Sweetening the deal: dating for compensation in the digital age

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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.