Who knows? On the epistemic status of experience in sugar-dating research

Abstract

Sugar dating has gained extensive media coverage over the last couple of years, often being depicted as a veiled form of prostitution / sex work. While similar dating arrangements encompassing some sort of economic compensation are well researched in an African and Asian context, sugar dating has only garnered attention from researchers in the Global North during the last decade, in the wake of a proliferation of websites facilitating the practice. In light of the contested nature of the phenomenon, in this article we critically assess how knowledge about sugar dating is constructed in the emerging literature on the topic in the Global North, with a particular focus on the role attributed to sugar daters’ own experiential accounts. Alongside furthering the discourse on sugar dating by unravelling the epistemological underpinnings of existing research, we utilise the case of sugar-dating research to elaborate on the continued relevance of feminist debates on the epistemological status of experience. We call for a more comprehensive theoretical examination of experience in sugar-dating research and posit that some versions of feminist standpoint theory, as well as strands in feminist phenomenology, provide valuable theoretical tools for navigating between understanding experience as an ideological construct and/or as a privileged foundation of knowledge.

Keywords

Experience feminist epistemology feminist standpoint theory ideology situated knowledge sugar dating

Experience or the subjective moment arising in daily lives must be our point of entry but not the endpoint. We must extend our understanding of an individual's experience, intention, and location into social and historical levels. Then it will become evident that the local and immediate experiences are specific forms of a general larger social organization and relations. It is by reading my experience in these historical, social terms that the standpoint of my knowledge would allow for deeper social understanding (Bannerji, 2020: 50).

Introduction

In 2006, the graduate student Brandon Wade, located in San Francisco, USA, established the website SeekingArrangement.com (now Seeking.com). The purpose of the platform was to facilitate connections between individuals engaging in ‘sugar dating’, defined as arrangements in which ‘intimacy, companionship or other forms of attention’ are exchanged for ‘financial, professional, or other forms of support’ (Wade, 2009: 11). The proliferation of similar websites has led to the widespread global practice of sugar dating, which has attracted significant attention from media, law enforcement and political actors due to its resemblance to prostitution / sex work. While there are same-sex sugar relationships (Kuate-Defo, 2004) and heterosexual arrangements between ‘sugar mummies’ and ‘sugar boys’ or ‘toyboys’ (Brouard and Crewe, 2012), sugar dating predominantly entails arrangements between older men – ‘sugar daddies’ – and younger women – ‘sugar babies’. Similar arrangements are well-researched within an African and Asian context (Luke et al., 2011; Li, 2015; Song and Morash, 2016), but sugar dating has only recently garnered attention from researchers in the Global North, with a marked increase in scholarly publications (for a discussion, see: Scull, 2020).

The scholarly examination of sugar dating plays a vital role in understanding and navigating the complex and contentious phenomenon of sugar dating. One key area of debate within the emerging field of research is whether sugar dating constitutes a form of prostitution / sex work and whether individuals, referred to as ‘sugar babies’, who engage in the exchange of companionship and sexual favours for economic rewards, are oppressed or empowered by this practice. These lines of contestation are closely tied to broader discussions regarding the conceptualisation of gendered sexual agency and oppression within a patriarchal societal structure, as well as longstanding debates on the power dynamics inherent in prostitution / sex work (Beran, 2012) and the role that the experience of sex workers should play in defining it (Phipps, 2016, 2017; Mulvihill, 2022). Sugar dating scholars make vastly dissimilar claims regarding the nature of sugar dating, and in this article we argue that these disparities – while often being defended as being faithful to the empirical material – are not only rooted in conflicting empirical data and/or the diversity of sugar-dating arrangements, but also linked to divergent epistemological convictions on the status of experience. However, despite being crucial to researchers’ understanding of sugar dating, these epistemological convictions are rarely made explicit or defended.

This article endeavours to reinvigorate feminist discourse on the epistemic significance of experience, with a specific emphasis on the experiences of subordinate groups. Through a critical analysis of the burgeoning literature on sugar dating in the Global North, we assess how knowledge about sugar dating is constructed, with a particular focus on the epistemological role assigned to the experiential accounts of sugar daters. We demonstrate that there are two main approaches to experience, where the first grounds the understanding of sugar dating on the accounts of sugar daters themselves, whereas the second critically contextualises the experiential accounts of sugar daters through critical theoretical tools. However, a negligible number of scholars within both ‘camps’ engage with (feminist) epistemological debates on the relationship between knowledge and experience, and then only shallowly.

