The nearly 40 million tourists who come Las Vegas each year see it as the epicenter of debauchery. Visitors can get their fix of harmless, kinky fun that may be frowned upon elsewhere because, after all, this is what happens in Vegas. Exploring a person’s sordid, most closely held impulses is not only welcomed, but encouraged.
Nevada is the one U.S. state where prostitution is legal in select counties. A UNLV Social Health of Nevada report says brothels serve 400,000 clients every year, raking in $35-50 million in profits. While brothels can be found across the state, Las Vegas’ Clark County doesn’t permit prostitution. However, other forms of sexualized labor flourish here, as does the celebration of sexuality. Las Vegas is home to the infamous Green Door swingers club, the Erotic Heritage Museum, and the annual AVN (Adult Video News) Expo. Billboards lining the sides of I-15 promote celebrity erotic dancers holding residencies at one of the many local strip clubs. Put simply, Las Vegas and the sex industry go hand in hand. Lately, a new form of sexual labor has become a point of interest.
Sugaring is an umbrella term for negotiated relationships commonly held between an older partner, the sugar daddy or mommy, and a younger partner, the sugar baby. Sugar relationships require elaborate negotiations to create clearly defined boundaries and expectations, meaning that no two arrangements will look identical. For some, the relationship is focused on companionship devoid of physicality while, for others, the dynamic mirrors that of a traditional relationship, including consensual sex. Babies are compensated monetarily or with gifts, such as high-end merchandise or luxurious vacations. Where do sugar babies fit into the ever-evolving world of sex work in Las Vegas?
“It’s a lot better and a lot worse than people think,” sugar baby Daisy (a pseudonym used to protect her identity) explains.
Sugaring is in a gray area between traditional dating and sex work. Caught somewhere on this continuum, sugar babies navigate the tricky terrain of emotional connection, financial compensation, and legal labor. As fascinating as it is controversial, sugaring abounds in the city of commercialized sexuality.
AMONG THE MOST challenging aspects of starting a sugar relationship, according to Hannah, a sugar baby of almost 10 years, is meeting someone to truly connect with. After a month of back-and-forth messaging, Hannah and I speak for the first time in a virtual meeting. Dried flowers and art prints hang delicately on her apartment walls. Short blond hair frames her unblemished face. Talking fast, Hannah takes small puffs from a lime green vape as she shares her vernacular for arrangements: “I call them ‘sugar dads’ because I think it’s funnier. It makes them upset because ‘sugar daddy’ is a sexy thing. But if you’re not my ‘daddy,’ that’s creepy.”
Hannah’s most recent arrangement was with a frequent work visitor from overseas, who sent her $4,000 at the start of every month. Their seven-month relationship ended suddenly when Hannah’s partner revealed his wife had become fatally ill. “He decided it was time to stop being a shitty husband,” she explains, tucking her hands into the sleeves of an oversized black sweater. “He and I genuinely liked each other. We’d talk every single day on the phone. I don’t know if he was telling me the truth the entire time, because if you’re married and talking to me, I don’t know how to trust you.”
Despite the trust barrier, Hannah found as much enjoyment in the arrangement as her partner. Her eyes dart wildly as she tells the story, then settle as she concludes, “It was hard, because I liked him a lot. It broke my heart honestly. But it’s not my business to be crying over somebody’s husband.” Hannah offers that she’s not an intentional homewrecker. Often, she doesn’t find out a sugar daddy is married until the end of an arrangement.
Hannah’s first, and longest standing, sugar relationship was with an unmarried “prominent man” in Arizona, who feared being seen with a 21-year-old. In the near decade since first meeting, their relationship has been mostly platonic. This spring, Hannah says, he took her on a trip to Cabo strictly as friends, no strings attached. “We didn’t even hold hands or anything,” she tells me, “but he still gave me $1,000 to go on an all-expense-paid trip to a $12 million home and hang out on a 70-foot yacht. Some of it is fun and glamorous like that … but it’s not how people try to make it out in movies.”
