Platformed Sugar Dating: Gender, Class, and Boundaries in the Digital Intimacy Economy
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Many studies have examined how American media and technology firms structure romantic and sexual intimacy. Amid changing U.S. legislation aimed at restricting online sexual expression, this dissertation examines the ways popular discourses, digital platforms, and platform users are presently shaping sugar dating. People who sugar date form relationships that become ‘mutually beneficial’ based on negotiated exchanges of companionship and financial or material benefits. Because the practice has been contentiously positioned along a continuum between mainstream dating and commercial sex work, sugar dating is an especially compelling site to explore how the digital intimacy economy is reconfiguring the boundaries of economic and social relationships. Across three qualitative projects, I examine the current gendered and regulatory dimensions of platformed sugar dating. The first study shows how online dating companies embody a “dual” status as both intimate and digital platform intermediaries. I argue that certain companies are adapting to the fragilities of online sex work by simultaneously courting sugar daters and denying their involvement in sugar dating. The second study analyzes media portrayals of women who sugar date in relation to women’s embodied experiences. Drawing on 60 popular press articles about sugar dating and interviews with 13 women who have sugar dated, I find that women sugar daters both confirm and challenge media narratives about their physical appearances and sexual agency. The third study explores how people who use online dating services to participate in sugar dating navigate risk and risk management. Based on 21 interviews with sugar daters and a six-month observation of the r/sugarlifestyleforum Reddit community, I argue that online sugar dating produces distinct physical, reputational, psychological, and economic risks for women and men. My holistic analysis of how platforms, press coverage, and participants engage with sugar dating highlights how the practice is at once made hyper visible by mainstream popular discourse and vulnerable by evolving moderation measures across the platform ecosystem. My findings suggest that this paradox leads people to pursue online sugar dating in increasingly covert ways, which intensifies their exposure to harm. I explore this argument with particular attention to the ways that dominant institutions reinscribe power dynamics through sex. I conclude by considering the role sugar dating plays in illuminating how laws, tech policies, and the present spread of cultural conservatism are cause for concern about future censorship aimed at marginalized romantic and sexual practices.