‘I have bills to pay!’ Sugar dating in British higher education institutions

ABSTRACT

The increased participation in the UK of university students in activities that are liminal to the sex industry such as ‘sugar dating’, defined as the transactional relationship between a younger woman (Sugar Baby) and an older, affluent man (Sugar Daddy), is under-researched. This article draws from seven interviews conducted with university Sugar Babies regarding the factors that influenced their decision to sugar date. Interviewees systematically described the lack of economic capital to cover basic expenses – rent, bills, or food – as a critical factor, despite having acquired a student loan. Other factors such as the expectation of ‘fun’, the acquisition of symbolic capital, and the forecast of enjoying a superior lifestyle were also noted. The findings suggest that the economic context of female students in the UK should be investigated to offer economic alternatives to gendered sexual activities such as sugar dating.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• heterosexualities
• women
• neoliberalism

Introduction

Sugar dating (also known as ‘sugaring’) is the name given to the dating dynamic by which two persons agree to an exchange of company and in most cases sexual encounters, for some sort of payment (Motyl 2013). Since sex is generally expected, sugaring can be considered an activity liminal to the sex industry.¹ A ‘sugar’ relationship is ordinarily formed by a younger woman – commonly known as ‘Sugar Baby’ – and an older, more affluent man – ‘Sugar Daddy’ (Nayar 2017). Sugar dating is well-researched in some countries such as Kenya (Longfield et al. 2004; Luke 2015), or South Africa (Brouard and Crewe 2013; Selikow and Mbulaheni 2013; Phaswana-Mafuya et al. 2014). In the last decade, sugar dating has acquired notoriety in the Western world, with research conducted in the US (Motyl 2013; Nayar 2017; Mixon 2018) and Canada (Daly 2017). Nevertheless, in the UK it continues to be an under-researched topic. This study constitutes a preliminary research in the UK regarding female university students who sugar date.

In the last two decades, the UK has seen an increase in the number of young women who join sugar dating websites to engage in transactional relationships while attending a higher education institution (HEI) (Dowrick and Randall 2020). The most popular website in the country is Seeking.com (Tapper 2019). This site operates in two different ways: as an online meet-up place for potential Sugar Daddies and Babies, and as a blog that encourages female university students to become Sugar Babies through the Sugar Baby University Program™.² In this ‘program’ the site describes sugar dating as a mechanism to cope with student debt and living expenses (Seeking 2020c); as well as connects the increasing number of students who are sugar dating with the systematic increase in tuition fees.

A similar trend can be observed in the participation of students in the sex industry. Authors such as Ron Roberts (Roberts et al. 2010; Roberts, Jones, and Sanders 2013; Roberts 2018) have argued that the neoliberalization of British HEIs – the increase in tuition fees and the reduction of maintenance grants, among other measures – is deeply linked to the participation of university students in the sex industry. While tuition fees have risen from £3000 in 1998 to £9000 in 2012–2013, the average real household income has minimally increased – from £440 to slightly less than £500 per week (Cribb, Norris Keiller, and Waters 2018). Students are also more impoverished, even though the number of British students who are engaging in low-paid, part-time jobs has been growing since the 1990s (Canny 2002), as well as the hours of work per week (Roberts et al. 2000; Broadbridge and Swanson 2005). However, this increase has not translated into higher revenues. The pay of casual jobs, where students are overrepresented, has been falling in real terms, while zero-hours contracts have become commonplace (Antonucci 2018).

Other factors beyond the acquisition of economic capital also have an impact on students’ decision to engage in transactional sex. Leclerc-Madlala (2003, 214) has highlighted that woman who engage in commodified relationships with older men may have motivations such as the acquisition of symbolic capital, defined as ‘symbols of modern and successful life’. Sagar et al. (2015) found that students who worked in the sex industry had an expectation of enjoyment and experiencing ‘fun’.

The commodification of the university and the surge in the number of students who engage in transactional relationships through the sex industry – and potentially sugar dating – are part of the same neoliberal logic by which the individual is conceived in terms of self-entrepreneurship and self-responsibilization, regardless of their social circumstances. This logic, however, affects women and men in different ways and fosters pre-existent structural gender inequalities. Neoliberal ideologies have ‘helped gender turn on new axes and reinscripted gender inequality in new forms [creating] intense demands for women to seek success in all life domains through individual responsibility and hard work’ (Blair 2017, 675).

