By REBECCA LUO
Luxury makeup spills across the countertop and expensive chocolate boxes are starting to pile up by the door. A beautiful sugar baby idly arranges her collection of brand-name lipsticks as her sparkling eyeshadow catches the light of her vanity mirror. She hasn’t a single worry in the world.
Being a sugar baby sounds like a pretty “sweet” deal. A sugar baby is a person who receives cash, gifts, or other financial benefits in exchange for an intimate relationship, usually sexual favours, with an older, wealthy partner. In fact, many women become sugar babies to achieve economic security, or to establish a lavish lifestyle. However, little do women realize, when they utilize their sexual appeal for economic gain, they are becoming less and less empowered.
In recent years, sugaring has become less taboo. With the rise of trendy phrases such as ‘daddy’s little girl’ and ‘sugar baby’ in popular culture, movies with sugar baby-central plotlines have become increasingly common, including The New Romantic (2018) and Sugar Daddies (2014). Media representation has fueled this dangerously overromanticized trend as data indicates that sugaring is becoming more prevalent; SeekingArrangement, a popular dating website for sugar babies and daddies, saw hundreds of more subscriptions from university students last year.
“I want to be a sugar baby,” one of my friends once said to me. “Just think about it, man, you just have to go on dates with an old man, and then everything will come to you. Not gonna lie, that sounds great.”
Getting money quickly without having to work sounds great. But is it really all it’s chalked up to be? Mainstream portrayals of sugar babies glamourize the lifestyle, and purposefully ignore the intrinsically sexist nature of sugaring, as well as its potential dangers. The dark side of sugar babying is rarely exposed.
I decided to do a deep dive to see the world of sugaring for myself. In less than five minutes, I was able to make an account on SeekingArrangement. I scrolled through the profiles of numerous aggressive men who have registered to become sugar daddies. Their bios were shockingly creepy and vile and referred to women like products on display in a supermarket. “Looking for a sexy girl whose ripe for breeding age [sic],” one bio reads. Multiple bios are also derogatory and include slurs, such as, “Looking for a stupid b*tch who just wanna have fun [sic].”
These men promote the idea that young girls must be servile and submissive toward older men, who substantiate a dynamic of “sugaring for favours” in these young girls. This current of ideas permeates the minds of young girls, thus allowing the toxic men to play a controlling and manipulative role in the relationship. Accompanied by the glamourization of sugaring by the media, which perpetuates the idea that relationships should involve a more successful man taking care of a subservient woman, young girls are led to develop misperceptions of normal, healthy relationships.
The popularization of sugaring also leads affluent men to become entitled and believe that women should do anything they ask. Sugaring perpetuates the idea that a man is allowed to see a woman as an animal who can be abused as long as he spoils her with enough material goods, without any accountability for his actions.
However, there are many women who find sugaring empowering—luring a stupid, old, rich man into giving up thousands of dollars a month with just a couple of feet pictures and sexual favours makes the man into a simpleton and the woman financially savvy. Is that really the case though? In my opinion, taking advantage of a woman’s body through financial coercion is not empowering; in fact, it is derogatory. When women succumb to a manipulative relationship, they lose their autonomy and are regarded as a pet or a toy with which men can do anything they desire. Sugaring promotes adherence to traditional gender roles, including male dominance (the "alpha male") and female submissiveness. Next time you see a sugar baby, is it that sweet anymore?