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Abstract

The proliferation of “sugar dating” websites, facilitating transactional relationships between a “sugar baby” and a “sugar daddy,” raises new questions about the reconfigured relationship between intimacy and economy in the contemporary Global North. By encouraging people to approach sex and intimacy through a logic of exchange, sugar dating has been claimed to represent the culmination of a broader trend towards a ”marketization” of intimacy. Based on semi-structured interviews, this article analyzes Swedish “sugar babies”’ investment in a transactional approach to intimate interactions with men, focusing on the emotional rewards that they associate with the transactional setup of sugar dating. While the participants’ transactional approach to intimacy is bolstered by the cultural dispersal of a neoliberal rationality into ever more domains of life, I argue that its deeper roots need to be sought in the precarious conditions of contemporary intimacy. Drawing in particular on the work of Eva Illouz, I claim that the women’s embracement of a transactional approach to heterosexual sex and intimacy may be read as a defensive tactic of seeking to gain control over the flows of intimate interaction in light of the (gendered) insecurities and vulnerabilities of the contemporary market of intimacy.

Keywords

commodification intimacy neoliberalism prostitution sex work sugar dating sugaring

Introduction

The global proliferation of “sugar dating” Web sites, facilitating transactional intimate arrangements between a younger “sugar baby” and an older “sugar daddy,” has refueled debates about commercial sex. Brandon Wade (2009), owner of the sugar dating Web site Seeking.com, defines sugar dating as “mutually beneficial arrangements” based on an exchange of “financial, professional, or other forms of support” for “intimacy, companionship, or other forms of attention” (p. 11). While the Web sites themselves vehemently demarcate their business from prostitution or sex work, sugar dating is widely framed as a white-washed form of prostitution (Miller 2011; Motz 2014), which through its discursive dissociation from commercial sex attracts new groups into the sex industry (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021). However, although the notion of sugar dating as simply a cover for selling and buying sex has been shown to be adequate for a lot of what goes on under the label of sugar dating (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021), the practices associated with sugar dating also have traits distinguishing them from more explicit forms of sex work (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021; Nayar 2017; Scull 2020, 2022). The way that many sugar dating arrangements are located at the border of the transactional and the authentic challenges conventional divisions between “regular” intimacy and sexual commerce, reflecting a broader societal pattern where “[t]he public–private boundaries between intimacy and commerce are being reworked in new and challenging ways” (Plummer 2010:398). Through its pushing of the boundaries between the personal and the professional, sugar dating thus comprises a phenomenon of key analytical concern for understanding broader reconfigurations of the relationship between intimacy and economy.

By virtue of explicitly encouraging people to approach sex and intimacy through a logic of exchange, sugar dating has been claimed to “represents the culmination of what scholars identify as the ‘commercialization of intimate life’” (Nayar 2017:341). Sugar dating is related to neoliberal restructuring not only in the crude sense that it offers a way of gaining one’s livelihood in a time marked by increased economic precarity (Palomeque Recio 2021) but also in the sense in which neoliberal ideology’s dispersal of a market rationality into ever more domains of life normatively undergirds sugar dating’s transactional mode of relating (Nayar 2017). As I will explore in this article, the transactionality of sugar dating goes beyond the mere fact of the economic compensation, involving a more encompassing marketized and exchange-based approach to the giving and getting of intimate interactions.

Based on semi-structured interviews, the article analyzes Swedish “sugar babies”’ investments in a transactional approach to heterosexual intimate interactions, focusing on the emotional rewards that they associate with the transactional setup of sugar dating. While these investments are bolstered by the neoliberal dispersal of a market rationality into ever more domains of life (Brown 2005; Rottenberg 2014), I argue that a key driving force behind the women’s embracement of a transactional approach to intimate interactions with men needs to be sought in the precarious conditions of contemporary intimacy. Drawing in particular on the work of Eva Illouz (2007, 2012, 2019), I claim that the women’s investment in such a transactional approach to heterosexual sex and intimacy may be read as a defensive tactic of trying to gain control over the flows of intimate interaction in light of the (gendered) insecurities and vulnerabilities of the contemporary “market” of intimacy.

Sugar Dating in the Global North

The practice where a younger woman enters a relationship with an older man who compensates her economically for her social and sexual availability has a long and geographically dispersed history (Kinsella 2011; Månsson 2019). In East Asia, the phenomenon has a strong foothold and is relatively well researched under the label of “compensated dating” (Chu and Laidler 2016; Lee and Shek 2013; Li 2015). Sub-Saharan Africa is another context where what is typically referred to as “sugar daddy relationships” or “sponsoring” has long been a widespread phenomenon (Bhana and Pattman 2011; Brouard and Crewe 2012; Kuate-Defo 2004; Toska et al. 2015). In the Global North, a field of research studying “sugar dating,” or “sugaring,” is taking shape in the wake of the emergence of profiled sugar dating Web sites that facilitate dating arrangements between a “sugar baby” and a “sugar daddy,” or sometimes “sugar mama” (Deeks 2013; Gunnarsson and Strid 2021, 2022; Hier 2017; Miller 2011; Mixon 2019; Motyl 2013; Nayar 2017; Palomeque Recio 2021, 2022; Scull 2020, 2022; Upadhyay 2021). Seeking.com (formerly SeekingArrangement.com), established in the United States in 2006, was the first sugar dating Web site in the Global North and has subsequently been followed by a steadily increasing number of similar sites.