Drawing upon interviews with seven women who had sugar dated while attending a higher education institution and considering the economic context, I will argue that the neoliberalization of the university sector in the United Kingdom favoured the dire economic situation that the participants were experiencing. Financial hardship was the most important factor that influenced their decision to enter a ‘sugar’ relationship. Other motives related to the hegemony of neoliberalism as the current cultural logic like the acquisition of symbolic capital, or a more comfortable lifestyle, were reported. Additional reasons were also noted, such as sugar dating providing a financial gain as opposed to non-commodified dating, which many participants found to be a disappointing experience. These findings hold implications for possible changes in tuition fees and/or a new reconfiguration of student loans in the United Kingdom.

University students’ engagement in transactional sex

Seeking.com announces itself as a ‘leading dating site where over 10+ million members find relationships on their terms’ (Seeking 2020a). The platform functions as an online-dating website where users are expected to abide by the definitions provided: A Sugar Daddy must be ‘generous when it comes to supporting a Sugar Baby’, while a Sugar Baby is defined as an attractive person ‘looking for the finer things in life [who] get[s] to experience a luxurious lifestyle, and meet[s] wealthy people on a regular basis’ (Seeking 2020b). Throughout the website, Sugar Daddies are depicted as middle-age white men, and Sugar Babies as white or Asian young women. Male Sugar Babies are absent from the site. Using symbolic elements such as gendered formal clothes – e.g. ties for men, short evening dresses for women – on pictures of heterosexual couples, the website constructs sugar dating as a gendered and heteronormative dynamic where the young woman occupies the position of the Sugar Baby and the senior man that of the Sugar Daddy.

Seeking.com specifically targets female university students as prospective Sugar Babies through their Sugar Baby University Program™; and establishes a direct correlation between the rise of tuition fees, the acquisition of student loans, and the number of members that have joined their site:

The value of outstanding student loans at the end of March 2019 reached £121 billion. As many as 83% of student loan borrowers in the UK will never be able to repay their debts, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It makes sense that the number of college Sugar Babies seeking Sugar Daddies on SeekingArrangement rose 5 percent from the previous year in 2019. (Seeking 2020c)

The site also provides information about its members and states that there are currently 2,058,362 female Sugar Babies, 150,354 male Sugar Babies, 501,459 Sugar Daddies and 14,126 Sugar Mommas registered in the United Kingdom (Seeking 2020c). The numbers show the acute gendered nature of sugar dating as women compromise the majority (95.7%) of the Sugar Babies and men most of the Sugar Daddies (97.4%). In addition, a ranking of British universities, classified according to the number of students who have registered in Seeking.com with an email account provided by them, can be found online. The University of London, University of Portsmouth, and the University of Salford occupy the top three positions respectively (Seeking 2020c).

The data suggest that Seeking.com is highlighting a prevalent trend. Despite the acquisition of a student loan, some students are struggling to cover daily living expenses: 62% of British students think the loan is insufficient (Bushi 2019). Meagre loans can be linked to the progressive process of neoliberalization that the British HE sector has undergone in the last three decades. One of the first steps taken in the process of liberalizing higher education in the United Kingdom was the introduction of tuition fees: in 1998 a tuition fee cap was established in the United Kingdom at £1000 per academic year. In 2004, England, Northern Ireland, and Wales increased it to £3000 (Marginson 2018). These figures were eight years later increased up to maximum cap of £9000 pounds per academic year for full-time, domestic students. Tuition fees are currently at £9250³ per academic year in all the nations that form the United Kingdom except Scotland (Marginson 2018).

Simultaneous with the introduction of tuition fees, maintenance grants⁴ were dramatically reduced and replaced by student loans to be repaid after graduation (Lunt 2008). Student loans are not interest-free. In fact, the interest rate is applied at the maximum possible rate while students are still at university. Despite most students not being able to support themselves solely with the loans (National Union of Students 2018), they will finish their undergraduate studies with an average debt of £50,000. Moreover, the opaque design of the loans makes it almost impossible for students to foresee how much they will eventually pay (Connington 2018).