The purpose of the article is twofold. Firstly, we aim to further the discourse on the phenomenon of sugar dating by unravelling the largely implicit epistemological underpinnings of the scholarly literature on sugar dating produced so far. Secondly, we utilise the case of sugar-dating research to elaborate on the continued relevance of feminist debates on the epistemological status of experience. As a contested and ambiguous phenomenon, sugar dating serves as an apt point of entry for reinvigorating discussions on the epistemological status of experience, particularly considering the longstanding and complex feminist debates on women's sexual agency within a society marked by male privilege. Sugar dating's contested position as part of, or at least bordering on, the sex industry strengthens its usefulness as a case for reinvigorating these discussions, in so far as the often-heated debates over the sex industry are characterised by strong tendencies of using sex workers’ own experiences as valuable rhetorical and epistemic ‘capital’ (Phipps, 2016). We call for a more comprehensive theoretical examination of the epistemic status of experience in sugar-dating research and beyond and posit that some versions of feminist standpoint theory as well as strands in feminist phenomenology provide valuable theoretical tools for navigating between understanding experience either as an ideological construct and or as a valid foundation for knowledge.

The epistemic status of experience

The utilisation of experiential accounts as a foundation for knowledge claims has long been a central epistemological issue within feminist theory and politics. Historically, women's experiences have served as an epistemic counter-authority to patriarchal ideology. However, the deceptive nature of women's consciousness as shaped by such ideological conditions has also been a prevalent theme in feminist discourse (Hartsock, 1988). Feminist grounded theory and feminist standpoint theory are prominent theoretical frameworks that have greatly influenced feminist discussions concerning the connection between experience and knowledge. Both approaches prioritise the perspective of marginalised groups as a starting point for knowledge production. Grounded theory, primarily a methodological strategy (Kushner and Morrow, 2003), emphasises the use of ‘first-order, primary, lived concepts’ (Denzin, 1989: 25), while feminist standpoint theory is more theoretically orientated. Some versions of feminist standpoint theory posit that the experiences of marginalised groups are epistemically superior, as the ‘gaze from below’ provides a more accurate understanding of the world than the ‘gaze from above’, and as powerlessness and marginalisation lead to an increased interest in understanding structures of oppression (Hartsock, 1988; Kruks, 2001; Hemmings, 2012).

However, feminist theorists have also scrutinised the notion of experience as a locus of truth, with claims that experience is inherently discursive (Hekman, 1991; Scott, 1991) and should therefore be critically interrogated rather than treated as a foundation for knowledge (Scott, 1991). Experience has also been considered too fragmented and varied to serve as a solid basis for knowledge (Hekman, 1991), and an emphasis on shared experiences of suffering rather than shared futural goals has been posited as leading to political balkanisation (Brown, 2001) by the way it ‘attributes the experiential aspects of suffering with an apodictic truth status’ (McNay, 2014: 105).

Despite this prevalent epistemological scepticism towards the concept of experiential knowledge, the mobilisation of experience remains crucial in feminist politics. As Shelley Budgeon states, ‘connecting experience to knowledge continues to constitute one of feminism's central problematics’ (2021: 249). The basic principles of feminist standpoint theory seem to continue to hold significant influence over contemporary feminist movements which tend to assign greater epistemic value to the experiences of marginalised groups than those of dominant groups (Johansson Wilén, 2023). This can be observed in discussions surrounding prostitution / sex work, where sex workers are often regarded as more authoritative sources of knowledge about the nature of prostitution / sex work (Phipps, 2016) than groups outside of the industry. As Johansson Wilén notes, ‘standpoint theory was declared dead without ever really dying or being buried. In that way, feminists could continue to make standpoint theoretical claims, although the official line was that the theory no longer measures up’ (2023: 96).¹

There is also a group of scholars who critically engage with the concept of experience, neither adhering entirely to feminist standpoint theory nor to the critique of experience as entirely discursive. Sonia Kruks (2001) endorses a phenomenological perspective emphasising the truth of women's non-linguistic and embodied experiences. Johanna Oksala (2014) takes issue both with what she takes to be Joan Wallach Scott's discursive idealism, arguing that it has ‘no traction on reality’ (2014: 396), and with phenomenological understandings of the pre-discursive nature of experience, stating that it is the ‘dissatisfaction, this gap between their personal experiential accounts and the dominant cultural representations, that can generate critique as well as create new discourses capable of contesting and contradicting the old ones’ (2014: 396; cf. Stone-Mediatore, 1998; Gunnarsson, 2021). Clare Hemmings (2012) similarly emphasises the emancipatory potential of the affective dissonance that experience can produce, while Lois McNay (2004) – utilising tools from Pierre Bourdieu's socio-phenomenological project – rejects a poststructuralist concept of experience as ‘a location within a discursive structure’, arguing instead that experience is ‘a lived social relation’ that not seldom ‘involves the negotiation of conflict and tension’ (2004: 185). For McNay, experience is a relational entity, where a certain experience is constructed by, while also negotiating, the context of dominant power relations.

