Skip to content

Paying to play: the two exceptions

Channel: Orion Taraban
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JySv494wxJs

Taraban argues that almost all sexual relationships are transactional - resources exchanged for sexual access - and that only two kinds escape this "prostitution continuum" and are worth having: love and the hookup.

Key points

The transactional continuum

  • Sugaring (an explicitly negotiated exchange, typically male resources for female sexual opportunity) has exploded via online platforms. Taraban says that as long as everyone is a consenting adult, it is none of his business.
  • Objections to sugaring are rarely substantive: they stem from breaking the tacit rule that the transaction must never be discussed openly, but instead covered with indirectness, vagueness, and innuendo. The term "romantic relationship" is preferred over "sexual relationship" to preserve a bourgeois respectability.
  • His broader claim: nearly everyone sells themselves, and cheaply. Anyone who works for money is, by his analogy, a "prostitute" - an employee is always paid less than the value they generate. We all trade limited time and energy for what best meets our current needs and options.
  • On a sugaring platform, the pay-per-use prostitute and the woman seeking a "traditional arrangement" (be a wife, be taken care of, provide sex plus companionship and homemaking) are not qualitatively different - only quantitatively, sitting at different price points on the same continuum.
  • Most relationships fall somewhere in that vast middle. Where the man cannot benefit the woman, or the woman cannot sexually interest the man, no relationship occurs. In the middle, the exchange must be "mystified" through security, excitement, lifestyle, gifts, effort, and support - "resources" is not just a euphemism for money.

The two exceptions

  • The exceptions are still transactional, but instead of transacting what they have, the parties transact who they are.
  • Exception 1 - love: much rarer than people claim. Test: tell a woman you will never marry her and see if she stays. Love keeps loving even when it gets nothing, because it is concerned with the good of the other, not benefit to the self. It needs no security, contracts, gifts, or flowers, and will never drag you to family court or couples therapy. What holds most relationships together is not love but "like" - the feeling from a high ratio of getting what you want to not getting what you don't. People mistake that for love.
  • Exception 2 - the hookup: pure lustful desire, with nothing else needed - no money, commitment, or security. Simple access to the other is benefit enough.
  • The two exceptions converge: both disregard social norms and contracts (a person in love or lust will risk crime, danger, shame, even cheating), and both treat the person of the other as the greatest good rather than what the other can provide. Both would feel cheapened by receiving anything in return for access.
  • These are the only relationships in which a man can feel inherently valued rather than used (or a user): when a woman gives without expecting anything back, and when she wants him sexually without expecting anything back. His prescription: transact with others as needed to meet your needs, but prioritize relationships based on love and lust above all others.

Reception

  • Broad agreement with the thesis; the most-liked comments echo "we all pay, one way or another" and "all relationships are transactional." One noted sugaring has not grown, women are just more open about it.
  • Several shared personal counter-testimony of genuine love: a widower whose late wife gave him "the best life ever" and who only realized how rare it was after re-entering dating; a 67-year-old bachelor loved by his late Filipina girlfriend who paid for dates and never asked about his finances; a couple 20 years apart insisting it was attraction and love, not money.
  • A recurring lament that love-for-you is "rarer than a unicorn" - one man said he blew his one real chance because he assumed it was too good to be true.
  • A popular reframe: women are like mutual funds - pay the one-time up-front fee (sugaring) or the back-end trailer fee forever (marriage).
  • Pushback on the central analogy: some argued that selling yourself sexually makes you a prostitute but holding a regular job does not, calling the employee-prostitute comparison too weak to carry the thesis.
  • Note: many of the highest-"liked" comments are affiliate book-spam plugging a fake title ("Power Behind Locked Door" by Jacob Rockefeller); these are ads, not viewer response.