The acquisition of a student loan impacts differently in terms of debt on students depending on their economic background. Students who come from more affluent backgrounds are often shielded from debt by their parents, while those who come from households with lower incomes do not enjoy that protection (West et al. 2015). While parents tend to feel responsible for contributing to their children’s educational expenses, those who earn higher salaries are abler to do so, effectively creating another layer of inequality for low-income students (West et al. 2015).

The rationale behind the neoliberalization of HE is closely linked to the intensification of a cultural logic that praises individual success and conceives individuals as completely detached from structural social inequalities. This ideology

extends its political reach beyond social and economic policy, disseminating its market values so that human life comes increasingly to be conceived in primarily entrepreneurial terms where individuals are responsible for their own adaptation and progress; regardless of the circumstances they have been dealt. (Baker 2010, 188)

Female students, considering the circumstances described above, may apply this entrepreneurial logic to realms of their private life, for example by capitalizing on sexual labour and/or dating. While contemporary ideas on sexuality are imbued with the notions of agency and individual choice, these need to be recalibrated against the background of economic pressures (Gill 2007). In sugar dating, femininity is regarded as a bodily property that can be commodified. This ideology, alongside the economic precarity caused by a neoliberal university sector, may explain the fact that an increasing number of female students is engaging with different coping strategies such as sex work⁵ or sugar dating to cope with financial distress.

Participation in sex work has steadily increased in the last decade, especially for those social groups who are more prone to experience precarity and financial hardship – women, young people, and migrants (Sanders and Hardy 2013). Research conducted in the United Kingdom focusing on the factors that affect students’ decision to participate in the sex industry systematically concluded that financial struggle was the most important one (Roberts, Bergström, and La Rooy 2007; Haeger and Deil-Amen 2010; Roberts et al. 2010; Sagar et al. 2015). The sex industry can be a relatively well-paid activity if compared with other part-time jobs that are popular among students such as working in retail, hotels, or bars (Roberts et al. 2010; Broadbridge and Swanson 2005); and may offer other advantages such as flexible hours. However, not all the reasons provided by students were economically motivated: some of the participants of a survey conducted among students who were involved in sex work were ‘found to be intrinsically motivated for doing this type of work (in terms of anticipated enjoyment) rather than feeling forced into it’ (Sagar et al. 2015, 401).

The popularity of sugar dating needs to be placed within the broader context of students engaging in transactional sexual dynamics. Their participation is favoured by economic precariousness, the difficulty to cope with daily expenses despite having acquired a student loan, as well as by a neoliberal rhetoric of entrepreneurialism and commodification of femininity. Sugar dating online spaces such as Seeking.com may have found in female university students a target group who can potentially be attracted to sugar dating, which is described by the site as an activity that will generate economic gains in exchange of a companionship and/or sexual services, yet without guarantees. Understanding the context where university women choose to engage in sugar dating can contribute to broader theories around how gendered sexual entrepreneurialism develops within the United Kingdom’s higher education system.

Methods

In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted between August and December 2019 with seven women who were sugar dating at the time or had previously done so. Six interviews were conducted face-to-face and one by phone, lasting between 45–90 minutes. Afterwards they were fully verbatim transcribed; the extracts have been minimally edited for length and clarity. All identifying data has been anonymized.

Purposive sampling and the snowball method were used to recruit participants. Purposive sampling involves seeking a ‘closely defined group for whom the research question will be significant’ (Smith and Osborn 2008, 56). I recruited five participants through the social network Facebook by creating a post in several women-only support groups seeking women who had ever sugar dated or were doing so and would be willing to be interviewed.

The criteria were the following: women based in England who were sugar dating or had previously done so, between 18 and 30 years old, who had obtained or were pursuing an undergraduate degree. Although I was aware that the ‘Internet population constitutes a biased sample of the total population in terms of demographic characteristics’ (Baltar and Brunet 2012, 58), this demographic bias was useful for my research purposes, as younger people tend to use the Internet more intensely than older cohorts (Hargittai and Hinnant 2008).