Sugar dating in the Global North

The existing research on sugar dating in the Global North addresses the phenomenon in the USA (Miller, 2011; Deeks, 2013; Motyl, 2013; Hier, 2017; Nayar, 2017; Mixon, 2019; Lam, 2020; Scull, 2020; Upadhyay, 2021; Kirkeby et al., 2022; Scull, 2022a, 2022b), the UK (Recio, 2022a, 2022b), Sweden (Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022, 2021), Denmark (Andersen and Thing, 2021), Hungary (Birkas et al., 2020; Lang et al., 2021), Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (Swader and Vorobeva, 2015; Swader et al., 2013). As Gunnarsson and Strid (2022) note, a significant share of the research published to date has aimed to empirically define what sugar dating is, particularly whether it should be understood as a form of prostitution / sex work or not. Several studies have examined the practices of sugar dating to identify the aspects that differ from or overlap with prostitution / sex work (Motyl, 2013; Swader and Vorobeva, 2015; Hier, 2017; Scull, 2020). Features that are highlighted as distinguishing sugar dating from prostitution, or from ‘more explicit forms of sex work’ (Nayar, 2017: 335), include the dating aspect of many sugar-dating arrangements (Scull, 2020; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022), the oft-present element of interpersonal authenticity (rather than a strict business exchange) (Swader and Vorobeva, 2015; Nayar, 2017; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2021, 2022) and the informal and unregulated nature of the economic exchange/support (Swader and Vorobeva, 2015; Nayar, 2017; Scull, 2020; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022). Meanwhile, Gunnarsson and Strid's (2022) study shows that many sugar-dating arrangements lack these features, and that sugar dating is here instead used as a label to conceal the explicit pay-for-play nature of these arrangements. An issue also raised in the literature, which is closely related to the issue of sugar dating's relationship to prostitution, is whether the practice should be considered legal or not (Deeks, 2013; Miller, 2011), and moral or not (Rakic, 2020). While some studies are firmly based in a feminist critique (such as Recio, 2022a, 2022b; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022), others adopt a moral position, where the actors in the sugar-dating relationships (rather than the context of the phenomenon) are scrutinised (Rakic, 2020; Lang et al., 2021).

While a significant amount of research is centred on empirically mapping and defining sugar dating, several scholars also engage in a critical contextualisation of the practices and discourses of sugar dating in relation to broader social, economic and cultural trends. Here, researchers highlight that sugar dating raises broader questions about the transformation of the sex and intimacy industry, the conditions of contemporary heterosexual sex and love and how to understand women's emancipation in a time marked by neoliberal restructuring and capitalist ideology (Nayar, 2017; Recio, 2022a, 2022b) and their impact on people's (especially women's) economic situation and on their practices, experiences and interpretations of love and sex (Swader et al., 2013; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022, 2021). The way in which sugar dating replicates and contests norms and hierarchies within normative heterosexuality is another recurrent subject of investigation (Swader et al., 2013; Nayar, 2017; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022; Recio, 2022a, 2022b). The field delves into the discursive constructions of the phenomenon, by examining the websites facilitating it (Nayar, 2017; Upadhyay, 2021), those engaged in it (Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022) and counsellors who work with the latter (Andersen and Thing, 2021).

Similar to the literature on sugar dating in the African context, some studies address the negative effects of participating in such arrangements (Kirkeby et al., 2022). Sugar babies have been identified as being at risk of experiencing sexual or other forms of violence, as well as facing public stigmatisation by being labelled as greedy, immoral and/or deviant (Lam, 2020; Scull, 2022a) or lacking agency (Nayar, 2017; Andersen and Thing, 2021). For example, Maren Scull (2022a) characterises sugar dating as a ‘deviant career’, highlighting how individuals involved in sugar dating must navigate the societal stigmatisation that accompanies it. Additionally, Kavita Illona Nayar (2017) illustrates how the process of stigmatisation is not only directed at sugar daters by external actors, but that sugar daters themselves draw moral boundaries between sugar dating and prostitution / sex work in a way that reinforces the stigmatisation of more explicit forms of sex work.

In the publications examined, qualitative methods are most common, but there are instances of quantitative and mixed-methods designs. Among the quantitative studies, the most frequent method employed is various types of survey questionnaire studies (Swader and Vorobeva, 2015; Kirkeby et al., 2022; Lang et al., 2021; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2021, 2022), while also including a study based on a quantitative analysis of institutional and demographic data (Mixon, 2019).

