Sex & Sexism: How Indian Women in Sugar Dating Negotiate Male Gaze & Stereotypes

“He took the diamonds back,” Chandini told me, “The last time I visited him, he told me to give them to him so he could keep them safe while we were out and about, but then he just “forgot to return them” and broke up with me.”She pulled out a box of cigarettes from the Louis Vuitton handbag that lay on the floor of her plush, glitter-themed apartment in Delhi and lit one using the miniature blowtorch on her mantle.“I’ll get him back, at least for six months so I can sort out my financial situation,” she said, flicking ash into a pink crystal bowl, “But I don’t think I will ever get those diamonds back, you know? It’s such a shame losing those, vital to my financial security.”Chandini, 36, is a sugar baby, though she prefers the term “professional girlfriend”. For the past year, she has been seeing a wealthy businessman in Chennai. She visits him each month, does everything a girlfriend would do, they speak every day, he dotes on her and buys her everything she needs.Transactional relationships, or 'sugar dating', are increasing in popularity all over the world. It refers to a phenomenon wherein relationships between the two parties are codified around what they can both offer to one another — usually financial security on the part of the man and an unspoken sexual agreement on part of the woman.According to SeekingArrangements, the premier dating app for transactional relationships, India, at 3,38,000, has the maximum number of sugar daddies in Asia. The founder of the app, Brandon Wade, is a somewhat notorious man who insists that every relationship in the world is transactional, at least in his version of things, that transaction is outright and benefits both parties. He touts the honesty of these arrangements as to why they are superior to traditional relationships and augurs that this enables women, an upward mobility, in terms of steady incomes, agency, and professional contacts. This is what makes these arrangements superior to traditional sex work. However, on the app, the men seem to resent this honesty.“These women are not interested in anything but the money,” Sid1345 wrote to me in my Direct Messages on the application, “Even before you have had any other discussion, they want to talk about allowances and wishlists. We will give, but this aggressive and open discussion of money is a turn-off. It’s a relationship first, now it has just become a meat market.”'Swipe Right' For Trouble: How Six Foreigners Duped Indian Women on Dating AppsChandini told me this attitude towards money is common, the men do not want to feel like the women are only interested in them for the money and they expect the upkeep of the covenant of silence around it. There is an innocence they wish to project onto the women, a modern rendition of needing to feel like you are rescuing the girl from a life of sexual debasement. The men don’t wish to discuss the money or they want to get it out of the way as soon as possible. Sagar, the man who is Chandini’s sugar-daddy, insists that she avoid bringing up the transactional elements of their relationship as much as possible because it hurts him.“In our case, there is no monthly payment as such,” she explained to me, “He pays for all my expenses directly, buys all my groceries, and sends me many presents, but he never gives me cash directly. This form of monetary control, sometimes so reminiscent of marriage in India, is not uncommon in the industry. The expectation on part of the men that the women put on the illusion of a “real” relationship is extremely high, and in that, they reserve the right to dictate the behaviours that are expected in exchange for the provisions they make. Often, the expectations are of beauty, a well-maintained figure, soft-heartedness, arm candy, glorious, overstated femininity, a certain level of education, and fluency in English and class.Unspoken penalties are imposed upon the women when they fail to meet expectations, for instance, when Chandini was unable to visit one month, Sagar suddenly began to face business losses which caused him to buy fewer things for her. Once she visited again, the losses seemed to disappear. Money is at the heart of the power dynamic but the silence around it is an expectation dressed up as class. Madhu, 22, a sugar baby and professional dominatrix told me about her experiences with men and money in the marketplace.“Rich men will not go for you if you seem desperate for money,” she explained to me, “You have to create a persona, on Instagram especially, they should see you with designer labels, speaking English and living a very glamorous life. If you seem desperate for them, they’ll think you are just a gold digger or a prostitute. They shouldn’t think that you need their money.”The terms 'sex work' and 'prostitution' are looked down upon within the ranks of sugar babies. Instead, most women who engage within these demographics, view this form of employment as empowerment for themselves and sex work as something completely different, something inherently demeaning. There is a legal precedent for sugar dating to not be considered prostitution since the latter as defined in the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act of 1958, necessitates an element of exploitation for an act of transactional sex to be considered unlawful, and even then the law rarely targets the women.“The purpose of the law is to safeguard women from exploitation,” explained Sumit Chander, a lawyer who practises in the Supreme Court and runs a law firm in Delhi, “The question of protection arises in traditional prostitution wherein you have a brothel and more often than not, the women engaged in this work are doing it against their will and for the commercial benefit of someone else. The law has not kept up with the changes in the industry but in implementation, it has also abandoned those it was meant to protect. On ground, prostitutes are not protected, they are harassed and the possibility of empowered prostitution may not even exist.”The legality of sugar dating as it exists today, primarily in the upper echelons of English-speaking, urban society, is ambiguous. While there is little precedent that the women will be persecuted, there is little recourse available to them should something untoward happen as well. While the Supreme Court ruled in May 2022 that sex work is a profession and entitled to the criminal protections extended to any professional under the law, the fact that the women in the sugar industry seek to distance themselves from profession, has created a chasm of distance between traditional sex work and transactional relationships, effectively