To find the rest of the participants I employed the snowball method: once a willing research participant is found, this person gives the investigator the name of another possible participant, who provides another name, and so on. This technique is often used when participants are hard to reach (Faugier and Sargeant 1996; Baltar and Brunet 2012) as it is the case for women who engage in sugaring dynamics. Two participants referred two other women who agreed to be interviewed. The resulting participants were the following (Table 1):

Table 1. Participants’ characteristics.

Name	Age	Degree	Graduated	Student loan	Actively sugar dating	Family economic support
Jessica	18–23	FT Undergraduate	No	Yes	No	Yes
Nora	23+	FT Undergraduate	Yes	Yes	No	No
Rosa	23+	FT Postgraduate	Yes	Yes	No	No
Rebecca	18–23	FT Undergraduate	No	Yes	Yes	No
Suzanne	18–23	FT Undergraduate	No	Yes	Yes	No
Patricia	23+	FT Postgraduate	Yes	Yes	No	No
Yasmin	18–23	FT Undergraduate	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

The transcripts were analysed searching for overlapping answers to the following questions asked during the interviews:

• What are your main reasons for entering a ‘sugar dating’ dynamic?

• What are/were the benefits of being in a ‘sugar’ relationship?

• Can you tell me about the negative and the positive aspects of your experience?

Throughout the process of interviewing, as well as during the analysis of data, a feminist ethics was adopted; specifically, feminist standpoint theory: The participants’ experiences were considered a legitimate locus where valid scientific knowledge was produced (Harding 1991). The data were analysed using feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA), which permits the examination of ‘the constitutive role that discourses play in contemporary society’ (Vaara 2010, 217) as well as highlights the link between discursive and other social practices – in this case, sugar dating. The answers of the participants were analysed looking for matching patterns and themes, and the trustworthiness of the data was ensured by applying constant comparison to their answers throughout the interviews, and ensuring posteriori that participants agreed with the interview transcript.

A feminist ethics of reflexivity has been adopted by which I have sought to establish a reciprocal relationship based on empathy and respect with the participants, respecting the fact that the persons researched are experts in the stories of their own lives. The knowledge here presented has been constructed collaboratively as the answers of the participants are a response to the specific questions of the author. Therefore, claims of universality and positivist objectivity are absent from this research.

To ensure that the participants did not experience distress when covering sensitive topics, a series of techniques were employed: debriefing the interviews, offering a list of relevant organizations that support student sex workers, and asking several times if the interviewees were comfortable and wished to resume the conversation.

Results

During the interviews, participants were asked to describe the main factors that contributed towards their decision to sugar date. Financial struggle was identified as the main factor, even though all the participants had acquired a student loan. Other relevant factors albeit less pressing, were the lack of time to engage in full-time work and the desire to experience a superior lifestyle than the one they could afford as students.

In addition, gendered and psychological factors that contributed to the participants’ decisions to sugar date were identified during the interviews. While these themes do not constitute the centre of analysis, they provide a richer understanding of the participants’ complex gendered experiences under neoliberalism.

Financial struggle and lack of time

Participants systematically mentioned experiencing financial pressures during their studies as a key reason to sugar date. Rebecca recalled her first year at university, when she was not able to afford food. Prior to commencing her university studies, she had been working for three years. Because she decided to acquire a student loan, she thought that she would not have to work while studying full time. In addition, she could not rely on parental economic support. The student loan was not enough to cover the totality of her expenses and when asked if she could support herself, she answered:

No, [the loan] literally all went on mostly rent, yeah. So, it all went on living costs, obviously maintaining the place I am living at, travel to and from uni … It builds up and then you look at your account and there’s nothing in there? So, you start like, wait, how am I going to eat? I am not for three days, until I get some more money.

Her financial problems were accompanied by a lack of time to dedicate to a job, as she was studying a very time-consuming degree in liberal arts. After the struggles during her first year, in her second year Rebecca felt that sugar dating was her only option to gain quick access to economic capital:

If I need the money, then what other option is there? Even in the context of, well, I will get a job … well I can’t get a job tomorrow [laughs] it’s a whole process that may take a couple of months and I need the money now, so … 

Yasmin’s story was similar to Rebeca’s. Even though she had acquired a student loan, it was insufficient to cover her daily living expenses. She worked part-time in a café for a while but was eventually fired:

Anyways, it [the job in the café] was like, bare minimum wage, it was like £5 an hour so … […] I was living in deficit, trying to find a job, or borrowing money from my parents. Well, my mom. At some point, I had to pay my mom back and it just … it was quite expensive.