While Wade’s (2009) definition of sugar dating as an exchange of financial, professional, or other forms of support for “intimacy, companionship, or other forms of attention” (p. 11) does not mention sex, mirroring sugar dating Web sites’ persistent claims that sugar dating has nothing to do with prostitution, research shows that sugar dating typically (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021; Nayar 2017; Palomeque Recio 2021, 2022), while not always (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021; Scull 2020), incorporates sex. Still, scholars are divided as to whether sugar dating should be seen as a form of sex work/prostitution or not. While some equate it with prostitution (Deeks 2013; Miller 2011), others argue that the personal rather than business-like nature of sugar dating and the non-formalized and gift-like character of the compensation distinguished sugar dating from a sexual service (Scull 2020; Swader and Vorobeva 2015). The classification of sugar dating is complicated by the fact that the content of sugar dating arrangements differs between studies, as well as among participants in one and the same study. For example, Sofia Strid’s and my (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021) study of sugar daters in Sweden demonstrates that the label of sugar dating is applied to a broad range of practices, ranging from explicit forms of sex-for-money to more comprehensive and long-term arrangements where the economic compensation is woven into the relational fabric as gifts and support.

Sugar dating has been framed as part of a broader trend of mainstreaming of commercial sex (Brents and Sanders 2010) and as emblematic of neoliberal developments as expressed in the domain of sex and intimacy (Gunnarsson and Strid 2022; Nayar 2017; Palomeque Recio 2021, 2022). In its material sense, neoliberal restructuring has led to increased economic precarity pushing a growing number of people to find new ways of earning money, not least students (Mixon 2019; Palomeque Recio 2021), as well as to capitalist expansion opening new practices to commodification (Brents and Sanders 2010), both factors fueling the sugar dating industry. In the ideological sense, the marketized, exchange-based attitude to relationships encouraged in sugar dating maps well onto developments of a “neoliberal rationality” (Brown 2005) permeating ever more domains of life, so that intimate relations too are “tracked for progress, manipulated for return on investments, and evaluated by cost-benefit ratios” (Nayar 2017:337). As Rocío Palomeque Recio (2021) puts it, “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” (p. 11).

Regarding women’s motivations for sugar dating, the need for money or other material benefits is obviously a central factor (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021; Mixon 2019; Scull 2022), which has become more salient with neoliberal restructuring increasing economic precarity (Palomeque Recio 2021). Through sugar dating, women may reap the monetary fruits of commercial sex while keeping at a distance from the stigma of prostitution (Johansson and Gunnarsson 2022). However, economic benefits are not the only factors drawing women into sugar dating. Some do it for the adventure, fun, and glamor (Palomeque Recio 2021; Scull 2022), some to meet other kind of men than in “regular” dating, for example, more high-status and gentlemanly (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021), while some use sugar dating as a route to (casual) sex (Paul 2022; Scull 2020, 2022; Upadhyay 2021). The delimited no-strings-attached character of sugar dating arrangements (Wade 2009) has been identified as a feature that both “sugar babies” and “sugar daddies” are drawn to (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021; Scull 2020; Upadhyay 2021). However, rather than being altogether instrumental and unemotional, Kavita Ilona Nayar (2017) shows that some degree of emotional involvement is typically encouraged in sugar dating and points to “the balance ‘sugar daters’ attempt to achieve between the unrestricted emotional environment of dating and relationships and the overly transactional and underwhelming passion assumed of sex work” (p. 343).

Strid and I (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021, 2022) conceptualize the bounded form of intimacy sought in sugar dating as hooking onto broader developments in the sex and intimacy industry, where an increased demand for “authentic intimate connection for sale” has been identified (Bernstein 2007:7), typically through the sexual service referred to as the girlfriend experience (Carbonero and Gómez Garrido 2018; Milrod and Monto 2012). Focusing on “sugar daddies”’ stakes in sugar dating, they argue that “the sugar baby experience” may be seen as “the girlfriend experience taken to the next level [. . .], through its more deep-going promise of authentic mutuality but without the responsibilities and vulnerabilities associated with noncommercial relationships” (Gunnarsson and Strid 2022:317, 318). Addressing the bounded intimacy at least ideally delivered in sugar dating from the perspective of “sugar babies,” Nayar (2017) thematizes the stabilizing function of the transactional setup, noting that “[t]he transaction provided a helpful barrier that held the emotional and sexual intimacy in place, keeping it from spilling over into the uncertainty of normative love and relationships” (p. 338). Here, the “controlled conditions” (Nayar 2017:340) of sugar dating is framed as an alternative or solution to problems that “sugar babies” experience in non-transactional dating and intimacy. Along similar lines, Palomeque Recio (2021) highlights how her participants’ experiences of non-transactional sex and relationships significantly framed their stakes in sugar dating: their disappointing and exploitative experiences with men in “regular” dating made sugar dating, which at least guarantees economic revenues, seem like a preferable alternative.

The Social Organization of Intimacy in the Twenty-first Century

While sugar dating may fruitfully be analyzed as an expression of trends in the sex and intimacy industry toward mainstreaming and more diversified and complex services (Gunnarsson and Strid 2021, 2022; Johansson and Gunnarsson 2022; Nayar 2017; Palomeque Recio 2021), this article addresses the practice from the point of view of developments in the social organization of intimacy and sex more broadly. Significant sociological attention has been paid to the deep-going transformations that the conditions of intimacy in the Global North have undergone during the last demi-century. A prominent theme in this literature has been how tendencies toward individualization and de-traditionalization have reshaped the conditions through which intimate bonds are formed, sustained, and dissolved (Bauman 2003; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Illouz 2007, 2012, 2019). Anthony Giddens (1992) has famously argued that when individuals are free to choose their intimate bonds and external institutional anchors and norms around love and sex become weakened, we are left with a “pure relationship,” the existence of which is based solely on its members’ subjective experience that the relationship is satisfactory and worthwhile.

