To Örebro University

The paper explores the mechanisms of heterosexual so called “sugardating” and the proliferation of specific sugardating online datingplatforms from a feminist perspective. Sugardating, according to these platforms, is an arrangement based on the exchange of intimacy andmaterial support, often including sex and money.

The aim of the paper is to describe, analyse and provide a critique of sugardating seen as aspecific manifestation of the changing nature of the contemporary social organisation of human sexual experience, where women areincreasingly commodified. In so doing, the paper informs about and engages with lived life and real-world events, with the aim to stimulatediscussion over controversies surrounding contemporary sexualities.

The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with men andwomen with experience of sugardating (n=23), a structured questionnaire with members of a sugardating online community (n=100), andregistered membership profile data of a sugardating online community (n=34 578).The paper argues that sugardating needs to be situated and analysed in its socio-sexual and economic contexts, rather than from anindividual perspective.

In remaining based on structural inequalities and unequally positioned men and women, sugardating perpetuatesgender and binary norms and practices of women’s sexuality as subordinate to men’s sexuality. Further, this inbuilt structural inequality doeslittle, contrary to postfeminist arguments, to transform or subvert fe/male (hetero)sexuality. Ultimately, sugardating serves to upholdprostitution and underpin the prevailing gender order. The enabling mechanisms are the continued commodification of women and theconflation of intimacy and patriarchal capitalist practices of the sex industry.