Yasmin explained that, although her mother would sporadically send her money, it was not a reliable amount. Yasmin needed money that, in her own words, will come ‘quick and easy’ and decided to try sugar dating.

Nora also reported the lack of economic capital, as well as lack of time, as key reasons to sugar date; despite having acquired a student loan and having worked part-time in the past:

It seemed like a quick way to make money […] I was a student and I was struggling a bit with money at that time […] I’ve had part time jobs as a student, I worked in [night club] for a while, but it was … my degree, I was training to become a therapist and we had to pay for therapy which was very expensive, it was £40 a week and then go to placements … so it made it very difficult to earn money.

The fact that sugar dating may provide a faster revenue while being less time-consuming than other transactional activities was a factor also mentioned by other participants, even those who had a job separated from sugar dating. Lack of time, especially against the background of intense educational commitments, needs to be considered a motivating factor that is often coupled with financial hardship. Another reason was mentioned by another participant as a key motivating factor to try sugar dating: the possibility of experiencing a superior lifestyle than what she could afford as a student.

Desire to experience a superior lifestyle

Rosa worked as a sex worker during her university years, specifically as an escort. At some point, she started combining it with sugar dating:

So, my friend was doing it [escorting] and then she told me what she thought about it, and I was like, ‘sounds like you’re making a lot of money and I need a lot of money’ [laughs]. So I did that at the end of the second year, before the semester started and then I did it during the summer, and I was also working [outside of the sex industry] … but then I was like, if I’m getting into sex work I can work less hours and have more time for like, studying, so I did that.

Eventually Rosa started having regular clients, and she decided to try sugar dating with them as way of experiencing a superior lifestyle while still being a student. Regular sex work clients became Sugar Daddies:

I guess when I started, when I got regular clients, it was probably in my third year. That was when I was more into the Sugar Daddy-kind-of thing. I didn’t necessarily charge my sex rates, they will take me out for dinner, we’ll have like, a nice time … […] It was really nice because I was kind of living a different lifestyle that I would as a student in [city in the South of England] so you know, staying in nice hotels, and like, going for weekends away … so that was nice.

Going to an expensive restaurant or on holidays can be understood as acquiring symbolic capital in the form of experiences that will indicate that the person is leading a successful life (Leclerc-Madlala 2003). Experiencing a superior lifestyle is understood by Rosa as part of the positive aspects of having a relationship with a Sugar Daddy, especially since she explained that she was still not earning enough to be able to afford these experiences on her own. Rosa made it clear that she was using the money she acquired through sugar dating to pay for rent and household bills:

So, my master’s year, this is when I started see this guy [a Sugar Daddy] […] I was working two jobs and I was also doing sugar dating and sex work […] But it was like … still rough. Like I still … I was living off about £75-80 per week.

Despite her financial struggles, Rosa acknowledged that she deviates from the social stereotype of the sex worker, as she considers herself middle-class and is university-educated. The fact that she was a student was perceived by both her sex work clients and her Sugar Daddies as a desirable characteristic that she consciously exploited. Rosa’s status as a student gave her comparative advantage on the sugar dating market since she could capitalize both on a highly stylized and middle-class femininity, and her cultural capital. Sugar dating can be considered in the case of Rosa as an entrepreneurial capitalization on femininity against the background of student impoverishment:

Rosa: so, when I was going out to meet someone for sex work or sugar dating I would shave, moisturize, do my face properly […] my hair … get really dressed up, all really nice. They want you to dress quite posh. That’s another thing, they really like the fact that you spoke quite posh.

Rocío: did they like that you were a student?

Rosa: yes […] I think it’s what they think it is ‘ethical consumption’? that idea of ethical consumption of sex workers that are students, and they just need a little bit of extra cash … like, you know, you are not trafficked, you are not being abused. You are middle class, smart, young women who just want a nice handbag … that’s how he would describe it. I guess it is like if you have a posh accent, it means that you are not being abused so I’m doing good, right?