The shift toward more individualized grounds for forming intimate bonds is associated with a drive toward democratic values centering individual needs, freedom, and equality and, not least, with women’s relative emancipation from institutionalized oppression and lack of choice in the realm of sexuality and intimacy (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992). Meanwhile, the shadow side of the relative dissolving of traditional scripts, rituals, and normative anchors regulating sexuality and intimacy is that intimate bonds have become increasingly fragile (Bauman 2003; Illouz 2012, 2019) at the same time as erotic and intimate recognition has acquired an increased significance as a source of self-worth in an individualized culture emphasizing self-differentiation and uniqueness (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Gunnarsson, García-Andrade and Jónasdóttir 2018; Illouz 2012; May 2011).

With processes of intensified commodification and neoliberal restructuring, the emphasis on individual freedom in intimacy has come to take on an increasingly marketized, consumer-oriented form (Johansson and Gunnarsson 2022; Nayar 2017). The “commercialization of intimate life” (Hochschild 2003) has been documented as part of a more general capitalist colonization of ever new domains of life (Brown 2005). While this pushing of the “commodity frontier” (Hochschild 2004) is present in its strictly economic sense in the expansion of the sex (and intimacy) industry, as addressed above, it has also brought about a shift toward transaction-based forms of consciousness in an expanded non-monetary sense (Brown 2005; Rottenberg 2014). Here, the realm of dating and intimacy has been pointed out as increasingly market-like (Brents and Sanders 2010; Illouz 2007, 2012, 2019) in the sense that its actors are “guided by their own self-interest and little social obligation” and “relationships are tracked for progress, manipulated for return on investments, and evaluated by cost-benefit ratios” (Nayar 2017:338, 337). This development has made it more normalized not only to approach others as objects of consumption but also to make instrumental use of one’s own bodily and personal resources as a means to an end (Illouz 2019; Johansson and Gunnarsson 2022; Palomeque Recio 2021).

One of the most incisive and comprehensive investigations of the contemporary conditions of intimacy has been carried out by Eva Illouz (2007, 2012, 2019). In line with other analysts of the commodification of intimacy, she foregrounds how people are today positioned in a way that encourages them to approach intimacy through a “market subjectivity” (Illouz 2019:72), through which other people are approached as objects of consumption and costs and benefits associated with relationships are calculated and weighed against each other. Illouz also points to Internet technology as a central factor that has “accelerated and sharpened the organization of sexual encounters as a market (people meeting each other following the attribution of value) and made the encounter into a commodity purchased and disposed of” (Illouz 2019:62). Exemplified by dating apps like Tinder, Internet-based platforms have created an unprecedented unboundedness of the market of intimacy by enabling instant interactions with an almost infinite number of prospective partners. Together with consumer culture’s privileging of sexual practices requiring little “investment,” this technologically facilitated unboundedness reinforces tendencies toward non-commitment, through engendering experiences that there is always someone better around the corner (Illouz 2019). Drawing on Illouz, Carolina Bandinelli and Alessandro Gandini (2022) point out that “the technological ‘proceduralisation’ of love” (p. 438) is an ideological surface used by platforms to provide the “lover as entrepreneur” (p. 423) with a fiction of control and efficiency, while in fact reproducing a structural uncertainty that keeps up the demand for this very fiction of control.

While echoing the conceptualizations of other scholars of intimacy, Illouz’s work stands out in how it centers the human insecurities and vulnerabilities generated by these marketized conditions of intimacy. The risk-assessing, calculating consumer subjectivity increasingly driving intimate interactions is not a simple matter of neoliberal ideology seeping into every cell of human existence (Brown 2005; Rottenberg 2014), but also a tactic for coping with the unpredictability that has come with the deregulation of the partnering market (Illouz 2012). Illouz (2019) puts forth that contemporary relationships have a “negative structure” entailed by the fact that “actors do not know how to define, evaluate, or conduct the relationships they enter into according to predictable and stable social scripts” (p. 9). While short-term, pleasure-centered sexuality maps well onto the logic of broader consumer culture, forming committed emotional ties is becoming increasingly difficult since there is a shortage of rituals and scripts that can regulate—and thereby make predictable and manageable—interaction aimed at committed forms of intimacy entailing an investment of more of one’s self.

Method and Material

Illouz’s framework in particular, and the broader field of conceptualizations of intimacy more generally, make up the backdrop of my analysis of “sugar babies”’ investments in transactional modes of relating to men in sugar dating. The interviews analyzed in the article were conducted as part of a broader research project on sugar dating in Sweden including semi-structured interviews with both “sugar babies” (15) and “sugar daddies” (9) with experience of heterosexual sugar dating. The participants were recruited through an enquiry that was disseminated through a range of channels. Most participants got information about the study through the Web site Sugardaters, which assisted us in posting the enquiry without cost. The enquiry was also circulated in various social media forums and at Youth Guidance Centers and sexual health clinics, alongside being forwarded by social servants to clients with experience of sugar dating. The enquiry targeted people “with experience of sugar dating,” without providing any definition of sugar dating. The interviews were conducted between May 2019 and May 2020, either face-to-face or through video or audio conversation, depending on the participant’s preference.

The interviews followed a semi-structured format, revolving around the participants’ motivations for sugar dating, the practical content of their sugar dating arrangements, and their subjective experiences of the practice. They went on for 45 minutes to two and a half hours. The interview transcriptions were processed in NVivo through a combination of data-driven and theory-driven coding, and analyzed thematically.