eradicating the possibility of the expansion of the term or a united, more intersectional front. It also leaves the sugar babies themselves unprotected by the law because they refuse to align themselves with sex work, and even if they did, the lack of exploitation may mean they do not qualify. “I am not a sex worker,” Madhu explained to me, “I have a choice, sex workers have to go with anyone, I choose my clients carefully depending on my preference, I know the value of my time and I am a goddess that they are lucky to even touch. Prostitutes are those women who lie around in brothels, they don’t even know who is coming to use them and all, that’s not me, I am a professional.”Unlike Chandini, Madhu doesn’t come from a particularly privileged, educated, or even middle-class background. She was born to conservative parents who were struggling financially and she resolved, at a very young age, that she would break the cycle of poverty and transcend class. She taught herself to speak in English, took grooming classes, and emancipated herself from her family as soon as she was able to do so.“With an office job, I would never be able to do this, I wouldn’t be able to be so free,” Madhu explained to me, “At my age, I could never have made this much money any other way nor could I have this lifestyle. I travel to luxury hotels and I never have to wake up early. After this, I can never go back to an office job.”This is a sentiment echoed by the men who have these relationships as well, but it comes off as more accusatory. Manpreet, 41, is a businessman from Pune who has a rotation of sugar babies whom he dates for a period of six months to a year at a time.“These girls don’t want to work,” he wrote to me, “Basically, they want the best of both worlds, they want the glamour of having a high-paying job without the effort of doing the job, they want to do sex work but they want to pretend there’s some grey area here because they are influenced by the West but ultimately, they also know, they cannot keep this up forever, so the smart ones get a degree and the smarter ones look for a husband.”On the face of it, it does seem that this is an industry of transience, but most women have different and concrete goals for their time here. For Chandini, the goal is to build up as much wealth as possible from this relationship, she keeps a careful account of the value of the products, designer handbags, jewellery, and presents she receives.She barely uses them because she knows someday she will sell these products to build a nest egg for herself. This is why the diamonds were so important. On his part, Sagar seems aware of his role as an asset-builder in this relationship and adept at using that position to elicit desirable behaviour while still pretending that money is too distasteful a subject to warrant discussion. Even when he gifted her the diamonds, he kept the certificates of authenticity, Chandini had the stones independently evaluated, but was unable to sell them because he insisted she wears them at all times for his pleasure.“He probably wanted me to wear them to make sure I don’t sell them,” she said of the stones, “I cannot believe I was outsmarted by this man, I feel like a fool, he probably passes the same diamonds from woman-to-woman. Still, I have to try to get them back, at my age finding a second guy like him is very unlikely.”Age does seem like a relevant factor in the industry. While the men profess to preferring younger women because they have fewer entanglements, easier demands, and their entire lives ahead of them, the women admit to lying about their ages in worry that their earnings will be impacted as they get older.Madhu told me, “That’s why I insist on payments in cash and not presents, shoes are good, but I need a long-term plan, I want to make investments and buy real estate so that my future is secure. In the end, I also want to get married and have a stress-free life, and I am always looking for one of these men to be that one guy who can be part of my retirement plan.”It is hard to ignore the traditional view of freedom, beauty, women’s roles in society, and sexist stereotypes that permeate the industry. Despite the notion of empowerment many women seek to espouse, they often find themselves governing their behaviour according to the taste of men who finance them. They explain that it’s important to seem polished but not intelligent, men feel safer with emotional women. It is important to pretend that they are in monogamous relationships with these men, a condition almost ubiquitous in the arrangements. It is important to dress in a feminine manner, take care of your hair and nails, and put on an act of girlish simplicity because that is what men want. Even when they pay you and even if they are in the more legally compromised position, they wish to declaw you just enough to not have to fear you. On the one hand, the women say that these conditions they uphold, like any other job, are just the skills that make them better at it than other people, and truthfully so, but the social implications of their jobs and the general moral narrative around sex work do seem to impact the self-worth and mental health of the women involved.“Look, the unspoken truth is that sometimes I feel really bad that I have multiple advanced degrees but still, this is what I do for money,” Chandini told me, “When I hear other women doing it, I feel supportive, but when I think of myself doing it, I find it sickening. I know we are not technically sex workers, but aren’t we, in a way? And if we are, is it really so bad?”"“Are you judging me?” She asked, giggling through her teeth as I shook my head, “I am sure you are wondering why this woman who is so educated is running after diamonds a man gave to her.”I'm not judging her; it's clear that until such a time when financial entrapment of women is dismantled systemically, diamonds will have to remain a girl’s best friend.Note: All names with the exception of Sumit Chander have been changed upon request.(Aarushi Ahluwalia is an author, journalist and columnist currently based in New Delhi, India. Her debut novel "13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman" was published in 2022 by Notion Press. She has worked in the field of women's rights, policy and issues for a decade. She was a recipient of the Orange Flower Awards in 2023. She tweets @the_pamphleteer.This is a personal blog, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Sex & Sexism: How Indian Women in Sugar Dating Negotiate Male Gaze & Stereotypes

Sugar dating often touted as 'empowered prostitution', leaves women legally unprotected, exploited even.

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