpot; we play for free drinks, for time’s glitzy passage. On The Bachelor we play for True Love, for The One, for a brush with celebrity and a trip to Madrid. Polyamorists play for the infinite romance, to have our cake and eat it too, to fall in love over and over again, to pull the slot machine’s handle until it comes up all hearts. On SeekingArrangement we play for free drinks, cold cash, Easter eggs. We sometimes win friendships that aren’t easy to name. All such games are united by the potential for heartbreak. This is what the playboy risks, in any iteration: a heart publicly shattered.
*
Last night I sent a man a message with a series of red rose emojis. He responded, How many do you want, Angel?
I replied, 1k.
In internet parlance, roses are code for money. As in, how many roses for a night together? However, I like this idea of being sent a thousand red roses. In the real world, it’s also a code, a classic romantic gesture, like when The Bachelor picks his favorite girls at the Rose Ceremony. Thank you, they whisper, accepting his proffered red rose as a token of love. Sometimes girls fall asleep holding their rose, as if another contestant might steal it and the love that went with it. Maria and I have wondered how many roses are used in a season.
Are they real or fake? I ask aloud, though I know it doesn’t matter. My body in a halter dress and cowboy boots is just as fake as it is real. Angels are real; ask the heavy drinkers of Reno, for whom every hour is happy. In the hot tub with Cody, my noises are real, even the ones that I fake. They echo towards Hawaii.
1k roses, real or fake, would fill my apartment. They would stain my sheets, also printed with roses. Weenie might eat some. Their odor would sicken me; I’ve never been attracted to rose-scented perfumes. Still, I’d feel rich. I’d like to think that I’d give most of my roses away, to neighbors and friends, crushes and queens, to the men Maria fucks and the men who ignore me. Like an orphan in a novel, I’d put them in a basket and hand them out on the street-corner. Strangers would smile at me.
Thank you, they’d say. Have a good one, OK? They would think that I had lost something. But I haven’t: I’m a winner, and so are you.