While sugar daters’ experiences are typically in focus in the interview studies, one study draws on interviews with drug counsellors, care workers and agents within the sphere of the judiciary (Andersen and Thing, 2021). Although, naturally, all interview studies relate to the participants’ experiential accounts as central for understanding the practice of sugar dating, the extent to which these experiential accounts are critically contextualised varies. Here we discern a connection to whether sugar babies, sugar daddies or other actors are the ones interviewed: as we elaborate on below, the interview-based experiential accounts of sugar babies are generally used as a reliable source of knowledge (Scull, 2020; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2022; Recio, 2022a, 2022b; Scull, 2022a), whereas the accounts of sugar daddies and representatives of authorities undergo more critical scrutiny and are analysed as shaped by patriarchal conceptions of gender and intimacy (Andersen and Thing, 2021; Gunnarsson and Strid, 2021, 2022).

This study

In what follows, we analyse the emerging research on sugar dating in the Global North with the following questions in mind: What authority is attributed to various forms of empirical material when discussing the nature of sugar dating? Are sugar daters’ experiential accounts critically interrogated or do they play a crucial role in informing the scholars’ own claims about the nature of sugar dating? Our analysis encompasses English-language peer-reviewed academic articles and university press monographs that examine, as their primary focus, sugar dating – and in some instances what is referred to as ‘compensated dating’ – in the Global North. We chose to delimit our study to countries of the Global North given their relatively similar socio-cultural and economic regimes of gender and sexuality. Additionally, research on sugar dating in the Global North is comparatively recent, which further justifies a particular scrutiny of this emerging field. In total, our material consists of twenty-two peer-reviewed articles and one monograph that were published between 2011 (when the first academic article on sugar dating in a Global North context was published) and December 2022 (when we ended our data collection). Publications in languages other than English were excluded, since academic literature in English has the greatest impact in the field, and since any broadening of the sample based on our own language skills beyond English would create a problematic selection bias. Although our study is focused on the Anglophone context, English-language publications covering Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries are also included in the sample.

Given the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of scholars studying sugar dating, a wide range of analytical tools and theoretical perspectives are employed. In this regard, we categorise the studies into two broad groups: critically contextualising approaches, which we understand to adopt a critical stance towards the empirical material with the help of theoretical frameworks, and empirically orientated approaches, where the empirical material serves as the primary source of knowledge claims and the scholar does not maintain the same level of analytical distance as in the first category. Based on this key distinction, we investigate the status that experience is given in the field, trying to tease out dominant epistemological convictions. It is worth noting, though, that there are variations in terms of the degree of distance and the emphasis placed on certain positions within each category, and that some studies fall within both categories in that they critically interrogate certain aspects of the empirical material while adopting a less critical approach towards others.

Empirically anchored approaches

The studies that we label as empirically anchored ground their understanding of sugar dating firmly and directly in the accounts of sugar daters, and seldom rely on other forms of empirical material to build their knowledge claims about sugar dating. Some of the studies that we discuss as critically contextualising are also addressed here, as both approaches sometimes coexist in one and the same study, being applied to different parts of the empirical material. The empirically anchored approach is rarely explicitly spelled out nor theoretically defended in the works analysed. While, with one exception, the scholars in this category do not explicitly ground their approaches in specific research traditions, we will show that some use statements that have a significant affinity to key assumptions in feminist standpoint theory and/or grounded theory.

A study that we analyse as implicitly guided by a grounded theory approach is Raven Lam's (2020) interview study, which sets out to explore ‘the lived experiences and perceptions’ of sugar babies and to ‘determine whether sugar babies articulate shared motivations; how they navigate sugar dating blurring or a traditional relationship and sex work’ (2020: 97). While a focus on the lived experience of sugar babies does not entail an uncritical stance per se, we categorise this work as empirically anchored, since Lam does not question or critically contextualise the participants’ accounts. Instead, she takes them at face value, stating – based on the experiential accounts – that ‘What this results in is women taking back control of their bodies and using it to push their goals’ (Lam, 2020: 101).

Scull (2020), who conducted semi-structured interviews with forty-eight sugar babies in the USA, is more explicit about her epistemological convictions and her motivation for conducting interviews, stating that semi-structured interviews enabled her ‘to ground my interpretations in the perspectives and experiences of my respondents’ (2020: 142; also see: Scull, 2022b). While not explicitly labelling her approach as such, it seems tacitly based on the epistemological premises of grounded theory, and this alignment is also evident in that she bases her own understanding of what sugar dating is on the participants’ definitions of the practice, without any critical contextualisation of these accounts. Instead, Scull's critical gaze is directed towards those who stigmatise sugar dating by ‘mistaking’ it for prostitution. While discourses around sugar dating conveyed by those not participating in the practice are critically discussed, the experience-based understandings of those who are stigmatised are not, and are instead used as evidence of others’ misconception of sugar dating (for a similar argument, see: Lam, 2020).