THE BIGGEST PLATFORM for sugar dating is Seeking.com (formerly SeekingArrangement). The site boasts over 40 million users across more than 100 countries with the goal of “helping singles find relationships based on open communication.” Nowhere do the terms “sugaring” or “arrangement” appear on the site. Brandon Wade, Seeking’s founder and former long-time CEO, said in a 2015 interview with CNN that he created Seeking and its sister sites “to offer the financial incentive to give myself, and others like me, a fighting chance” in the world of dating. He added, “Love is a concept invented by poor people.” In his eyes, Seeking offers a release from possessive love or unmet expectations.
Hannah says she signed up for free as a student. The site used to offer free premium subscriptions to anyone with an active, college-associated student email address. Today, anyone creating an account as a sugar baby gets a free profile. Sugar mommies or daddies can create an account for free but must pay a minimum $100 subscription fee to send or receive messages.
Seeking’s consistent popularity may be explained, in part, by the increase of dialogue about sugaring on social media. A sugar dating subreddit page, r/sugarlifestyleforum, has nearly 200,000 active members swapping advice on topics ranging from creating a well-rounded Seeking account to managing different arrangements. On apps such as YouTube and TikTok, a quick search of “sugar baby” returns thousands of videos offering advice on how to secure a sugar parent. Babies discuss the pros and cons of sugaring, where to find a potential partner, and how to maintain physical safety. Some babies even promote subscription mentorship services for those new to the lifestyle — one woman on TikTok, @_mvyvm, charges $650 a month for her expertise.
A study of social media sites as hubs for sugar dating advice in the journal Sexuality & Culture found that “sugaring occupies an intricate but open culture in which sugar babies communicate and exchange knowledge to help sugar sisters succeed.” The researchers analyzed a variety of user posts to discover which words or phrases were used most frequently when discussing sugar relationships. One of the most common terms to appear on online forums? Autonomy. The concern for independence factors into allowance negotiations, partner comfort, and boundary-setting.
As online discussions of sugaring have proliferated, particularly following COVID-related income losses, the topic has been met with backlash. Lisa Thompson, vice president of research for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, asked, in a Sierra Nevada Ally article, “Is that really the best America can offer its young women, is (to) prostitute your way through college?” It’s unsurprising, then, that sugar babies build their own online communities, where they can share their experiences free of judgment and shame.
IT TOOK ME less than 10 minutes to create a Seeking account, and under 24 hours for my profile to be verified. Although I clearly stated I was a journalist looking for people to interview, messages from sugar daddies flooded my inbox immediately. “Hey beautiful, I’d love to chat sometime.” “I’m a gentleman looking for a mutually beneficial relationship, and you caught my eye.” “Here’s my number, text me so we can talk.”
Profiles include an exhaustive list of details regarding income, career field, height, weight, ethnicity, lifestyle, marital status, and number of children. Users compose paragraphs to fill the “About Me” and “Seeking” sections detailing personality type, preferences, and type of arrangement sought. The sheer volume of people seeking relationships — a sea of crisp pastel polo shirts and half-blurred selfies taken on docked yachts — seemed impossibly vast.
One evening, a message arrived in my inbox. “Hey, are you still looking for people to interview?” This is how I met Daisy.
DAISY'S ACCOUNT WAS minimalistic and charming. Her profile photo showed a short brown bob, wavy and disheveled in a way that seemed intentional. She wore a brown velvet coat with thick fur trim over a heart-patterned tank top, and at the photo’s focus were doe eyes framed with messy eyeliner. Daisy uses a fake name (which we’re using here), both to play a character and to maintain safety. She wrote that she was a “sweet girl,” educated but always looking to learn more about the world. Her “seeking” section stated that she was open to different types of arrangements, as long as they were healthy, and communication was open. We emailed back and forth, then set up a time to talk virtually.