The “sugar babies” participating in the study were 18 to 41 years old. They were students (5), unemployed (1), on sick leave (1), sex workers (3), professionals (2), and “unskilled” workers (3). All but three were born in Sweden, out of which three had parents born abroad. All but two, who were located abroad at the time of the interview, lived in various parts of Sweden, most in mid-sized to larger cities, but a few in a smaller town or village. Their experiences of sugar dating varied significantly, with a key dividing line being whether they reported appreciating the interactions with the men in and of themselves or used sugar only as a means to earn money. In the former group, which is addressed in this article, a compelling theme that emerged was the way that the transactional setup of sugar dating had a positive value beyond the fact of the economic compensation itself, connected to how it structured the intimate interactions with “sugar daddies.” Situating this initial finding within a broader context of an increasingly marketized and deregulated sphere of intimacy, below I analyze the architecture and rationales of the participants’ investments in a transactional approach to intimacy. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive picture of “sugar babies”’ investments in sugar dating; indeed, the accounts analyzed represent only half of the women interviewed (for a more comprehensive account of the various experiences, see Gunnarsson and Strid 2021). Instead, the experiences of this limited group of participants are focused since they can provide us with new insights about the broader shifts accounted for above through which the boundaries between intimacy and transactionality are renegotiated.

Analysis

Contractualizing Intimacy

A recurrent theme in the interviews with participants voicing an appreciation of interactions with “sugar daddies” is that the contractual setup of sugar dating creates an orderliness and predictability that they find attractive. In her discussion of the contract as a way of regulating social relationships, Illouz (2019) states that “clauses against surprises” (p. 9) comprise a fundamental component and function of contracts as normally understood. Meanwhile, it is precisely such protections against surprises that the contemporary market of intimacy suffers a significant shortage of. Camilla (36, ethnic Swede, larger city) works in a managerial position and leads a family life with a man that she loves. She does not receive any monetary gifts from the men she meets through sugar dating, but uses it as an efficient and predictable route to casual, extra-marital sex and dating spicing up a life that is too replete, in her view, with every-day drudgery. Camilla succinctly summarizes her appreciation of the fact that in sugar dating roles and mutual expectations are more clearly spelled out than in non-transactional dating:

I like situations where both know the rules of the game. You know what the other is after.

Knowing what the men she meets are “after” means that she can enter the interactions with a pre-set script for how they will roughly unfold. Being aware of the men’s expectations on her also gives her a sense knowing in advance to what she agrees and whether she is ready to accept that.

Hanna (28, ethnic Swede, rural area) is a university-educated woman currently on sick leave due to a burnout. While receiving minor monetary gifts from her various “sugar daddies,” she reports practicing sugar dating primarily for the fun of it and expresses a strong investment in the sugar dating lifestyle. Like Camilla, Hanna highlights that knowing what is expected from the outset means that she can determine more easily in advance whether investing in the relationship is worthwhile:

You know what is expected from you and then it’s much easier to leave if you’re not OK with it.

She exemplifies this by comparing with “regular” relationships:

In a sugar daddy relationship you’re much more open and clear about expectations of sex, and I think that’s healthier in a way. Instead of, like, the whole Friday goes and you’re like “Will we have sex or not, I don’t know if I’m up for it, what am I to do if he wants to and I don’t?” All that. That’s things that one isn’t clear about in regular relationships.

Hanna here depicts non-commodified relationships as void of clear, outspoken—and pre-determined—expectations, giving rise to ambivalence and uncertainty. When expectations about sex are not decided on and communicated in advance, whether sex will happen or not becomes a matter of a complex negotiation based on the subjective—and as such organically evolving—states of mind of the parties involved. As Illouz (2019) puts forth, in contemporary dating “the lack of ritual structure and normative anchors leaves the subject struggling on her own to decipher another’s intentions, to devise a course of action, to create strategic responses to uncertainty, and to form clear and steady feelings” (p. 157). The contractualized sugar dating arrangement comes to represent a relief from the constitutive instability of contemporary intimate interactions structured by the ideal of a “pure relationship” (Giddens 1992) anchored in the subjective experiences of its parties rather than in more stable external factors.

Leila (31, Middle Eastern roots, larger city), who works in the health sector, was drawn into sugar dating due to a debt but subsequently came to enjoy it beyond the economic rewards. Reporting that she likes what she finds to be a directness of communication in sugar dating relationships, she exemplifies this with how men in the sugar dating setting may ask her about her sexual preferences before meeting:

Then you’re honest about what you like. If I had done that with a guy in regular dating he would have thought I was mad—hey, we’re just meeting for a coffee! But then you see a bit what kind of person you are and what you like and don’t like.

While Hanna speaks about contractualizing, and thereby making predictable, whether sex will happen or not, for Leila the way that sugar dating allows for making explicit the expected content of an interaction makes it possible to be prepared for what kind of sex is expected and offered.

The attraction of contractualizing intimate interactions in this way lies primarily in that it offers a promise of protecting the women from surprises. It gives them a feeling that already before they enter an arrangement, they know what it will contain. This both serves as a ground for judging whether it is worthwhile entering or not and provides a sense of control and predictability as the interaction takes place (cf. Palomeque Recio 2021). Illouz (2019) notes that the idea of a contract presumes a notion of stable wills, which is not applicable to the contingent structure of contemporary relationships. The contractualization associated with sugar dating may be seen as tied up with an intersubjectivity of stable wills, requiring that the desires and expectations of the subjects be stabilized as a means of countering the ontological instability of a pure relationship ruled by the subjective states of minds of its parties.

Balancing Investments and Returns

The marketization of intimacy has made it increasingly normalized to view sexual and intimate relationships through an economistic lens weighing “investments” against “returns” (Brents and Sanders 2010; Illouz 2019; Nayar 2017). In contrast to a logic of care, approaching relationships through a marketized logic of exchange means that giving is conditional so that offering something of value to another person is premised on something of similar or equal worth being offered in return. While the strengthened hold of such a market rationality over the “standard” market of intimacy is counterweighed by persisting taboos on mixing intimacy and transactionality, sugar dating stands out in explicitly embracing a logic of exchange, framing it as a fruitful and honest way of making sure both parties in an intimate interaction get what they want.