Nayar's (2017) study also places a significant emphasis on the experiential accounts of sugar babies, as evidenced by her rejection of the ideas that their reported feelings of empowerment within the context of sugar dating could be an example of false consciousness. While not explicitly stated, this stance can be inferred from her discussion at the beginning of the article where she highlights the exercise of power at work in the ‘dismissal of [sugar babies’] experience[s]’ and the ‘insistence that economic transactions and intimate relations cannot peacefully commingle’ (Nayar, 2017: 336).

In their quantitative survey study on sugar dating, Kimberley Kirkeby and colleagues (2022) adopt a social exchange theory perspective in analysing the prevalence of condom use among sugar babies. Contending that ‘the person who is least dependent on the relationship typically holds greater power in negotiations’ (Kirkeby et al., 2022: 732ff), they argue that the ‘sugar baby’ respondents’ reported feelings of being in power in the sugar-dating relation ‘suggest[] that subjective perceptions of power in relationships that are both intimate and transactional in nature are complex and that there is still much to learn about how interpersonal negotiations occur within them’ (Kirkeby et al., 2022: 737), without critically examining their results in light of the ideological setting in which their respondents claim this experience.

In their article on sugar daters’ experiences of sugar dating, Gunnarsson and Strid, similarly to Lam (2020), Scull (2022a, 2022b), Kirkeby and colleagues (2022) and Nayar (2017), build on the experiential accounts of sugar daters ‘to explore the full range of ways that sugar dating is understood and practiced’ (2021: 2). However, contrary to the scholars previously mentioned, Gunnarsson and Strid argue that ‘the complex non-financial motivations’ for sugar dating that sugar babies refer to must be ‘related to the precariousness that some of our participants experienced in the non-commercial “market” of intimacy, and to what other scholars have referred to as the extension of an instrumentalizing market mentality into ever greater numbers of spheres’ (2022: 17). We here discern a crucial difference between using the accounts of sugar babies to contest other accounts of sugar dating, as done most plainly by Scull (2022a), and consulting them in order to get a grasp not of what sugar dating is but how it is understood and practised, as do Gunnarsson and Strid (2021).

In one of her studies, Rocio Palomeque Recio (2022b) stands out in explicitly declaring her work to be guided by feminist standpoint theory. Apart from stating that ‘[t]he participants’ experiences were considered a legitimate locus where valid scientific knowledge was produced’ (Recio, 2022b: 550), she does not however elaborate on what such a stance entails. As we show below, it does not keep her from critically interrogating how the participants turn neoliberal ideals into practice (Recio, 2022b: 555), nor from framing sugar dating as a way of combining a discourse of emancipation with ‘attempts to recuperate (male-dominated) consumer capitalism’ (Recio, 2022b: 556). While Recio's feminist standpoint theory perspective is described as part of her research ethics, its epistemological side is absent, leaving the reader uncertain about her understanding of the relationship between ideological pressure and situated experience, and about the precise meaning of and motivation for why the experiences of the participants are considered a ‘legitimate locus’ producing ‘valid scientific knowledge’.

To summarise, in the empirically anchored studies, the experiential accounts are given an authoritative role, and are often mobilised as tools to challenge accounts of sugar dating that do not comply with the experiential accounts of interview participants. Analytical accounts that do not echo the experiences of sugar babies are considered stigmatising (Scull, 2022a) or an exercise of power (Nayar, 2017). The work of Recio (2022a, 2022b) and Gunnarsson and Strid (2021, 2022) does not fit perfectly into the category of empirically anchored accounts as they, while giving the experience of sugar daters a central role, situate them in a broader social landscape. However, like the other scholars in this category, they do grant sugar babies a privileged role while not offering any analytical tools for discussing the epistemic status of sugar daters’ experiential accounts, or for separating ideologically tainted experiences from experiences considered a legitimate basis for valid knowledge claims.

Critically contextualising approaches

Sugar-dating websites portray sugar dating as a ‘mutually beneficial relationship’ (Wade, 2009: 11) and sugar babies as determined agents who enter the relationship on an equal footing with sugar daddies. Several of the studies that we label critically contextualising scrutinise this supposed mutuality and female agency, drawing on theoretical perspectives related to contemporary heterosexuality, economic precarity and/or the transformation of the intimate sphere in neoliberal capitalism. With a specific emphasis on the issue of mutuality, Gunnarsson and Strid (2022), in their interview-based study on sugar daddies’ experiences of sugar dating, draw on feminist scholarship on patriarchal relations of domination to assert that ‘whereas the experience of mutuality is a premise for fulfilling intimate encounters, at least in the normative (hetero)sexual paradigm, this ideal of mutuality is often played out in ways undermining mutuality since heterosexuality is structured by gender inequality’ (2022: 311). While recognising the sugar daddy participants’ experiences of longing for mutuality, the authors critically analyse the men's ways of dealing with this experience as an expression of patriarchal entitlement towards women.

