Parinda Wanitwat is the first-time director and producer of Daddies Date Babies, a documentary that explores the dynamics between sugar daddies and the women who date them. Wanitwat became interested in the subject when a friend suggested the website SeekingArrangement.com to her after she lost her phone and could not afford a new one, saying there were men on the site looking for young women to spoil in exchange for sex. Though she ultimately decided against a relationship, she noticed that the media about “sugar dating” is heavily skewed in a direction that makes the young women look desperate and the men look like gentlemanly saviors.

I was interested in Wanitwat’s film as a sex work activist, as well as a writer who has seen the work of sugar babies largely overlooked as a form of legitimate labor. Wanitwat’s exploration of the topic speaks more to the issues of emotional and physical labor that go into these relationships than any previous media coverage I’ve encountered.

The film follows women learning to negotiate the value in their own erotic capital while simultaneously working on their own professional and personal goals. Some of Wanitwat’s subjects took highly transactional approaches to sugar dating, while others never explicitly discuss money. All of the women had multiple sugar daddies in their sugar dating “careers,” but they all have very different feelings about the ethics of sugar dating.

Though still in post-production, the film is drawing lots of media attention for the 23-year-old filmmaker. Everyone from Susan “Princeton Mom” Patton to writers at The Atlantic are weighing in on Wanitwat and her film sight unseen. Being drawn in by the compelling trailer and the feeling that any enemy of the “Princeton Mom” was a friend of mine, I contacted Wanitwat to discuss what drew her to the subject of sugar dating and what she hopes for audiences to get out of her film. We talked about being a first-time documentarian and what media gets wrong.

Hey, sorry I’m late, I had like, three hours of sleep.

Hey, me too. High five!

Ugh, right? A lot of the footage is blending in my head with, like, the news coverage that the film has received. So if I’m all over the place about who said what about what…

(Laughing) Oh, I didn’t keep track of that either.

You’re not a trained filmmaker. What drew you to film?

I took a documentary filmmaking class in my senior year, which is really late. It had nothing to do with my major. When I took that course, I wished I had discovered this field earlier; it felt like a perfect combination of what I could do. I like asking questions, I like digging into topics not widely known.

I was born and raised in Thailand. I think with certain social values there, I felt that I shouldn’t make art, it doesn’t have value. But I have come to a point in my life where I feel that there’s nothing else that I can do or would rather do. I know I will learn a lot, I know that I’m not wasting my time, and that this is the most steep learning curve I’ve ever experienced.

I wanted to ask about this because: you’re 23. You went to Princeton. You’re from Thailand. So much of that trajectory is stereotypically outside of a career in the arts. Is your family like, “You’re making a movie about what?”

(laughing) So to be honest, I don’t know. I think that my mom and my dad are vaguely aware what I’m up to. I don’t know if they read the English articles or if they know what sugar daddies and sugar babies are.

In one article, you mentioned you looked into sugar baby work and decided it wasn’t for you. After that, did you start to think, “But maybe I should make a movie about it?”

When I signed up for the website SeekingArrangement, I subscribed to the YouTube channel. It was all just really biased content. All the existing media I saw portrayed sugar dating and sugar babies in one really consistent way, that these women were desperate for money, and the media was always asking, “Is this prostitution?” Why are we so obsessed with trying to categorize?

What’s more interesting, to me, are the dynamics of the relationships. What I found is that some women really do enjoy it, some women are treated really poorly. Some men really like it, some men do it out of desperation. There are so many other interesting sub-dialogues that are not being discussed. Not to mention the fact that sugar daddies are all portrayed as successful, kind businessmen that want to help, and the sugar babies are portrayed with a Louis Vuitton bag or as someone desperate for college tuition.

When I signed myself up on the website, I asked myself, “How does this work? How much do I ask? How should I expect guys to treat me?” I did get some messages that said, “This is how it worked with my previous relationship, I gave her $300 every time we’d meet.” And that’s sex work.

I was wondering how to respond to these messages and none of the existing media give people a range of experiences. They all just ask, “What are we supposed to do about it?”

Was there a reason for only interviewing the women who participate and not the men?

This answer might not be that interesting or controversy generating, but I’m female, I know females better than males.

From a sugar baby perspective, it might be easier for them to come forward than it would be for an established man whose identity needs to be kept secret because of their jobs, so they barely have any incentives.

But what do you think the incentive was for women to share, particularly those that didn’t participate under cover of anonymity? There’s stigma attached even when it’s not considered sex work.

I can’t speak for all of the sugar babies out there, but the ones in the film wanted to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. I would say the majority interviewed do want to combat slut-shaming. Sugar babies, as portrayed in the media, often say things like, “Oh, we're not sex workers, we're not prostitutes. Prostitutes are bad and dirty and cheap. We just date for perks.” Most of the girls that contacted me want to reverse that kind of slut-shaming. They are putting themselves out there and they don’t know what’s going to happen later in their life. And I really admire and respect their decision.

When you were making the film, what did you learn about the emotional labor of sugar dating?

After hearing what they have to do to get on the website, to get attention, to manage expectations once they are in these relationships, it will be very clear to viewers that this is not something that everyone can do. I don’t want to necessarily label it as a job, but there are definitely elements that make it very similar. There is both physical labor and emotional labor, and there are monetary transactions. If you just put the sugar dating aside, it does sound like a job description.

I learned a lot listening to different girls manage their emotional health in these relationships. For example, with one woman, a guy said, “I am going to pay you $300 for this time we hang out, are you okay with that?” And the question that popped up in her mind was, “I’m going to hang out with this guy for eight hours, I’m getting paid $300. Am I really worth this much?” Right there, that’s thinking of it like a job. She was trying to get over the emotional element of negotiating her worth of it.

What has the reaction from SeekingArrangement been like? Are they like, “She’s found the only girls on the site who are having sex! This is precisely what we don’t do!”

Give me a break!

Right? Are you blowing up their spot? Have any of your subjects not had sex with their sugar daddies?

All of them did. And all of them explicitly say so.

Right, its not a big secret. What do you think about the way SeekingArrangement presents itself?

That’s hard to answer as when trying to stay objective, but I can say what my subjects have said. One of them was contacted by SeekingArrangement a few years back when they were trying to build a social media presence. She’s a PhD student who is very smart, very articulate, and they asked her to talk about her experiences. And when she got there, their media team asked her to say she didn’t have sex with those guys. She refused. The site knows what’s going on, they run the site. But because in our current society we shame sex work, we make it illegal, we make it unacceptable. That’s why, to operate it as a business, they have to avoid the prostitution part of it.

You mentioned when I first approached you that you tried to take a much more empathetic approach to sugar dating. Do you think that informed the way the material came out?

Because I’m not running a production company, I’m not an established filmmaker with a certain deadline, or under a certain budget, I got to tell these stories the way I wanted. And I really admire these women. I think people can learn a lot from them.

The way I treated them helped me get the stories I got, but to be honest, that’s not my intention. That’s just how I treat people.

Alana Massey is a writer and disappointment in New York. She likes Serbian fiction, Lady Twitter, and your approval.