soc449blog

[soc449blog]

Sugar Babies, Why Don’t They Claim the Suga ?!

My blog is about sex work, specifically Sugar Babies. Sugar babies are women or men, but primarily women, who have sexual relations with older men for money. Being a sugar baby has various criterias to it and is not always sexual, it just depends on the agreement that the client and the consumer come to. 

Sex work itself has a long history and various jobs and roles that fall under the umbrella. Sex work is criminalized in a majority of places. In our Teacher Assistant (TA) Victoria’s lecture titled Sex Work 101 she talks about how many sex workers do not have access to financial services. Victoria says “banks are well known for discriminating against sex workers and will arbitrarily shut down accounts, services like Paypal ban the sale of anything sexual on the platform, even sex toys and crypto currencies were thought to be a saving grace for sex workers, but over time crypto wallets have also started excluding sex workers” (Victoria 2023). This is one reason why sugar babies are technically considered sex workers, many do not claim this title.  They are excluded from the working class community in many different ways and financially is the biggest one. Sugar Babies tend to have large sums of money coming in often consistently and if they are not able to obtain secure financial services then how are they supposed to keep their money secure ? While this is a main concern for me, many people do not think being a Sugar Baby is a legitimate form of work. This is supposed to be the land of the free where one is able to do what they want with their body whether for money or not yet folks are being discriminated against. 

A primary question that comes up when discussing this topic is “does sex work reinforce the modern heterosexual orthodoxy?” I say that even though there aren’t many male strippers or sugar babies out there, because they definitely do exist, when you think sex work you think women. This idea is reinforced strongly by these two positions of sex work. With these jobs most of the time it is younger women using their bodies and sexuality as a way to earn money from usually older men. This is further backed up by the Mann Act of 1910 which “criminalizes the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose” (Victoria 2023). This law literally states that it is for women which is a direct reflection of my point. With reference to our lovely guest speaker, Katerina spoke about how the mens and womens brothels in Prague are separated and not mixed. Men come into the women's brothels and the other brothels are male and for gay men. Whether or not there may be brothels for straight men to work where women can indulge she did not mention. With these companies being split in this way it perpetuates the heterosexual society we live in because when asked if women often come into these brothels to have sex with other women I was told no. These brothels seem to be strictly heterosexual, not by anyone's ill intent, but by the nature of the society around them. 

Gale Hawkes in her book titled A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality says  “This new conceptualization of behavior can be read as one index of the emergence of the notion of the “social individual” as we understand and experience it in the Modern era” (Hawkes pg 19). This chapter is about the concept of civilite which in short, means “manners”. In this time manners determined your place in the social hierarchy and a civilite encourages your self worth not based on tradition, but based on self control and managing your own individual behavior. Bodily functions such as sex, are seen as less civilized in this time which in correlation means you aren’t well mannered. The outcome of all of this increased the lines between public/private and mind/body, placing sex and other bodily functions at the bottom of the hierarchy, meaning you are not considered less than/lower class for partaking in such actions. With all of this being said, this shows Hawkes standpoint on sex workers such as Sugar Babies. By partaking in this line of work, you are not upholding your self worth and are making yourself seem less than for not living up to the respectable standards and social norms of society.