Sweetening the deal: dating for compensation in the digital age

Abstract

This paper explores the online ‘sugar dating’ phenomenon, the proliferation of websites that connect ‘sugar daddies’ and ‘sugar mamas’ with ‘sugar babies,’ in order to better understand the kinds of meanings informing and derived from the pursuit of openly commodified relationships. Qualitatively analysing discourse on a popular ‘sugar dating’ blog, I argue that ‘sugar dating’ cultivates a disposition to and through paid intimacy that differs from both romantic love and more explicit forms of sex work. Discussed along economic and emotional dimensions, blog participants embrace the economic underpinnings of their instrumental uses of intimacy, but they also invoke romantic discourses of chemistry, connection, and personal choice and the morality of economic exchange, demonstrating a refusal to see their relations as work and solely driven by market logic. These differentiations help to buffer social stigma and represent the social acceptability of instrumental intimacy as a neoliberal strategy for coping with economic and social conditions, but also make it harder to identify the labour of ‘sugar dating’ and further disenfranchise sex workers as they reinforce social distinctions in order to legitimize these relations.

Keywords:

• Mediated intimacy
• instrumental intimacy
• sugar dating
• sex work
• sexuality

Notes on contributor

Kavita Ilona Nayar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published in the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. Email: [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The sample includes the following blog posts: 2008’s ‘New sugar daddies, babies: Where’s the love?’ (744 responses); 2009’s ‘Happy Thanksgiving, sugars!’ (2091 responses); 2010’s ‘Relangemenship’ (1417 responses); 2011’s ‘Sugar Daddy dating: choices’ (660 responses); and 2012’s ‘Fending off the ‘Bad Apple’ Sugar Daddies?’ (948 responses). I examined the blog post with the most responses from each year in an effort to allow for analysis of as much conversation as possible. This sampling method was deemed most theoretically useful in that conversation ebbed and flowed in ways that eventually covered a variety of topics within one blog post that could not have been observed if posts with fewer responses were examined. Responses typically occur over the course of several days or even weeks after a post is published to the blog and even after a newer post has succeeded the original.