In a similar vein, in a study based on interviews with sugar babies and an analysis of the discursive construction of sugar dating on Seeking.com, Recio (2022a, 2022b) posits that the construction of sugar dating as a mutual arrangement can be understood as a ‘technology of heterosexual coercion’ and raises the question of how mutual sexual consent is possible under such circumstances (2022a: 46). Through this theoretical lens, sugar daddies’ expectations of authenticity, aligning with sugar dating websites’ marketing of the phenomenon, as well as sugar babies’ feelings of having to ‘consent’ to sex are critically analysed and contextualised. Yet, Recio does not approach all aspects of the women's experiential accounts in a critically contextualising fashion but also mobilises parts of their experiences to challenge the aspirations for mutuality that men express. For example, the sugar babies’ accounts of financial hardships are drawn on to contest men's illusions regarding the nature of sugar dating:
The interviews have shown that some of the women were struggling to the point of not having enough food or not being able to pay their bills. Therefore, sexual agency in sugar dating needs to be recalibrated against a background characterized by gendered, neoliberal sexual scripts, as well as financial precarity that often precedes the involvement of the Sugar Babies in transactional relationships (Recio, 2022a: 58).
Alongside analyses of sugar daters’ experiences from the point of view of heterosexual scripts and power structures, sugar-dating scholars in the critically contextualising approach have also analysed how such experiences are shaped by neoliberal economy and ideology. Nayar (2017), Recio (2022a, 2022b), Gunnarsson and Strid (2021, 2022) and Upadhyay (2021) all mobilise theoretical frameworks conceptualising intimacy in a neoliberal setting. Nayar describes sugar dating as an expression of a ‘neoliberal rationality’ and as ‘the culmination’ of the ‘commercialization of intimate life’ (2017: 341). In her study of comments made by sugar daters on the sugar-dating site SeekingArrangement's (now Seeking) blog, she analyses the economic and emotional distinctions that sugar babies make to distinguish sugar dating from both sex work and traditional romantic arrangements as an expression of the ethos of modern individualism and a neoliberal market rationality. At the same time, she draws on the testimonies of sugar babies to challenge the idea that sugar dating equals patriarchal oppression, arguing that ‘women who advocate for the empowerment in their positions as “sugar babies” reflect not a “false consciousness” about their own subjugation, but perhaps a reflexive negotiation of their options in the current social and economic climate’ (Nayar, 2017: 344). The shape that this reflexive negotiation might take is, however, not elaborated on. Hence, while critically contextualising the sugar babies’ own accounts of sugar dating, Nayar rejects the (critically contextualising) notion of sugar babies as carriers of a false conception of their situation and gives their accounts a privileged position in her analysis of the implications of sugar dating regarding female agency and emancipation.

In line with Nayar, Recio analyses sugar dating as an expression of a ‘neoliberal logic by which the individual is conceived in terms of self-entrepreneurship and self-responsibilization’ (2022b: 546) and by which femininity becomes a commodified property. In her analysis of interviews with sugar babies, Recio shows how this logic informs the way in which her respondents describe their experiences. However, she does not understand neoliberalism as merely a cultural logic but as a specific form of capitalism causing a financial hardship that influenced her participants’ decisions to enter into sugar dating. In other words, the theme of economic coercion is as central as the ideological setting, and the experiences of financial hardship are not understood as discursively constituted but as materially based. Hence, in Recio's work, the experiential accounts of sugar babies are attributed different epistemic status, meaning some are critically assessed while others are not.

Analysing how drug counsellors talk about sex with their clients, Ditte Andersen and colleagues (2021) consult Bronwyn Davies’ concepts of discourse and positioning, understanding ‘positioning as the practice of relating persons to discourses in ways that constitute their subjectivity’ (2021: 401). They use this framework to argue that women engaged in prostitution-like arrangements, such as sugar dating, are stigmatised as deviant victims by counsellors, and that their stories and experiences are not properly heard. Here, the discursive practices and experiences of drug counsellors are the target of critical investigation, while the perspectives of clients (indirectly inferred since they are not interviewed) are treated as a potential basis for challenging the counsellors’ accounts, which are understood as reflecting hegemonic discourses.

