Topic: Feminism. The 'sugar' lifestyle has been described as the new 'prostitution economy'. Supplied: The Hunt. Almost , Australians are involved in 'sugar relationships', in which men pay mostly young women large sums of money for companionship and intimacy. But are these arrangements part of the prostitution economy, as has been suggested, or as one 'sugar daddy' insists, an act of kindness just like volunteering at the soup kitchen?
That relationship lasted two months after, he says. He has met all five of them, whom he has dated at different times in the last seven months, through Seeking Arrangement, a dating website that bills itself as a place for sugar daddies "successful men" to meet "sugar babies" "attractive people looking for the finer things in life". Older, male, work clients introduced him to the website. Unlike a conventional dating website, Seeking Arrangement connects men and women who agree up front to pay younger, attractive men and women for companionship, or as the website puts it: "sugar babies are an expense that must be accounted for".
The overwhelming majority of relationships are made up of older men paying to see younger women. Among the , Australian members of Seeking Arrangement, men make up about 90 per cent of the "successful" people paying for companionship, and women make up about 89 per cent of the sugar babies.
The concept of a "sugar daddy" may be nothing new β some think the term might stem from the marriage between Adolph Spreckels, an American heir to a sugar fortune, with a woman 24 years his junior.
His wife called him "sugar daddy". What is new, however, is that these types of relationships, while once something widely made fun of, have gone mainstream and global. Once upon a time, men in relationships with sugar babies were a target for ridicule, as in the silent Laurel and Hardy film Sugar Daddies, in which an oil tycoon struggles to escape a woman he accidentally married while drunk. He escapes by pretending to be his butler's wife. While the data on just how many men are engaged in these relationships is hard to pin down β other sugar daddy websites contacted by the ABC declined to provide data β testimonies from sugar daddies have been popping up with regularity over the last year in such publications as The Australian Women's Weekly, Harper's Bazaar and GQ.
