Newswise β It turns out being Sugar Daddy isn't a one-size-fits-all gig. While it occasionally lives up to the stereotype of a wealthy, middle-aged man lavishing gifts and money on a young woman in return for her companionship, there's more to it in the U.
Drawing from 48 in-depth interviews, sociologist Maren Scull , PhD, assistant professor at University of Colorado Denver , has identified seven types of these "sugar" relationships: sugar prostitution, compensated dating, compensated companionship, sugar dating, sugar friendships, sugar friendships with benefits and pragmatic love.
Sugar relationships are based on companionships, intimacy or other forms of attention in exchange for personal benefit financial support, material goods, professional advancement. These kinds of agreements are hardly new--in the s, Geishas were seen as socially respected entertainers even though they were paid to amuse men, usually without sex.
During the first two World Wars, soldiers paid women to join them for a night out of dinner and dancing. But the bulk of modern-day research focuses on transactional and survival sex in sub-Saharan Africa, and compensated dating in East and Southeast Asia. There was a black hole of research in the U. To understand how "sugaring" works in the U. She explored the kind of activities the women were involved in, whether sex was involved and whether their lives were intertwined with their benefactors.
She also found that most forms of sugaring aren't a play-for-pay arrangement. Scull labeled the first "sugar prostitution," a form of sugaring absent emotion and purely the exchange of gifts for sex.