Although the image of a young women who is sugar dating to buy a designer bag did not correlate with Rosa’s reality, neither was the interest of her Sugar Daddies genuine:

Rosa: yeah, so it just helps their conscience, I guess. I always find it funny, and that’s something that I capitalized of.

Rocío: did they know that you were using the money for paying bills?

Rosa: no, I didn’t really say … they must have known, I think they probably know … but they never asked, cause that’s the thing, they really didn’t want to know, they wanted to assume that is for nice stuff, you know? They assumed that it was because I wanted to jet off to Paris or … you know what I mean? Or like, buy a designer bag, or something. And to be honest I used to save for like, holidays and stuff like that but … it was mostly boring, day to day stuff. They really didn’t want to know that, they didn’t want to think that.

In the case of Rosa, she was commodifying her class advantage as middle-class student in a way that perhaps Yasmin or Rebecca were not able to (as they did not describe themselves as middle-class). Nevertheless, the class background of the participants is not a determining factor as often participants described the class background of their parents, which did not necessarily translate into parental support. All the participants mentioned the lack of stable and reliable financial support during their undergraduate years, although Rosa and Yasmin were sporadically helped by their parents, and Nora received some financial aid from a distant relative. However, these funds were not sufficient to cover all their expenses, nor was the student loan enough, either.

Nevertheless, all the participants except for Rebecca and Yasmin mentioned several other factors that impacted their decision to engage in a transactional relationship with a Sugar Daddy. Although financial struggle was the most decisive one, other elements were taken into consideration when deciding to sugar date, such as a lack of self-esteem or gendered experiences of power struggles within the relationship.

Gendered psychological factors

Other (gendered) factors connected to the complexities of navigating economic precarity had an impact on the participants’ decision to sugar date. These reasons were considered by the participants as less pressing than financial hardship, but still worth mentioning when discussing their desire to sugar date.

Lack of self-esteem

Jessica met her Sugar Daddy online, when she worked independently uploading erotic videos and pictures to a porn site. He became a regular client and eventually the relationship changed: they agreed on a fixed amount of money for a fixed number of videos per month, as well as some erotic chat. Over time, the relationship began to involve emotional support from Jessica. Although they never met in person, Jessica described him as her Sugar Daddy since the relationship included, in her own words, some ‘companionship’. Part of the reason why Jessica started uploading porn pictures and videos was because she was struggling with her self-esteem:

I got into other sex work like a year later, doing a porn blog … and I started making my own porn videos […] for like, probably confidence issues and just to get an extra money from it […] But it’s nice because I started off doing it because I was self-conscious of my body, I felt like I had the body of a child almost, like at first I wasn’t making any money, I was just making it for my blog and just feeling like … people were like ‘oh you look amazing’ and I was like ‘oh that’s good’.

Jessica’s creation of her blog can also be interpreted as an entrepreneurial move. Since she was planning on capitalizing on it, testing how much she could profit from her beauty capital can be understood as a strategic decision. Once enough beauty capital was accumulated, Jessica could convert it into economic capital by selling erotic audio-visual material. Uploading pictures improved Jessica’s self-esteem, although eventually it began impacting her mental health. Jessica was asked about the negative impacts of sugaring and sex work, and explained that:

I guess you are not always … ready to be there and it’s like … kind of … if you are doing it full time like I was at one point I was it is emotionally draining because you are just seen … like your whole thing is your sexuality and … like that’s all your life is. And it can consume you sometimes, and it can make things like dating hard and … yeah … emotionally and mentally it’s just … I had to take a long break from it because it really did mess up with my head and made me think all I was good for was sex and it really does … like … mess with who you think you are.

A low self-esteem can be a potential factor to join sex work – and sugar dating – for some participants, like Jessica. Others reported different reasons such as a dissatisfaction with their love life when dating heterosexual men.

Unsatisfactory dating life

Nora articulated how a sugar relationship made her feel more powerful and less ‘used’ by men, especially since she could get paid and therefore take ‘something out of it’:

I find a lot of the times like … relationships, it’s … I don’t even know how to describe it, [the way] I’ve been treated hadn’t always been … I guess it seemed like taking more control, in that sense? Like … power? And be able to … like I can set the terms for what is going to happen, rather than just feeling used and not take something out of it.

