There’s more to sugar babies than meets the eye
Interest piqued by the sound of last week’s BBC documentary on “sugar babies”, I sat down with relish to watch it, hoping for fresh insight not only into the girls who are supported financially by older men, but the chaps themselves.
It was easily the worst piece of televisual reporting I’ve ever seen. The presenter, Tiffany Sweeney, an undercover sugar baby in her twenties, drawled on in the drone of someone giving a dire speech at a lifeless wedding, armed with just a single point that she drew out, over the whole hour: “Being a sugar baby is akin to doing sex work!” You don’t say, Tiff.
Like all matters to do with sex and dating, which blur together now more than ever through online portals, the sugar dating world is facilitated by websites such as Seeking, which has 20million members worldwide. These sites expressly forbid the exchange
of sex for money, but it’s hardly rocket science to work out that’s what is going on. Is cash for sex really so different from 12 Louis Vuitton bags and a luxury holiday in exchange for 10 boring dinners and some canoodling? The presenter was shocked to discover that quite often the answer is no.
As someone who, pushing 37, has noticed an upsurge in interest from very young men, the aspect of the sugar
baby phenomenon I was most curious about was the age difference itself. At the start of the programme, we got a sniff of this interesting subject: Valentina, who at 18 has seven sugar daddies, mentioned that males of her own age (are they boys? are they men?) are only interested in playing video games. Men in their forties, she suggested, are more emotionally available, more interesting. Here we see how the arrangement might not simply be transactional.
But what about the men? Do they value anything at all about the women but their age and financial needs? We don’t get to find out: their faces and voices are all blurred. We are told that sugar daddies want a “connection”. What kind? Why?
The few experiences I’ve had with younger men suggest that dating down in age can be interesting, offering a different perspective on life and showing, sometimes shockingly, how much has changed within a single generation. It’s a fun, if emotionally odd, thing to do.
But instead of offering a new angle, this documentary was moralistic, two-dimensional, utterly unsurprising – and, I couldn’t help but note, made zero mention of “sugar mamas”. What a shame.