Camilla expresses a strong and blunt investment in this logic of exchange, despite standing out among the participants in having never accepted money from “sugar daddies.” The sugar structure of her arrangements instead consists in being invited to fancy dinners and sometimes receiving non-monetary gifts. Camilla speaks about her sugar dating arrangements with a marked sense of authority and entitlement, aligning with neoliberal and postfeminist feminist sensibilities emphasizing women’s rights to get what they want (Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg 2020; Rottenberg 2014, 2017). She frequently employs expressions like “I expect” and “I demand,” alongside using economic terms when describing her intimate exchanges:

These men are clearer [than men on non-sugar sites] about knowing what they want and that I expect something in return. I think it’s nice to be able to place that counter-demand.

Noting Camilla’s repeated mention of her “expectations” and “demands” on the men, I ask her to clarify her approach in this regard.

Lena:

When you say things like, “I expect this” . . . . It’s important to you that you feel “I don’t give this to you just like that”?

Camilla:

Yes.

Lena:

You have something to give but they can’t expect . . . it costs, costs within quotation marks.

Camilla:

Yes.

Based on this logic, Camilla uses a method of adjusting her expectations of material gifts and other forms of bonus experiences, depending on the intrinsic qualities of the intimate interactions: the more attracted she is to a man, the lower her demands for external benefits. Recounting that she recently started seeing a man that she really likes, she explains:

This guy, I like him. We’ve connected, it’s my kind of man, you know. And then it’s different. You got to give yourself a price based on what it costs. This won’t cost me much, I think.

In line with Nayar’s (2017) observation that sugar daters “frequently use marketplace metaphors to describe ideal behavior and attitudes in ‘sugar’ dating and relationships” (p. 340), Camilla here comfortably uses economic terms like “cost” and “price” to illustrate a logic of evaluating “sugar daddies” based on how well they satisfy her desires, and where men’s perceived shortcomings or strengths are corrected for through adjustments of her expectations of external rewards.

Erika (41, Black with ethnically Swedish adoptive parents, larger city) is a university-educated, currently unemployed woman of upper-class background describing sugar dating as an adventurous and glamorous way of meeting men. To her, the transactional setup of sugar dating is a way of securing that she is properly valorized and, taking the instrumentalizing logic of extraction one step further than Camilla, she goes as far as stating that sugar dating is a game of mutual manipulation in the name of getting what one wants:

Sugar dating is about me as a sugar baby trying to get out as much as possible and he as a sugar daddy also getting out as much a possible from it all. And, even though it’s not openly talked about, of course we use each other.

Li (29, Asian-born, larger city) is a student and divorced mother who has so far used sugar dating sites only to have sex with men in exchange for money but dreams about finding a more stable “sugar daddy” who will provide safety and respect but without the demands for emotional commitment that she shuns due to the difficulties in her previous marriage. Mirroring the claims of scholars of intimacy, Li connects the transactional logic of sugar dating to a historical restructuring of the norms of intimacy:

It’s like with modernization . . . Before one was married and was like for free and included. If you don’t have that, you borrow a girl, so that’s what you pay for. [. . .] And if you don’t have any thoughts of marrying the person and don’t want the other person to develop feelings, to fall in love, then you keep it to business. You get money, you are not my girlfriend, you don’t judge me. That’s how I think.

Li here articulates a theme that is recurrent in the material as well as in previous research on men’s stakes in the “bounded authenticity” offered in some sexual services (Bernstein 2007:6; Carbonero and Gómez Garrido 2018; Milrod and Monto 2012): what the “sugar daddy” pays for is the relief from the demands associated with committed, non-transactional relationships (Gunnarsson and Strid 2022). But Li also has her own interests and concerns, informing her expectations of being economically compensated. That the economic compensation is not important only for its own sake is clarified when I ask her if she would sugar date even if she had no need for money.

Li:

I think they need to somehow make an effort. [. . .] I see it as a compensation for something they haven’t done.

Lena:

The payment is a compensation for something they haven’t done?

Li:

Well. If I would meet someone and start a relationship, with someone who’s older, then I think I should be compensated.

Lena:

Because he’s older?

Li:

Yes. [. . .] But it depends on what kind of relationship it is and how much the person helps out. But I still think that . . . otherwise I wouldn’t want to start a relationship. Because then I have freedom. Because I prefer that freedom it feels better that the person pays.

This excerpt includes a set of slides between various negative factors that Li associates with sugar dating relations and therefore sees a need for being compensated for. It is not the sex—because that part she reports enjoying—but (1) the man’s not doing things that are expected in a regular relationship (being committed, helping out), (2) his older age, and (3) the circumcision of her freedom that a more committed sugar dating relationship would, as she pictures it, entail. It might seem contradictory that, on one hand, Li searches for a more committed, long-term arrangement, while, on the other hand, seeing it as a threat to her freedom. This is an ambivalence permeating the interview with Li and, as further elaborated upon below, I see her way of approaching the men through a logic of exchange as a means through which she seeks to secure a relationship where any of the negative aspects that she associates with intimate relationships are compensated for through money. This can be compared with Palomeque Recio’s (2022) observation that extracting money from men in sugar dating may serve as compensation for the dissatisfactions associated with relationships with men.

Camilla and Li stand out among the participants in that their application of a language of exchange to intimacy appears to come natural to them. Other participants seem more aware that thinking in such terms may come out as problematic, feeling a need to defend their transactional approach. To this end, some make comparisons with “regular” relationships, to make the case that they too are ultimately structured by a logic of exchange. Hanna, for instance, speaks about a previous non-sugar relationship with a man who according to her had an “extreme sex drive”:

It was the same thing there [as in my sugar dating arrangements], that for the sake of the relationship you made an effort and gave in when he wanted to have sex. I wasn’t paid for that, but I was paid in the form of a pleased boyfriend. So, I think that sex can always be used as a currency. [. . .] It doesn’t have to be money or even gifts, it can be simply for the sake of domestic peace. [. . .] It’s skewed if it’s seen as something negative to regard oneself as a currency, for all people are a form of currency.