For Nora, the fact that in a ‘sugar’ relationship the partners will set an agreement beforehand made her feel more in control. Rosa, along the same lines, expressed that:

I’ve been a serial dater at uni, so I’ve dated quite a few people and I got no one. I’ve been in so many shit dates, I had sex with so many different people, and I was like, ‘why am I at least not being paid for it? I am doing the work, and you know, I am doing the emotional labour and I am not getting anything from it? So that’s why I started  …  in uni, it just made sense. Also, I needed money and it was like, for me, something that I was quite good at, like chatting and … you know, getting along with people.

Suzanne shared a similar opinion:

So … obviously I had been dating, exploring dating guys … and I just realized that it was very … underwhelming, I don’t know … just lacking? So, I was like, hey, if I am going to do this, I may as well get money from it.

Rosa’s and Suzanne’s description of sugar dating as an activity that allows for the commodification of their social skills that are often employed ‘for free’ resonates with Archer’s (2019) concept of ‘playbour’: a combination of play and labour by which the person expects to obtain some capital from an activity previously thought as leisure. ‘Playbour’ is informed by the neoliberal encouragement of commodifying areas of individuals’ lives that were thought to belong to the private sphere of intimate relationships, ‘effectively eroding boundaries of private and public, care and commerce’ (Archer 2019, 160). Non-transactional dating is described as an investment that these women are not willing to commit to, since it does not provide the expected revenues, while sugar dating offers a potential economic benefit, alongside other advantages such as a boost in self-esteem as described by Jessica, or the enjoyment of a superior lifestyle as was the case of Rosa. All these factors played a role in the participants’ decision to enter a commodified relationship, albeit economic insecurity was consistently the main reason provided in every case.

Discussion

This article opens the path for more research regarding sugar dating in the United Kingdom and offers a preliminary study into the factors that motivate young women to enter in transactional relationships with older men. Contemporaneous, Western societies are characterized by the flexibility and precariousness of the labour markets (Mahmud 2015): life conditions for some university students are deeply affected by financial insecurity. This situation permeates the life of the interviewed women, who see their possibilities of acquiring financial stability during their studies reduced by several factors such as the lack of time to find a full-time job in light of intense educational commitments, or the low pay of casual jobs.

Nevertheless, these testimonies highlight that a confluence of factors favours the entrance of university female students into sugar dating. Sugar dating websites are deeply embedded in a neoliberal logic that encourages women to capitalize private realms of their lives (such a dating) and treat highly stylized femininity as a valuable commodity (Harvey and Gill 2011). In sugar dating, Sugar Babies translate gendered neoliberal ideals into practice; especially for Rosa, Nora, and Suzanne, they aimed to capitalize on their social skills and on leisure activities for two different reasons. Firstly, because a logic of ‘playbour’ (Archer 2019) is applied, as the lines between work and leisure blur in late-capitalist societies; and secondly, because they saw dating through an optic of cost–benefit. Since their dating life was not considered successful, commodifying it may have compensated the dissatisfaction. Nancy Fraser develops the idea that social relationships (such a dating) are a precondition for acquiring economic capital in late-capitalist societies. She uses the notion of the ‘social-reproductive contradictions of financialized capitalism’ (2016, 99) and describes it as a ‘crisis of care’; understanding care in a broad sense to include social relations such as romantic relationships or friendships – ‘affective labour’ is offered as a synonym. Fraser argues that the current economic system depends on the (re)creation of social bonds as a precondition for the accumulation of capital. Drawing on classic Marxist theory, Fraser (2016) explains that, since the industrial era, the work of social reproduction is mostly performed by women and not economically compensated – rather, remunerated by ‘love’ or ‘virtue’. Productive work is paid in economic capital and ‘in this new world, where money became a primary medium of power, its being unpaid sealed the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinated to those who earn cash wages’ (Fraser 2016, 102).