To summarise, in the critically contextualising approach, experience is not treated as something raw, untainted by context, but rather deeply saturated by it. However, while the researchers in this camp confront their participants’ experiential accounts through critical contextualisation, they selectively draw on such accounts to deconstruct discursive constructs of sugar dating by pointing to discrepancies between discourse and experience. In other words, experience is treated as valuable in the sense that it can reveal unfulfilled promises in discursive constructs, even though the experiential accounts themselves might be tainted by such constructs. Moreover, although sugar babies are often seen as influenced by a heterosexual norm of female sexuality, their negative experiences of sugar dating are used to deconstruct a male fantasy about the possibility of mutuality in a context of inequality, most notably in the work of Recio, or are used as a basis for deconstructing narratives expressed by authorities, as in the work of Andersen and Thing (2021). In this sense, also within the critically contextualising approach, there is a tendency to privilege the experiences of sugar babies as being less tainted by hegemonic discourse and more attuned with reality than the experiences of authority representatives as well as sugar daddies.

Experience in sugar-dating research

Sugar-dating research represents an intriguing mix of approaches regarding the epistemic status of experience, significantly shaping researchers’ conclusions about how to make sense of sugar dating. Yet, as we have demonstrated, these approaches are implicit rather than explicitly declared and theoretically defended. Overall, many scholars in the field seem to be guided by a tacit notion of sugar babies as more reliable producers of knowledge about sugar dating than sugar daddies, authority representatives, owners of sugar-dating websites and the public, a notion that converges with the standpoint theoretical idea of subordinate groups as epistemically privileged.

In what we refer to as empirically anchored approaches, there is a tendency to frame any critical contextualisation of the experiences of sugar babies as an exercise of power, while the possible workings of ideology in shaping such experiences are overlooked. While such loyalty to sugar babies’ experiential accounts signals crucial affinities with the standpoint theoretical notion that the experiences of marginalised groups constitute a privileged starting point for knowledge production, the lack of critical contextualisation contradicts the standpoint theoretical notion that such experiences are also reified by dominant ideologies (Kruks, 2001; Bannerji, 2020). As Mariana Teixiera states, ‘the dominant vision of the world is an effective force that shapes the world in which everyone – capitalists and proletarians, men and women – must participate’ (2020: 231).

In what we refer to as the critically contextualising approach, there is less of an uncritical embracement of sugar babies’ accounts, in that these are interpreted in light of broader economic trends and dominant ideological constructions related to neoliberalism, heterosexuality, gender and agency. Still, also in this category a tendency can be discerned of regarding sugar babies’ experiential accounts as epistemically privileged, while the experiential accounts of other actors, including sugar daddies, are more heavily scrutinised. In this sense, the contextualising approach aligns with the standpoint theoretical endeavour of privileging the experience of marginalised groups while taking their ideological conditioning into account. However, the scholars in this category are not transparent about the grounds for the epistemic differentiations made between the experiential accounts of various actors. Moreover, scholars sometimes oscillate between a critically contextualising and an empirically anchored approach in their evaluation of sugar babies’ accounts too, depending, it seems, on the content of such accounts. For example, while Recio frames aspects of her participants’ experiential accounts as a product of neoliberal ideology (2022a), other parts of their experiences are treated as a factual basis for knowledge claims about the realities of sugar dating (2022b).

Sugar-dating scholars would benefit from explicitly addressing the as yet unarticulated tension in the field between embracing and critically scrutinising sugar babies’, as well as other actors’, experiential accounts about sugar dating. Indeed, any scholar doing ethnographic work needs to deal with the tension between loyalty to and critical interrogation of participants’ accounts. However, the specific feminist political dynamics underpinning knowledge production about commercial sex (Phipps, 2016) makes this tension accentuated in sugar-dating research, tending to lead to simplified notions that critically analysing sugar babies’ accounts, or not letting them be the sole actors to decide what sugar dating is, equals not seeing their experiences as important.

As a way of mediating between what Shelley Budgeon (2021) refers to as the ‘excesses of foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemologies’ (2021: 259), which either sees experiences as ‘raw’ and unmediated or overemphasises their political and discursive determinations, we propose that engaging with resources from feminist standpoint theory and feminist phenomenology is useful. A central claim of feminist standpoint theory is that although all experiences are partly reified in present society, the specific nature of the reification of subordinate groups opens up the possibility of producing trustworthy knowledge, since they are not benefitting from their subordination and the ideology that partly enables it, engendering ‘a practical consciousness of contradiction between what [they] live and what they are told’ (Bannerji, 2020: 48).

Hence, on the one hand, this framework emphasises that the subjectivities of all people are shaped by distorting ideologies; on the other hand, it attributes a privileged position to marginalised and oppressed groups – such as women or, more specifically, sugar babies – in that they have a potential to develop a deeper social understanding of their positions based on their gaze from below. It is not being oppressed or marginalised itself that engenders reliable knowledge about the nature of the social world, but rather an active reflection and collective struggle against the oppression (Hartsock, 1988; Teixiera, 2020), including a critical analysis of one's own experience (Kruks, 2001). This is in line with Alison Phipps’ claim that ‘experience must be grounded in an understanding of structural conditions in order to produce an emancipatory commitment’ (2016: 315).