Although Hanna is probably right that most relationships between adults depend, at least ultimately, on some form of balancing of what is given and received, the commodified logic of exchange differs in that it seeks to reduce this basic intersubjective dialectic of giving and receiving to objectivized, and thereby calculable, exchangeable, and controllable, units. While the women’s investments in such a transactional logic may be seen as a neat reflection of a neoliberal, marketized rationality “slowly colonizing every aspect of our world” (Rottenberg 2017:332), it is important to acknowledge what I see as a central undercurrent organizing this investment: the desire to gain control over the terms of intimate interactions with men.

Being Valued

The notion of value is deeply ambiguous due to its centrality both for an economic sphere ruled by market principles of supply and demand and an interpersonal moral realm guided by principles of sympathy, love, and care (e.g., Stark 2009). The tension between the notion of value in these spheres is reflected in the way that being valued as a commodity is often regarded as standing in conflict with being valued as a human being. However, in several of the interview accounts in this study, the boundary between these different applications of the notion of value is erased, so that monetary valuation takes on the function of affirming the value of the woman as a person, or at least as a sexual being. Leila puts it like this:

I feel validated in that the person is ready to pay for being with me, is ready to pay for having sex. [. . .] When they pay it means that I cost money . . . that it’s not for free.

The theme of economic compensation as an intersubjective valorization process resurfaces in several interviews. While a material need for money has been a key driving force for Angelika (35, ethnic Swede, larger city), who has extensive experience of sex work and has used sugar dating as one avenue among others to trade sex for money, she also underscores the “incredible affirmation” in being economically compensated, especially in cases where men have offered her very large sums of money to be with her. Vendela (18, ethnic Swede, small town) too, who speaks about her adolescent experiences of sugar dating as, ultimately, a self-destructive means of regulating her emotions, invokes the theme of monetary compensation as a reflection of her value:

It’s a validation in itself to get the sex, but that they also pay for it means that “you’re worth this” [. . .], that “you’re like really worth paying for.”

Illouz (2019) states that “[s]exual exchange located on a market leaves women in an ambivalent position: at once empowered and demeaned through their sexuality” (p. 17) and this is an analytical point of immediate importance for Vendela’s experience. While the instant effect of having sex with men for compensation was a feeling of being valued, she recounts that after the sex this quickly transformed into a feeling of devaluation, to a self-hate stronger than before the encounter.

Hanna raises the theme of valuation as being regulated by a broader sugar dating culture that she has come across as a member of a chat group for “sugar babies.” Here, being bestowed with value through economic compensation is not only a matter of feeling valued by the man offering the compensation, but also a source of recognition among peer “sugar babies”:

[The sugar daddy] is supposed to affirm you as young, good-looking, sexy, beautiful—as worth. It’s this thing that the more money he spends on you, the better you are. [. . .] A good sugar baby can get hold of lots of money and, you know, girls compete among themselves.

Hanna’s use of the word “worth” is grammatically incorrect, reflecting an interesting slide between traditionally separated spheres of value. In conventional language you can be worth something, but in Hanna’s statement that something is left out and “worth” takes on an independent form of reality: being worth putting a lot of money on translates into being worth in a more generic sense. While having one’s worth determined in money is traditionally regarded as demeaning, that is, as damaging one’s sense of human worth(iness), with the diffusion of a market rationality to ever more human domains economic valuation increasingly becomes the mode of valuation representing value in a broader sense. As Rottenberg states, “different registers—political, economic, social and affective—collapse under the hegemony of neoliberalism, and all forms of valuation transpire through a market metrics” (in Banet-Weiser et al. 2020:8). Just like “selling sex and intimacy makes sense” in this ideological climate (Nayar 2017:336, emphasis added), it makes sense to take pride in being highly valued as an object of consumption. In the neoliberal and postfeminist imaginaries, the positioning of “women’s bodies as their source of value” (Gill in Banet-Weiser et al. 2020:5) is a fact that can be skillfully made use of, but, as utterly clear in the case of sugar dating, the process through which women’s bodies acquire value is “more or less controlled by men who have the symbolic and economic power to define women’s worth and attractiveness” (Illouz 2019:103–104).

Evading the Risks of Regular Intimacy

While having so far briefly addressed the participants’ transactional approach to heterosexual sex and intimacy as a reactive response to the precarious conditions of contemporary intimacy, generally and for women particularly, I now explore how this theme is explicitly addressed by the women themselves. In the interview with Erika, who spoke about sugar dating as a mutual making use of one another, it becomes apparent that her stakes in sugar dating derive their meaning only in light of her experiences of subordination in “regular” dating with men. She constructs a sharp contrast between a “past” of exploitative non-transactional dating with men and a “now” of sugar dating, where she places high demands on men:

I see it as a revenge for all the men who have treated me badly. That I’m capable of so much more, I can stand up for myself. That’s like what I convince myself of, that I’m not a doormat.

