Who's your (sugar) daddy?

From Manolos to minks and oh, so much bling, these are a few of their favorite things.

Pricey meals and Godiva chocolates are prerequisites; weekend jaunts to the tropics standard fare. And if you're lucky, they might even let you pay their rent.

Critics call them gold diggers. But the women who prowl online dating Web sites like wealthymen.com and sugardaddie.com know what they want -- and they're not afraid to flaunt it.

"I am looking for someone who will take me on trips, spa getaways, to the salon, clothes and lingerie shopping," declares female user TNQTPI, a "fiery redhead" from Tennessee who numbers among the "sugarbabes" on sugardaddie.com.

This southern belle is hardly alone in her quest for a man with deep pockets.

Cristine Gomez, 21, recently dated an older man she met on wealthymen.com for three months, a span of time in which he paid her rent check and car payments, and picked up the bill on her college tuition. Gomez harbors no guilt about the expenses; in fact, she views them as a natural part of the relationship.

"The site," she says, "is about being spoiled."

A little repulsive

Defying modern-day notions of gender roles, these sites certainly don't pull any punches regarding members' wants and needs. What might be considered crass or shallow at a social gathering -- "How much money do you really make~" -- is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, when typed onto a profile.

"These Web sites do this strange thing where they make explicit what's implicit," says Dr. Helen Nissenbaum, an associate professor in the department of culture and communication at New York University. "We recognize that desire is there to find a wealthy man ... and at the same time we find it a little repulsive."

Steve Pasternak, founder of sugardaddie.com, believes he has created a place where men and women can live out their greatest fantasies. Fitness models, Playboy-style models and actresses inundate the site's female population, while most men fall between the ages of 35 and 50.

"For the men, it's spending that weekend walking on the beach dining out with a beautiful woman," Pasternak says. "For a woman, it's an opportunity to go places and experience things that she usually wouldn't have access to."

Pure, innocent, wonderful

One sugar daddy requests a woman who can "easily change from a pair of jeans to a small black cocktail dress" in the same day. Another describes himself as a "race car driver looking for his red Ferrari." ArchOn, a graduate of Harvard Law School who is allegedly worth an estimated $1 to $5 million, professes that he is simply in search of "arm candy."

Men are typically forced into the role of the pursuer on mainstream dating Web sites like Match.com and Americansingles.com, where the male-to-female ratio is a lopsided 70 to 30 percent and hundreds of e-mail inquiries drown females' inboxes. Not so when hefty bank accounts are involved, according to Joe Tracy, publisher of Online Dating Magazine. At wealthymen.com, for instance, females outnumber males five to one.

"You kind of reverse the roles because the men are rich and the women are looking for rich men, and therefore they're going to be more aggressive," Tracy says.

Mark Bellinger, a film producer based in Los Angeles, protests the image of sugardaddie.com as a venue for "a bunch of young girls that go out with a bunch of old farts that are gonna pay their rent." The 47-year-old devotes hours each day to his online pursuits; on one occasion, he worked through the night replying to hundreds of e-mails from what he calls "pure, innocent, wonderful" women.

Make no mistake; Bellinger shuns women who try to use him for his fortune. But he wholeheartedly embraces gold diggers, whom he defines as intelligent ladies with an appetite for the "nice stuff" in life.

His assessment: "You want to be with a woman that's satisfied with sitting in a trailer park watching soap operas~"

Romantic ideals

With the online dating industry raking in a half-billion dollars per year, niche sites that cater to a specific audience -- in this case, mercenary-minded women -- are cutting a swath of success across a highly competitive market.

Since the site launched in March 2006, Wealthymen.com has signed up 250,000 females and 100,000 males, while Sugardaddie.com ranks well above the 100,000 mark.

Though both sites serve essentially the same purpose, Wealthymen.com strives to distinguish itself by verifying members' income via tax returns, submitted voluntarily by men who desire the site's golden stamp of approval. The verification scores major brownie points with women wary of being bamboozled by self-professed millionaires who aren't.

"I don't want to date a mechanic, you know what I mean~" says Massiel Gandolff, a divorcee in her mid-30s (who enjoys boating in the waters off Miami's coast with the men she meets on Wealthymen.com).

Abe Smilowitz, founder and chief operating officer of the site, says a project is in the works to create a companion site, Wealthywoman.com. But the company has low expectations for its success, blaming existing societal stereotypes.

"Let's face it: Women care more about a guy's profession and how he does financially than men care," Smilowitz says. "We're just catering to that need."

The cultural phenomenon of women flocking to wealthy men contradicts the prevailing Western romantic ideal of "love me for me," according to Nissenbaum.

"What makes technology so interesting is it can come in and really challenge certain cultural conventions," she says. "And perhaps suddenly, this has the capacity to alter these romantic ideals that we've lived with for so long."

In the meantime, sugar daddies and babes are clicking away, hoping to find a hot date -- or, in Bellinger's case, a walk down the aisle.

"If that's a gold digger, God bless 'em," he says. "I'm marrying one of 'em."