TikTok "sugar daddies" and Anora

On too-good-to-be-true men who may or may not have money

A few months ago, I gained a small “micro-influencer” following on TikTok because a story I narrated about a juicy divorce randomly went viral. Soon after, messages started landing in my inbox from dozens of random men claiming to be sugar daddies.

I imagined they were spammers and con artists, even bots. Two female friends gaining traction on TikTok were also seeing the same requests: middle-aged men, usually white and a bit overweight with names like Steve or Rob, DM’ing them: “Hey princess, can I take care of your rent, cell phone bill, monthly car payments?” Or, “Hey pretty, if $7,000 were deposited into your account, what would you do with it?”

Long story short, I was curious, so I engaged with one of them a few months back to see what would happen. He said he wanted someone to “talk to.” (Don’t worry reader, I was careful and did not get scammed or harmed in any way, all is good!)

Unsurprisingly, this was a con where the “sugar daddies” offer to send you (their “baby”) $7,000 or so over PayPal in exchange for conversation, but then ask for a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin as part of some “transaction fee,” because they “live in another country.” They send you a fake screenshot of the sugar baby money being sent over PayPal—and then they abscond with the few hundred dollars of the fake transaction fee you send.

Our online world is rampant with spam and fraud—especially with AI—so none of this was all that shocking to me. At the same time, of course there is an actual ecosystem and exchange of money where people can send foot pics or chat with a man online for more money than they make their day jobs. The internet scammers prey on people’s desperation, optimism, loneliness, or belief that they can out-con the con-artist (or all of the above)—and a lot of people lose money with little recourse.

I do wonder how many women in desperate situations have actually sent the bitcoin to Mr. “Sugar Daddy” and been out a couple hundred bucks. Nothing to laugh at for most people.

Now bear with me as I segue into Anora, which I finally saw last week and actually really liked. For those of you who haven’t seen it (without spoiling too much), it is the story of a Brooklyn sex worker named Ani who becomes the fixture of a Russian oligarch’s bored son (named Vanya). When things go too far between them and they marry impulsively in Las Vegas, we are led to believe Ani wields some power in the situation over this sex-addicted boy. But then Vanya’s ice-cold parents descend in on the first private jet from Russia—and things don’t go as well for Ani as we had hoped.

Ani genuinely believed that Vanya loved her. And critics have noted rightly that a seasoned sex worker would not fall for some pubescent trust-fund-son of Russian oligarchs in two weeks, nor would she fall for a fairy tale ending. She would have seen so many types of men at this point to discern that Vanya’s whims are childish and impermanent, that people and things feel totally replaceable to him. (As one former dominatrix told me, Ani would have had a filter that this dominatrix called “man goggles.”)

But at the same time, is it so crazy to imagine that sex workers might be exhausted by the grind, want to believe someone would take care of them, or possess an iota of optimism about human nature or people’s ability to change? She is a human being, after all.

I think we still imagine that many women either fall into two groups: jaded, cunning femme fatales who reject or outsmart the too-good-to-be-true promises of financial salvation—or obedient trad-wives and girlfriends who know their places alongside a man with the money.

Vanya was far from a rich or powerful man (he is a video-game-playing couch potato boy at best). But his power as an heir to a fortune mobilized many other men to drop everything they were doing, including baptizing a baby, to solve the problem of a “prostitute” potentially having any legal access to his family’s fortune (who their financial well-being is also dependent on). As strong-willed as Ani is—fighting off multiple “hit-men” types with names like Igor valiantly—she eventually comes to the conclusion that to hire a divorce lawyer in a battle against presumably billionaire oligarchs would mean ruin and destruction of the little she does possess.

Ani’s evolution as a woman is not uncommon. In an interview with Call Her Daddy this week, actor Ellen Pompeo (of Meredith Grey/Grey’s Anatomy fame) said she realized early on in her life that the sea would part for rich and powerful men. Initially, she thought they were the coolest guys in the world. She wanted to have what they had.

But later Pompeo’s views evolved, and she saw them as “mafia” men—but also as people to cleverly step on to attain financial freedom and do what she wanted. In the podcast, she literally advises other women to do the same.

Neither the TikTok sugar daddies nor Vanya nor most other men will come in to swoop you away or save you, for the most part. (And if they do, that comes at a cost you will later find out about.)

What I find interesting is that while Anora wins Best Picture this year, we are concurrently seeing the prominence of trad-wife themes of softness, of optimism in men and in relationships, of this concept that a woman can trust the safety that power and wealth provide. A life like that is limiting and unrealistic to me for a variety of reasons. But I find Ani’s character fascinating because of her multi-dimensionality. Ani optimistically believed that she could be a “trad-wife” of an oligarch, she thought she had fallen in love. Before Vanya, Ani understood the cold, hard world—and after Vanya, she received confirmation that the world is indeed cold and hard.

Throughout the film, one of the hit-men hired by Vanya’s parents (Igor) remains conflicted between following his boss’s orders and also helping Ani. He is sensitive, and seems totally in awe of Ani’s resilience and grit, even confused when he is asked to be the hired “gun” to capture her. At the very end after a candid conversation, Ani’s armor is stripped and she collapses onto him, crying for the very first time.

Some may call her journey naive, sure. But I also say let’s hope she still holds on to some optimism.