Erika’s case illuminates how investing in a neoliberal mode of feminist empowerment can be a strategy for avoiding the risks associated with heterosexuality while continuing to engage intimately with men. For Li too, the transactional setup of sugar dating derives its allure in relation to her previous experiences of heterosexual intimacy. As already touched upon, for Li, who has previously been married, engaging in sugar dating is strongly driven by a desire to avoid what she experiences as negative aspects of heterosexual intimacy. She starts articulating these negative aspects when I ask her if she is interested in forming a conventional relationship again:

Erhm no, never marry again at least [laughs]. But like boyfriend–girlfriend, living apart, because I kind of like being free. Because I also felt that another person [her ex-husband] could affect my mental wellbeing. [. . .]. I sort of want to be on my own and stop with that thing of getting involved in someone else. When I have dated people it felt scary. When I met someone and could imagine starting a relationship with them and then it felt . . . this will turn out the same. You start a relationship and then you discover that you’re not in love anymore and then . . . it can become difficult.

Li posits emotionally involving herself in another person as a threat to her freedom and well-being. In line with this, in her discussion above about being compensated, Li underscored that to the extent that a sugar dating arrangement circumscribes her freedom, she would want compensation for this. There is, however, another, seemingly polar, side to “regular” dating and intimacy that is foregrounded by Li as a risk she seeks to evade through sugar dating: the risk of rejection. She raises this theme by saying something that first makes me puzzled:

I wouldn’t have sex with someone through Tinder or something like that. If I have sex with someone I want that person to care and commit, and care about how I feel. So, I don’t think I can find someone on Tinder.

This account confuses me due to its focus on commitment—something she elsewhere talks about as risky—and since she has met a lot of men through sugar dating sites for sex only. I ask her if she means that it is easier to find someone who cares through a sugar dating site:

No, but . . . it’s easier for me to keep unemotional, not hoping too much. When I meet someone on Tinder I start like making plans, get an apartment in my dreams. But if I’m on this [sugar dating] site I know that I meet him now and if he gets in touch with me again I meet him one more time.

The tension between this statement and the one addressed previously is striking. It is as if Li, through sugar dating, is trying to create a relationship setup that will protect her from any form of downside associated with intimacy—be it the risk of restriction or the risk of rejection—while providing the positive things that she associates with intimacy. The fact that an “involvement of the self” (Illouz 2019:21) in intimate interactions not only entails vulnerability but is also a precondition for many of the benefits to be experienced in intimacy, is overlooked when Li here strives to split inseparable dimensions of intimacy into manageable parts to be chosen or rejected. As Katherine Angel (2022) notes, “it is not by hardening ourselves against vulnerability that we—any of us—will find sexual fulfillment,” but in “opening ourselves to” it (p. 99; cf. Gunnarsson 2018).

Leila similarly compares the restricted emotional involvement and predictable organization of sugar dating with what she experiences as a regular sphere of dating fueling uncertainty and vulnerability. This theme surfaces when she speaks appreciatingly about the directness of communication with “sugar daddies” and relates this to the bounded character of sugar dating:

In regular dating you always want to . . . I don’t know if the guys are the way that they want to keep everything to themselves and don’t want to show too much [. . .] because there’s so much at stake. With sugar daddies you know how we begin and where the date ends.

Leila here points to how the high stakes of regular dating may work as an inhibiting force; the possibility that the date could develop into a committed, loving relationship augments the risks of disappointment, making, as Leila interprets it, openness about oneself riskier than in a sugar dating arrangement normally excluding such trajectories from the outset. I ask Leila if she feels less vulnerable in sugar dating than in regular dating:

Yes. For example, when you say goodbye for the night [after a regular date], you think, “Oh my God, who will text first?” And with a sugar daddy you don’t even have to talk to the person for one week and you know you have the person.

Leila experiences that the contractual boundaries of sugar dating relieve her of what Illouz (2019) refers to as a struggle of “assessing the other’s intentions and calculating risks” (p. 147), a struggle that has become intensified with the fading away of ritual structures organizing courting. By knowing, and accepting, in advance that the relationship is circumscribed by clear boundaries and will not spill over into the “real” lives of its members, one is relieved of the labor of navigating the uncertainty of whether the relationships will develop into a committed one or not. Furthermore, Leila’s accounts suggest that a bounded relationship of this kind may, somewhat paradoxically, provide a more open and trustful, albeit strictly bounded, interactive space than a non-transactional pure relationship, precisely because its parties can rest in a predictable frame.

The predictable framing of sugar dating, then, is seen to offer an escape from two seemingly polar risks associated by the women with “regular” heterosexual dating and relationships. It is represented as, on one hand, a way of avoiding the restriction and confinement seen as linked to heterosexual intimacy. This may be read both as an expression of the diffusion of a relatively gender-neutral consumer mentality into the realm of intimacy, making “greedy committed relationships” appear like a costly investment (Illouz 2019:72), and as a strategy for escaping the emotional labor and subordination that women tend to face in heterosexual intimacy (Gunnarsson 2014; Langford 1999). On the other hand, sugar dating is seen as a way of avoiding the risk of rejection and abandonment. While this risk is a more or less unavoidable aspect of intimacy, the increased unpredictability of intimate interactions in contemporary society has heightened it in a way that enhances the allure of the bounded and predictably scripted interaction associated with sugar dating.

Conclusion

The transactional approach to intimate interactions embraced by the women in this study seems like a perfect expression of the strengthened grasp of a “neoliberal rationality” (Brown 2005; Rottenberg 2014) over the domain of intimacy. In my analysis, I identified the following features centrally figuring in the women’s transactional approach to interactions with “sugar daddies”: contractualization: the attempt to set the terms and decide the contents of intimate interactions in advance, as a way of creating predictability; cost-benefit calculation: the endeavor, articulated through an economized discourse, to determine and properly balance what an intimate interaction will take and give, as a way of gaining a sense of control over what flows “in” and “out” in interactions with men; and economic validation: the acceptance of a patriarchal commodity logic, whereby one’s value is expressed in monetary terms, as determined by men.