While not emphasising the element of collective struggle enabling the achievement of knowledge in the way done by standpoint theorists, a similar argument is made by Oksala (2014, 2016) in her work on feminist phenomenology. She argues that experiences are important, as the gap between personal experience and hegemonic schemas might generate a possibility for critique (Oksala, 2014). According to Oksala, ‘our everyday experiences already contain fractures and lines of fragility, it has aspects and elements that are inconsistent with its normative determinants’, which means that the ‘potential for change emerges out of these fractures, from the space of critical self-reflection and problematization’ (2016: 66). In other words, experience could – when it comes in the form of a certain discomfort with hegemonic schemas – function as a way of breaking free from dominant ideological discourses. But also, we would like to add, the lack of discomfort could have this function by urging us to ask ‘Why does this seem natural/normal to me?’. It is precisely because all experiences are tainted by ideology that our own reflections on what we experience and how to understand these experiences become central for producing valid knowledge.

Feminist standpoint theory is explicitly embraced only by one of the sugar-dating scholars examined (Recio, 2022b). We contend, though, that the basic feminist standpoint theory sensibility of the centrality of marginalised forms of experience structures a lot of the research in the field, but that the neglect of the accomplishment phase – that is the critical contextualisation and self-reflection – in situated knowledge that Bannerji points out, or the problematisation phase that Oksala discusses, results in difficulties in analysing how the experiences of sugar babies conform to or break with dominant distorting ideologies. Hence, while we argue neither against valuing experience nor against the insight that knowledge is situated and contextual – rather quite the contrary – the need for epistemological mediation stressed by feminist standpoint thinkers, as well as a sensibility in regard to how the consciousness of the oppressed might be as reified as that of the oppressors, gets lost in the insistence on the privileged knowledge of sugar babies in many contributions to the research field. For example, it is hard to find examples of sugar babies critically distancing themselves from their own experiences and putting them under critical scrutiny, in line with the epistemic process described by standpoint theorists.

While not making any a priori claim about sugar babies being victims of false consciousness, a concern of ours is that the studies that we have examined tend to presuppose that rather than demonstrate how sugar daters use their experience to produce valid knowledge. As McNay puts forth, ‘the granting of an epistemological privilege to experience […] is a contentious strategy because it pushes feminism dangerously close to an unexamined empiricism which does not scrutinize the conditions that determine how experience relates to knowledge’ (2004: 178). An upfront discussion on the relation and tensions between ideology, experience and situated knowledge in research on sugar dating and commercial sex and intimacy more broadly, supplied by feminist standpoint theory and phenomenology, would provide a welcome possibility for revitalising broader feminist epistemological debates around the concept of experience.

Such a discussion would also contribute conceptual rigour to scholarly discussions on how to make sense of sugar dating, a practice that needs careful conceptualisation due to its growing popularity and potentially harmful consequences. We see sugar dating as a phenomenon emerging at the nexus of a process of sex industry expansion driven by economic and technological developments; a neoliberal development where a contractualising market mentality increasingly permeates all domains of life, including sex and intimacy; a process of gender neoconservatism characterised by increasing nostalgia for traditional gender roles; and increased insecurities characterising the non-commercial ‘market’ of sex and love, creating a longing for contractualised forms of relationships (Gunnarsson, 2018). In a critically contextualising fashion, we argue that the practice of sugar dating is in part fuelled by how heteropatriarchal and neoliberal ideology structures subjects in contemporary society; hence, any critical examination of sugar dating is premised on scrutiny of how the subjective experiences of sugar daters, including sugar babies, are organised by this ideological setting. Meanwhile, not only out of ethical concern but also based on epistemic conviction, we affirm the importance of attributing a degree of epistemic privilege to sugar babies’ experiences for understanding not only sugar dating but heterosexuality more broadly, in so far as the patriarchal and neoliberal ordering of contemporary heterosexual dynamics is in many ways accentuated and crystallised in sugar dating. Women's, and even more so sugar babies’, structurally subordinate and conflicted position in heterosexuality engenders experiences which harbour important clues to understanding such broader dynamics. By working more transparently with theoretical assumptions of this kind and explicating how they inform interpretations, sugar-dating scholars are aptly placed to contribute to such broader understandings of contemporary heterosexuality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank colleagues who have read and commented on this article at different stages in the process, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and comments.

Funding

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

ORCID iD

Evelina Johansson Wilén

Notes

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