The Hidden Price of Sugaring

“I like your lips. And your eyes and your arms around me. I feel like we connect.”

This is what he whispered in my ear as we kissed in my parked car outside his apartment. He held my face away from his and looked into my eyes. An hour before we had met at a bar. It was our second date. He greeted me when I walked in with a friendly hug but immediately averted eye contact. “Want a drink?” 

I could tell he had already been drinking. He was more talkative than the first time we met, where I spoke almost the entire time, enjoying the way he laughed at my half-hearted attempts at jokes to ease the tension. Tonight, he was more open, his words coming out less forced. I tried to make more of an effort to smile, ask questions, widen my eyes at his stories. 

I was here because I needed money. 

But I was also here because I wanted to know why they were here. The answer turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. To have one reason for why people use sugaring sites would be to create a single story, a generalization. What I found instead was that sugaring is only one part, or rather one consequence of the complex socio-economic and political capitalist web we all find ourselves within. 

Of course in an ideal world, intimacy wouldn’t be transactional. It wouldn’t be a question asked and a wad of cash exchanged from one closed palm to an outstretched one. Ideally, it would be motivated by that magnetic pull we cannot see but believe to exist because we feel it to. Relationships are not, as the founder of the website SeekingArrangement claims, superficial arrangements that we engage in to get what we want. Although services are indeed exchanged in personal relationships, there is not always an unspoken “arrangement” that we are conscious of in the giving; rather, these exchanges come from something far more emotional and instinctive than calculated. 

But here human contact, physical or verbal, is a service provided. It is an arrangement written out in contract. And they are here because the alternative – to never touch or be touched – seems. worse. 

Last week I met a man at a Starbucks. We sat at a table outside that he said looked discreet. Almost immediately, he told me that he experienced mood swings that his therapist attributed to loneliness. I was surprised by his candor; he had at first seemed so confident and self-assured, but now a new layer appeared in his body, exposing his nervousness, eyes flicking back and forth. “Why are you so calm?” He asked me. 

He told me he had never done this before. I told him I had. He confessed that he hadn’t been with a woman in two years. “But I don’t want a relationship,” he told me, “just intimacy.” 

He reported in a business-like manner that he would pay me each time we were intimate, a word that suddenly struck me as odd in our current context. In this moment a discomfort, or maybe even a sadness was beginning to form in the pit of my stomach, perhaps inspired by the absurdity of our current situation: an older man and a 22-year-old woman sitting across from one another at a Starbucks discussing the price of intimacy. I was lost for words, attempting to conceptualize an intimacy that exists isolated from a relationship: an intimacy that is performed. I wanted to tell him that this was delusional, that dissociating intimacy from a relationship was forgetting that every time you authentically express intimacy, a relationship of some kind is formed. If intimacy is a service provided, is it intimacy at all? But I didn’t tell him any of that. 

At a hotel room, close to work, we met for an hour. I gave him my mind and my body and he gave me five hundred dollars in cash; to him it was a traditional relationship stripped to its bare bones, without any superfluous time spent or energy expended. Only the minimal requirements, an experience that offered a cathartic mental and physical release, then abruptly ended.

By most who engage in it, it is not considered sex work. I don’t know if it is or not, and I don’t think it makes a difference either way. There’s nothing wrong with sex work for people who are fulfilled by doing it. But the fact remains that he was not only paying for sex, because he could do that a lot more cheaply and easily. What he paid me for is the creation and maintenance of a specific illusion, namely, the illusion of intimacy. He pays to be able to control how much time we spend together, when and where we spend our time, and the nature of the time spent. He pays to curate the experience of intimacy he wants. 

As I made my way back to my car from the hotel room, a voice in my head was saying something isn’t right, and this voice stayed with me as I drove away clutching the cash close to my body. Something wasn’t right and this something wasn’t simply the fact that I was selling my body for sex. I expected to feel uncomfortable from that and in some ways don’t have too much of a problem with the idea of having sex for money. What wasn’t right to me was something more personal, more political, and ultimately more surprising than my distaste for the transactional sex. 

We grow up convinced that our personal value is determined by how much money we make, because money is the dominant societal indicator of value. I know this is true because of the inferiority I feel at making less money than most of my friends and family, like I am somehow worth less as a person. The men, on the other hand, come here because they have enough money to pay for anything they want, including “intimacy.” 

However, at its core, our capitalist economic and political system continues to exist because of the hidden consequences of our economic system. These consequences remain on the far periphery of our minds as long as no one says a word. Think environmental destruction alongside economic growth, or a minimum wage that is far too low in most places to ensure a quality standard of living. 

It is an avoidance of truth, an avoidance practiced so habitually in our daily lives that it comes easily. As long as the price paid is swept under the rug, we will continue to avert our eyes and look at what is put in front of us. We will continue to seek out the illusion no matter the cost because the alternative, to question and demand and live differently is far too daunting.  

And I was willing to play along. Inflating their ego and returning home with cash made it worth it — almost. But what was swept under the rug? What line was crossed? Was it seeing that the monetary and transactional values that characterize our capitalist system had seeped into the practice of intimacy, one of the last things that I truly believed defies the power of capitalism? Definitely. Because of their wealth, these men can attempt to manipulate intimacy into something under their control. But it was also more than that. 

After he pressed the cash into my hand at the hotel room, I felt a rush. I felt a rush because having money made me feel powerful. But when I left the taste of him was in my mouth, the smell of him on my clothes. It’s hard to explain what that feels like. It’s hard to explain how intimacy with someone I don’t feel intimate with makes me feel, or if I can even begin to describe what intimacy is here. 

I acknowledge that I am in a place of privilege. Although sleeping with men for money would make my life a lot more comfortable at this point in my life, I am not in a desperate situation. Not yet, at least. But sugaring is not empowering for me anymore because it requires me to avoid the truth that I am engaging in a system I cannot ethically support. Sugaring, in encouraging the creation of transactional relationships, also encourages a practice of “intimacy” that ultimately benefits men. Other forms of sex work don’t necessarily aim to construct such a controlled illusion of intimacy; they are straightforward about the service and the reward. 

But here I do not know what I am supposed to offer, and I do not know if it will ever be enough, even after I am stripped of my clothes and my sense of autonomy in the face of being literally paid to perform intimacy for them. I resent playing a part in a system that supports men in the belief that they can pay for emotional and physical intimacy, and use their money to buy control over every aspect of a personal relationship. I even more strongly resent that I gain any source of validation from this part that I play. 

Sugaring gives power to exactly the system, namely capitalism, that fails to value my moral code, my mental and physical health, my gender, and the marginalized identities of other humans living in this world. It supports a capitalistic way of viewing relationships, and one that benefits the men that engage in it far more than the women. 

I want to be asking myself how I can radically challenge the structures of capitalism rather than trying to benefit from it, and by doing so, also support the people who benefit the most from it.

 

 Photo by Daniela Guevara.