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In the ever-changing world of sex work, the newly released book Sex Work Today edited by Bernadette Barton, Barbara G. Brents, and Angela Jones offers a groundbreaking exploration of the modern sex industry… This volume dives deep into the diverse experiences within sex work, with stories written by current and former sex workers. It covers everything from camming and full service work to sugar dating and various forms of sexual entrepreneurship.

We鈥檙e excited to share an exclusive excerpt from Sex Work Today on Slixa, featuring the Introduction and the chapter on Sugar Dating.

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Introduction by Bernadette Barton, Barbara G. Brents, and Angela Jones

As sex work scholars who have been researching the sex industry a long time, we are excited to share with you Sex Work Today, a cutting-edge volume illuminating the newest trends in sex work. Sex worker activist Carol Leigh, also known as Scarlot Harlot, who sadly passed away in 2022, coined the term 鈥渟ex worker鈥� in 1978. She used this term to highlight that sex workers are service professionals and that, as the sex worker mantra goes sex work is work. Still, much has changed since Leigh coined this term. Here, we present data-driven stories, many of which are written by present or former sex workers, documenting the current landscape of modern sex industries. In the twenty-first century, sex work encompasses a wide array of temporary, professional, informal, formal, and entrepreneurial forms of work. Despite widespread media reducing sex work to 鈥減rostitution,鈥� commercial sex markets vary widely. They include camming, full-service sex work in various contexts (e.g., street-based, brothel work, and escorting independently online), hostessing, phone sex, pornography, prodomme work, stripping, sugar relationships, various adult content production, and a wide array of individual sexual entrepreneurship.

Sugar Dating: What Counts as Sex Work by Kavita Nayar Jablonka

Since their introductions in the early 1920s, the terms 鈥渟ugar daddy,鈥� a wealthy older man, and 鈥済old digger,鈥� a poorer woman who dates or marries men for money, have challenged traditional values of sexual respectability, in particular the belief that one should not or cannot mix money with intimacy. In the twenty-first century, digital 鈥渟ugar dating鈥� platforms facilitate arrangements between sugar daddies, mostly economically successful cisgender white men, or, more rarely, mamas, and the 鈥渟ugar baby,鈥� usually upwardly mobile cisgender white women. Launched in 2006, the most popular platform, Seeking Arrangement, boasts forty million active users worldwide, with three sugar babies to every one sugar daddy or mama. Srushti Upadhyay conducted a comprehensive study of user profiles, demonstrating that 80 percent of sugar daddies were white, educated, and affluent (averaging $280,000 a year in income). Among sugar babies, Upadhyay鈥檚 groundbreaking study showed some racial diversity, with approximately 54 percent identifying as white. Still, while more babies were identified as mixed (19 percent) and Latina (15 percent), there was still a significant lack of Black, Indigenous, and Asian sugar babies. On average, sugar babies are younger and have less education than sugar daddies. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and qualitative analysis of US online blogs and forums, this chapter examines the phenomenon of sugar relationships, a form of erotic labor that scholars are just beginning to explore. Because most mainstream sugar dating platforms cater to straight, cisgender men, called 鈥渟ugar daddies,鈥� and cisgender women, called 鈥渟ugar babies,鈥� my data examines sugaring from the perspective of female 鈥渟ugar babies,鈥� and I center their stories. I also recognize that the experiences of cisgender women in straight sugaring relationships do not capture the diversity of participants and breadth of sugar culture. In the following pages, I explain the mechanics of sugar relationships and explore how they differ from, and overlap with, traditional romantic dating and sex work. Sugar relationships, like gig work on platforms like OnlyFans, are part of a new wave of commodified relationships complicating how people perceive and define sex work.

What Are Sugar Relationships?

