Sex on Sunday: Dinner dates, money dating, shopping money and sex

While so many people are upset about the idea of commercial sex or the sex industry or prostitution, other forms of sex-money exchanges largely escape condemnation. I am interested in where people draw the line between commercial and non-commercial sex in specific contexts, such as transactional sex amongst fish-sellers and the famous sign asking Are you a prostitute? in Shanghai.

Prostitution, Gold-digging, or Just a Dinner Date? How Chimps Get Paid for Sex, at Psychology Today

Women in particular look forward to having a meal at a nice restaurant. Typically, though not always, the male of the species will pay the bill, which he may gladly do in the hope of currying favor with the female. Rarely, if ever, do couples on dinner dates appreciate the evolutionary psychology behind this ubiquitous activity. Taking a step back, it is clear that eating is simply a biological function and sharing food together need not intrinsically be romantic, and yet dinner is often associated with romance. Why?

Money Dating, at seeking arrangement.com

Money singles take an ultra pragmatic approach to the online dating game. Most money daters are interested in setting up mutually beneficial relationships, with clearly defined ground rules. In fact, many money daters decide the desired length of their relationship before it begins.

  • Sugar Daddy: A wealthy, usually older man who gives expensive gifts to a young person in return for intimacy or companionship.
  • Sugar Mommy: A wealthy, usually older woman who gives expensive gifts to a young person in return for intimacy or companionship.
  • Sugar Baby: A young person who gives intimacy or companionship to an older man or woman in exchange for expensive gifts.

Top 4 Most Beneficial Sugar Daddy Arrangements, by Andrea Rodgers

Mentorship . . . The value of making connections and learning from first-hand experience can be worth more than gold to women looking for professional advancement… “give a girl a fish and you have fed her for a day, teach her how to fish and you have fed her for a lifetime.”

Arm Candy . . . Many sugar daddies simply enjoy the pleasure of spoiling a woman, especially gorgeous, young and appreciative ones. This sugar daddy takes his. . .

Girls sell sex in Hong Kong to earn shopping money, at CNN.com/asia

‘We skipped the dinner part and went straight to the guest house for sex. Actually, I was a bit scared, but I knew this was the only way I could get money. This customer wasn’t bad, though. We just had sex, he paid, and then he left’. . . a growing social phenomenon among teens in Hong Kong called compensated dating, a practice in which a young woman agrees to go on a date with a man for a fee. More often than not, the date involves sex.

Earlier blog posts on compensated or subsidised dating at Japan’s enjo kosai and Poland’s piggies and mall girls.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

5 thoughts on “Sex on Sunday: Dinner dates, money dating, shopping money and sex

  1. Pingback: Twitter Trackbacks for Sugar | Gold-digging | Dating | Money | Prostitution | Border Thinking on Migration, Trafficking and Commercial Sex [lauraagustin.com] on Topsy.com

  2. Michelle

    What an interesting blog post and great links. I’m fascinated by sexual behaviors and how sex fits into survival and personal advancement. I’m more intrigued by what people do than by labels but I do find it interesting the terms they use to describe their activities. There are a lot of people that have sex with a transactional element who do not consider themselves commercial sex workers and who would be offended by the term.

    Reply
  3. Erica

    This article drops off. A great introduction gets me interested but its suddenly over by the middle of the article? Wheres the conclusion? The author brings up a great question that deserves to be asked “where is the line?”, but fails to take the reader anywhere past that. Its as disappointing as the end of “The Blaire witch”. Wheres the rest of the article???

    Reply
  4. Otro Baboso

    I remember a few years ago reading about Japanese teenage girls having sex to earn money for shopping. As in Hong Kong, the girls came from all socio-economic classes. I also remember reading that following WW II, there was a sudden increase in French housewives working in brothels in order to buy consumer goods like washing machines. The French women obviously knew that they were engaging in prostitution, but their behavior was otherwise identical to the Hong Kong and Japanese teenagers.

    There are men who hang around businesses that hire young women, expect them to present a good appearance (i.e. spend money on clothes and makeup), and don’t pay them much. If a woman has spent unwisely and can’t make rent, one of the men will offer to relieve her of financial embarrassment in exchange for consideration. Obviously the women who accept these offers don’t consider themselves prostitutes.

    You’ve already linked to this, but here it is again:
    http://www.alternet.org/story/13648/?page=entire
    Woman having sex with multiple men in order to create confusion about who fathered their children. It’s not a neatly defined transaction, but it is sex with the expectation of future compensation in the form of gifts of food for children.

    I’ve read that many Korean prostitutes have one or two regular customers who get involved in the prostitute’s family life and provide money to pay for children’s schooling and other family expenses. This money isn’t paying for sex and the customer is not the father of the children, but the customer is acting exactly like the men described in the alternet link. Seemingly it’s not always necessary to fool men about fatherhood in order to get them to support your children. An ongoing sexual relationship often seems to be enough.

    Another example that doesn’t involve a single transaction are the women who advertise for “generous” boyfriends. There’s no explicit exchange of money for sex, but there isn’t going to be a relationship if the man isn’t “generous”.

    Further out on the ambiguity scale are the women who announce to potential boyfriends that they are “high maintenance” and intend to stay that way.

    BTW, I’m not clever enough to have observed all this on my own. A friend who is an ex-prostitute pointed out to me various ways in which women exchange sex for goods, services, and even money without being labeled as prostitutes. I was blind to it until she educated me.

    Continuing with the confusion: There are Muslim societies in which any woman who has sex outside of marriage is a prostitute. It’s not the exchange of sex for money that makes a woman a prostitute, it’s the lack of a marriage contract. So a woman can enter into a temporary marriage contract that may last for only a couple of months, and for which she is paid, without being a prostitute. But should she have uncompensated sex with a man she loves but isn’t married to, she is a prostitute. She may not be a prostitute under formal law, but her relatives will consider her a prostitute and may even kill her for it.

    And finally, it’s legal to make porn in California because case law establishes that paying someone to have sex with someone other than the person making the payment is not prostitution. If a producer pays two actors to have sex with each other in front of a video camera, it isn’t prostitution. However, it is prostitution if the producer joins in. So what about the genre of porn video in which the director is both the star performer and the person who disburses the money?

    Another interesting question is the definition of pimp. Under many state laws in the US, a boyfriend who stays home and watches the kids while the woman earns the household income as a prostitute is a pimp, and can be put in prison. So what about the guy who goes on a date with a woman who has earned money for sex, and he’s broke and she buys dinner? Furthermore, if a prostitute’s live in boyfriend or husband is legally a pimp, why isn’t Bernard Madoff’s wife a pimp, since she also was supported by the proceeds of crime? I’m not saying she should be labeled a pimp, I’m just pointing out the rather arbitrary way in which pimp is defined.

    Reply
  5. laura agustin Post author

    erica, sex on sunday provides links to a few interesting places off my site – it is sort of my rest day. if you look around on my pages and posts you will find a wealth of developed ideas.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.