A controversial new trend in “sugar dating” has
recently gained attentionagain. Sold as somewhere between a business relationship and dating, the practice involves young, attractive, predominantly female “sugar babies” – many of them students – exchanging their companionship for financial support from older, wealthy predominantly male “sugar daddies” or “mommies”.
Expectations and boundaries for both people are outlined upfront, and if they proceed to an ongoing relationship it becomes known as an “arrangement”. Although arrangements commonly involve sexual intimacy, this is not always the case.
Angela Jacob Bermudo, spokesperson for one of the most popular and self-promotional international sugar dating websites,
SeekingArrangement.com, told me over email that the site now has 5m members, of which 1.4m (28%) are students. In the UK specifically, 160,000 (40%) of the 400,000 members are student sugar babies, a figure that Bermudo says “grew exponentially during the year of 2012". She puts the increase down to a policy change that allowed English universities to start charging up to £9,000 in fees per year.
This is a pattern similar to that
observed in the US alongside rises in the cost of university. Similar debates have also gone
on in Australia. In the UK, since tuition fees ballooned in 2012, undergraduate students can now expect to amass an
average debt of more than £44,000 over the course of their degree. According to Bermudo, the average university student sugar baby in the UK receives approximately £2,000 per month, which amounts to £24,000 a year. This is £2,300 more than the
£21,702 average starting salary for graduates reported in 2012. Overall, Bermudo reports that allowances for sugar babies range from £1,000 to £20,000 per month.BBC Radio 4 recently aired a programme on this phenomenon called
Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby, which included interviews with several female student sugar babies and a couple of older sugar daddies. For the sugar daddies, the primary motivation was access to beautiful young women for companionship and sex.
For the students, their decision to become involved in sugar dating was invariably driven by financial reasons, allowing a more lucrative and flexible means of keeping up with the
monetary and academic pressures of higher education than traditional part-time student jobs. However, while some students struggled emotionally with the practice or felt obligated to meet increasingly controlling demands of sugar daddies' money, others were very positive about the experience as a means of easing financial pressures and felt that it should not be stigmatised.
Increase in student sex work
While there has been very little academic research on sugar dating so far, there is broader evidence to suggest that financial pressures linked to recent rises in tuition fees have pushed students to engage with more extreme methods of funding their education. One example that can offer useful parallels with sugar dating in the UK is the
increase in student involvement in sex work in recent years (particularly erotic dancing, other non-direct services and escorting) as the cost of university has risen. Reasons
cited by students for their involvement in sex work include greater flexibility and financial reward compared to traditional part-time work.
Recent figures suggest that almost one in 20 students now engage in sex work during their time at university and more than one in five have considered it.
The rise in student involvement in both
sex work and
sugar dating can be understood in the context of the mainstreaming of sexual consumption and accompanying greater social awareness and acceptance of these practices.