Sugar  dating,  also  called  mutually  beneficial  arrangements,  are  relationships in which participants exchange youth, beauty, and flattering attention for gifts, money, favors, and social capital. CEO of Seeking Arrangement, Brandon Wade, explains that one person provides 鈥渋ntimacy, companionship or other forms of attention in exchange for personal benefit (e.g., financial support, professional advancement, etc.).鈥� 鈥淭he relationship resembles a business deal or a financial agreement,鈥� one sugar baby (SB) writes. The benefactor provides economic and social benefits, which may include money, gifts, all expenses paid trips, professional advice, and networking (colloquially referred to as 鈥渉elp,鈥� 鈥渟poiling,鈥� and 鈥渕entoring鈥�), and the recipient bestows relational benefits in equal amounts of companionship, conversation, and sexual intimacy. According to Seeking Arrangement, the average sugar baby earns twenty eight hundred dollars per month. In practice, benefits range from allowances of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month, gifts from an online retail wish list, college tuition, introductions to a network, or even capital investments in a business. Ideally, both parties anticipate some sort of genuine enjoyment in the relationship, and sex may or may not be part of the deal.Lawyers, psychologists, and journalists alike have begun to question whether sugar relationships are simply a glorified form of prostitution. Sugar babies themselves perceive sugar relationships as different from both 鈥渧anilla dating鈥� (when two people date with the hope of falling in love) and escorting. Among sex workers, full-service providers (those who have sex with clients) face far more social stigma than those who perform indirect sex work like stripping, camming, or sugaring. Sugar relationships deliberately obscure the exchange of sex for money to purposely shield sugar babies from the stigma sex workers endure. This form of stigma management benefits sugar workers but simultaneously reifies what sex workers call the 鈥渨horearchy鈥� and 鈥渓ateral whorephobia.鈥� In sex industries, both clients and workers often see full-service providers, especially those working in street based markets, as performing the most stigmatized work. Whereas those laboring in the camming industry or as dominatrices, for example, are seen as more privileged. Lateral whorephobia explains why more privileged workers, such as the sugar babies described in this article, might look down upon and perpetuate the stigma full-service providers face.At the same time, as I will soon explore, fostering the ambiguity that sugar babies may or may not do full-service sex work sometimes results in babies performing more emotional and sexual labor for less money than escorts. When asked what interests young people, mostly young women, to enter into sugar relationships, they offer the same reason as other sex workers: money. In the following pages, I explore how sugar daters challenge and expand contemporary understandings of gender, dating, sex work, and the line between money and intimacy.

Sugar Dating as Traditional Gendered Dating (with Benefits)

At first glance, sugaring is traditional dating, adopting rituals and customs little different from courting practices in the past: two people explore whether they have sufficient 鈥渃hemistry鈥� to develop a 鈥渃onnection鈥� through shared experiences of commercialized leisure and consumption, like dining out, traveling, shopping, and enjoying nightlife. The major difference is that the sugar daddy (or, more rarely, mama) always pays. Such male financial power is one key part of the gendered dynamic in  sugaring.  Indeed,  the  terms鈥�  鈥渟ugar  daddy鈥�  and  鈥渟ugar  baby鈥濃�攈ighlight a nostalgia for heteropatriarchal gender roles, neatly dividing participants by wealth, status, and rational intellect for men, and sexuality, subservience, and emotional intuition for women.The sugar babies I have interviewed say sugar dating is having 鈥渁 boyfriend with benefits. It has more perks than a traditional relationship.鈥� Sugar babies tell me that these relationships provide both 鈥渆xcitement, fun,  and  adventure鈥�  and  鈥渇inancial  security/gain鈥�  and  鈥渕entorship.鈥�  Sugar babies, like many women, say they prefer to date 鈥渆stablished,鈥� mature men rather than broke young ones who play video games all day and expect blow jobs on the first date. For example, Elise (all the names used are pseudonyms) explained her attraction to older men: 鈥淭hey generally have more money built up over a lifetime,鈥� 鈥渢heir kids are more than likely adults by then, which equals more freed up money for me, lol,鈥� and they also have a 鈥渕assive and varied Rolodex of connections.鈥� Dating older men has other benefits. Angie described older men as 鈥渓ess of  a  physical  threat鈥�  and  less  鈥減ressed/thirsty  for  sex鈥�  than  younger  men. She perceived sugar daddies as more 鈥済iving/accommodating because they鈥檙e used to taking care of family, wives, kids.鈥� The women I spoke with, were, as Upadhyay found, primarily young, cisgender, white women who were attracted to the social, cultural, and economic advantages sugar daddies might provide and perceived sexual chemistry as a pleasant but unnecessary element of the relationship.Some of those interested in sugar dating also appear motivated by the defined nature of the dating script, which romanticizes performances of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, or in other words, the strong, successful man who supports the sexy, feminine woman. Men with 鈥渨hite knight syndrome,鈥� who have the resources and want to be a hero to a vulnerable woman, can follow a simple set of rules: he pays, and she smiles and flatters him. Likewise, women can enjoy being 鈥渟poiled鈥� and performing an old-fashioned brand of femininity. Also, for those unsettled by new gender norms in the wake of #metoo and confused by the contemporary dating scene, sugar relationships offer men benefits previously reserved to strip clubs. In strip bars, regular male customers described feeling 鈥測oung,鈥� 鈥渧irile,鈥� and 鈥渁ttractive,鈥� able to openly appreciate women鈥檚 bodies without repercussions and interact with beautiful women without fear of rejection. Both strip clubs and sugaring not only uphold hegemonic masculinity but also offer a titillating reconstitution of heteropatriarchal gender roles: the sexual assertiveness and public nudity of female dancers, like the directness of some female sugar babies in stating their expectations, terms of engagement, and sexual willingness, transgress norms of respectable femininity in pleasurable ways.

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Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Morehead State University. She is the author of The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers, and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays.

Barbara G. Brents is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the co-author of Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives and The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland.

Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. They are the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry and co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Book.

Kavita Nayar Jablonka, Ph.D., is an independent researcher, writer, and educator based in the Hampton Roads area, Virginia, USA. Her research or commentary has appeared in , , and .