Rosa’s and Nora’s words echo Fraser’s: the young women complained about doing the beautifying labour and the emotional when engaging in non-transactional dating and not receiving enough compensation from it. Capitalizing this labour can feel like crossing from the realm of social reproduction to that of productive work by conceptualizing the relationship like an enterprise. Rosa’s, Suzanne’s, and Nora’s motivations may be interpreted within the framework of sexual entrepreneurism. As Harvey and Gill argue, ‘this ‘new femininity’ [the sexual entrepreneurship] constitutes a hybrid of discourses of sexual freedom for women, intimately entangled with attempts to recuperate this (male-dominated) consumer capitalism’ (2011, 52, emphasis original). For these participants, sugar dating can be an exercise of freedom motivated by an unsatisfactory dating life, but within a constrained scenario characterized by a lack of economic means in consumer capitalism. This behaviour is placed within a gendered context where women’s sexuality is conceived as profitable and can be mobilized to generate economic capital, and where notions of agency and choice are constrained by neoliberalism and its material effects. Pitcher (2019) has argued that in order to understand the complex reality behind contemporaneous sex workers’ experiences, one must move from the binary narrative of either ‘coerced prostitution’ or ‘choice’ and rather consider sex workers – and arguably Sugar Babies – as agents that take a decision within constrained economic conditions such as volatile labour markets. The women interviewed in this article who decided to sugar date are agentic individuals, but it is necessary to recalibrate this agency in the face of the financial pressures that they were experiencing, and in light of the other described factors.

Lack of economic capital needs to be considered as the dominant factor that motivates young university women to enter sugar dating, as this was reported and iterated throughout the interviews by the totality of the participants – some of them, like Rebecca and Yasmin, did not mention any other reason for joining sugar dating. For some of the participants, the fact that their student loans were insufficient was unknown previously to acquiring them. The meagre student loans alongside low-paid jobs and lack of parental economic support created a milieu that favoured the search for a Sugar Daddy. The desire to experience a superior lifestyle in terms of enjoying expensive leisure activities such as dining out was also mentioned by participants such as Rosa and Patricia, in what can be interpreted as a desire to obtain not only economic capital but also symbolic (Leclerc-Madlala 2003). These findings suggest that Sugar Babies are complex figures that depart from different economic backgrounds and may use that to their advantage: while Rosa could capitalize on her middle-class accent and aesthetics and may understand sugar dating as one option among many others in the job market, Rebecca strongly felt that sugar dating was her only option to access economic capital, due to the potential immediacy of obtaining payment.

The interviews match previous findings regarding the reasons why some women enter the sex industry: the fact that it is relatively well-paid if compared with other low-skilled jobs, and the immediacy of payment (Story and Jankowski 2015). The data presented in this work showed that the lines between sugar dating and the sex industry are elastic: although participants made a distinction between sugaring and sex work, several of them had been involved in both areas. Sex work clients became Sugar Daddies, such as in the case of Jessica or Rosa; therefore, sugar dating may act in some cases as a ‘hinge’ dynamic between traditional dating and the sex industry. The recalibration of the economic circumstances of students in the United Kingdom, as well as the gendered neoliberal ideology that promotes the commodification of private life, should be investigated to offer economic alternatives to gendered sexual activities such as sugar dating. More women’s voices and experiences need to be explored; further research that includes intersectional analysis of other social categories such as race, ethnicity, ability, etc., which may have an impact on sugar dating, will be key to understand how sugar dating evolves in the UK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rocío Palomeque Recio

Rocío Palomeque Recio holds a PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies from Nottingham Trent University (Nottingham, UK). Her research focuses on the commodification of intimacy and its connections with neoliberalism and higher education. Other interests are: feminist media studies and cultural theory.

Notes

1 Sugar dating can be considered liminal to the sex industry. While the dynamic is not affected by the same regulations, it falls into the category of transactional sex. Many of the features that characterize the sex industry also apply to sugar dating.

2 In 2010, Seeking.com launched their Sugar Baby University Program™ in the United States. After its initial success, the site created the British version in 2015 where it offers premium accounts to those users who register with a university email. The program targets university students by advertising sugar dating as an effective way of relieving student loans and debts related to the costs of higher education; as well as a means to reach a superior lifestyle by virtue of dating a ‘successful benefactor’ (Seeking 2020c).

3 Tuition fees are increased every year the equivalent of the consumer price index (CPI).

4 Designed to financially help students whose parents did not earn salaries over a certain threshold.

5 Defined as prostitution, escorting, lap dancing or stripping (Roberts, Bergström, and La Rooy 2010).