While these themes are unified by their alignment with trends toward marketization and neoliberalism, they also significantly represent, I argue, ways of seeking to gain control over and derive power and benefits rather than vulnerability and subordination from intimate exchanges with men. This drive to gain control works as the organizing force behind much if not all of what the women say about their transactional mode of relating to “sugar daddies.” Implicitly, this conveys that intimate interactions with men are a risky business that, therefore, need to be controlled and managed. In the last part of my analysis, these perceived risks come out more explicitly. Here, despite the fact that compensated forms of sex of intimacy tend to provide the economic benefactor with more control (Gunnarsson and Strid 2022), the contractualized and clearly bounded structure of sugar dating is seen as offering a form of escape from the risks of “real” dating and relationships, which due to their unbounded and therefore unpredictable structure create vulnerability and uncertainty.

The women’s investment in a transactional mode of intimate interaction with men can be read, then, as a defensive tactic of dealing with the risks and contradictions of contemporary heterosexual intimacy, which come to cultural expression for example in recent references to a cultural moment of “heteropessimism” (Holzberg and Lehtonen 2021). While this tactic may be conceptualized as a neoliberal feminist sensibility in action in the domain of sex and intimacy, rather than addressing the women as simply absorbers of neoliberal ideology, we need to examine what it is about women’s position in contemporary intimacy that makes the transactional rationality appear as an appealing mode of relating to men for some women. I contend that the participants’ highly individualized, “cold” (Hochschild 2003; Illouz 2007), and defensive tactic of seeking to gain control over intimate interactions with men derives its meaningfulness in relation, first, to the well-documented and historically long-lasting risks of subordination and exploitation that women face in heterosexual intimacy (Gunnarsson 2014; Gunnarsson, García Andrade and Jónasdóttir 2018; Langford 1999) and, second, to the newer, more generic forms of insecurity characterizing the conditions of intimacy in contemporary societies. When the regular “market” of intimacy is experienced as ill-suited for procuring for women’s needs for erotic connection with men in a secure way that does not take more than it gives, the neoliberal rationality, with its promise of control over cost-benefit balances, offers a readily available alternative for seeking to gain control over the flows of intimacy.

Sugar dating paradoxically represents both a logical continuation of broader trends toward transactionalized intimacy and a promise of an escape from the existential risks associated with an increasingly neoliberalized domain of dating and love. To the women in this study, sugar dating offers something preferable to the standard market of intimacy, where transactional logics intermingle in confusing ways with other logics, by explicitly embracing and “institutionalizing” the transactional element of relationships in a way that holds out the hope of more orderliness and predictability than “the normal chaos of love” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). I use expressions like “promise” and “holds out the hope” to accentuate that the participants’ investment in a transactional mode of interaction is not necessarily a successful tactic of gaining control. Indeed, as a semi-new segment of a patriarchal sex industry, sugar dating is structurally predicated on gender inequality and the privileging of men’s sexual and intimate preferences (Gunnarsson and Strid 2022). Although tensions between the participants’ attachment to transactionality and the actual outcomes of their interactions in the transactional mode are not the focus of this article, it should be noted that in some of the interviews there was clearly a gap between the participants’ high thoughts about what sugar dating can offer and their actual experiences of the practice. While it is my impression that Camilla overall succeeded in realizing her goals in sugar dating, Li’s hopes about finding a stable “sugar daddy” procuring for her needs in a predictable way guided by transactional principles were starkly contradicted by her actual experiences of being paid for temporary sex. That Camilla belongs to a White middle class, while Li is a student of immigrant background with little economic, social, and cultural capital is arguably highly significant to understanding this difference. Such intersectional constraints on variously positioned women’s access to an empowered position in sugar dating (cf. Jones 2020) deserve further study, as do, more generally, tensions between the discursive framing of transactional heterosexual intimacy as empowering for women and the actual power dynamics of such transactional interactions.

While the contemporary conditions of neoliberal ideology and precarious intimacy frame the analysis in this study, I want to underscore that these conditions should not be ascribed more importance than they deserve as factors explaining the participants’ investment in a transactional mode of relating. In any geo-historical location, a transactional disposition can be a way of defending oneself from the inevitable vulnerabilities associated with intimate interactions. However, apart from the fact that the present organization of erotic bonding has added a new layer of insecurity and unpredictability to intimacy, it is reasonable to assume that people marinated in a culture that positions them as consumers of commodities in all spheres of life are particularly badly equipped for dealing even with the constitutive, and thereby inevitable, riskiness of intimacy. The consumer is disposed to seek to satisfy their needs and desires through neatly packaged commodities that demand as little as possible back, and this is a logic of interaction that fits badly with the requirements of engaging with another subject, with their own needs and desires. The consumer logic is in alignment with experiences of deriving pleasure and enjoyment from other people, but not with the responsibilities, vulnerabilities, dependencies, and demands that come with genuinely intersubjective relationships (Benjamin 1998; Cahill 2012). While this study has foregrounded the historical and cultural continuities between the individualization and the marketization of intimacy (cf. Bandinelli and Gandini 2022; Nayar 2017), it should be underlined that individualized intimacy in the pure relationship mode does not have to be cast in the defensive and calculative market format, if there are sociocultural and psychological mechanisms in place for harboring and dealing with the inevitable vulnerabilities and risks of “de-regulated” relationships. However, by lack of such conditions, the sense of control associated with a transactional approach to intimacy may be experienced as a welcome substitute for the “old” rules and scripts regulating the realm of sex and love.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/orpublication of this article: This research was supported by FORTE – Swedish Research Council for Health,Working Life and Welfare (2018-00892).

ORCID iD

Lena Gunnarsson

Author Biography

Lena Gunnarsson is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Örebro University,Sweden. Much of her research has been dedicated to examining how various aspects of (hetero)sexuality and love are structured by gendered power relations. She has also done extensive work in the fields of feminist theory and social theory.

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