Daisy is warm, confident, and unrehearsed when we first meet. When I ask what compelled her to reach out, she says that people don’t understand sugaring. “There’s so much of a stigma surrounding sex work in general,” she tells me, adding that there’s a lot of unnecessary shame clouding sugaring. Both Daisy and Hannah consider it a form of sex work, though they acknowledge that each baby will form their own definition.
Daisy’s story is like that of many who undertake sugar relationships. Originally from Minnesota, she wanted a break from the cold weather, and the sunny Southwest offered a welcomed change of pace. She has a favorable view of Las Vegas in her first year here, though she admits, with a sigh, “It’s been hard to get a job.” Before moving here, Daisy bartended at a Minneapolis dive bar. Her goal had been to find something similar in Las Vegas — a smoky, off-Strip hole-in-the-wall, where she could serve locals and find stability to build a new life with her fiancé. She got all her Nevada certifications, applied to dozens of jobs, and received zero job offers. Against her fiancé’s wishes, Daisy decided to start sugaring again.
Her first sugar arrangement had been in her hometown when she was 19, when life looked different to her. “I was struggling with drug use and alcoholism,” she says. “I was so young that I didn’t even understand my own boundaries.” Now 25, she’s more comfortable firmly setting expectations with sugar daddies. “If you don’t respect me as a human being, and you’re not willing to sit down and have a conversation with me, I have no interest in meeting you,” she says. Like most sugar babies, Daisy has a safety protocol for vetting potential partners. It begins with hours of searching through the site before finding someone that looks legit. She’ll chat on Seeking before moving to text, then a phone call, and eventually meeting in a public space.
Still, she found that the search for legitimate arrangements had changed significantly since her previous experience. In Minnesota, Daisy would occasionally find a long-term relationship. The scene in Las Vegas is a different story. “The ratio is different out here. I have to message like 20 guys to get one response,” she says. I ask if the arrangements themselves differ as well. “Here, it’s all tourists … The way tourists treat the people who live here …” She furrows her brow before resuming, “I feel like the people who live here are part of the novelty (for sugar parents). It’s all entertainment for them.”
Daisy says the sugar parents she meets on Seeking are typically 40-60 years old, white, male, and middle class. They’re white-collar businessmen, who want the company of a beautiful woman for a weekend visit. “Most of the guys don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing. They don’t wanna be seen with a younger woman,” she says, adding that some take the What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas motto as fact.
LAS VEGAS IS a “city of contradictions,” says Lynn Comella, department chair of UNLV’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program and author of numerous texts on the adult entertainment industry. The city’s marketing advertises it as an adult playground, yet Comella describes it as “sexually conservative” in residents’ attitudes toward sex itself. She also sees an “uneven relationship” between the value placed on sexualized labor for the economy versus the value placed on those who work in the field.
Similar disconnects can be seen in the dialogue surrounding sugaring. Some insist one party, if not both, are being exploited — young women for their beauty and naïveté, and older folks for their loneliness and money. Hannah says, “Both of us could say that we’re being used.” But sugar babies receive the most criticism, reflected in unflattering or even degrading stereotypes of them. Conversely, some argue that such relationships empower babies by giving them financial freedom. In this view, they benefit from systems that have historically limited women’s opportunity.
Hannah takes issue with characterizations that encourage young people to explore sugaring. “I think there are a lot of girls who try to glamorize it for clout,” she says. When she catches social media creators being dishonest about sugaring, making up situations to imply anyone can and should do it, she calls them out for stretching the truth. Many young people, particularly young women, she says, lack the understanding of what the work truly looks like.
Sugar daddies can be con artists as well, Hannah notes. She describes some men in sugar relationships as, “Splenda daddies” — not quite as well off as they claim. What’s more, she says, they can be the most vocal online, contributing to the animosity toward sugar babies.
The material basis of the relationship explains an opinion I kept running into: that sugaring is a better alternative to traditional dating. In this view, all relationships are transactional; but in sugaring, every expectation has been addressed and negotiated, leading to a more honest exchange. One sugar daddy on the Reddit sugar lifestyle forum likened it to “having a fast pass at a theme park.” Hannah agrees: “I feel like with regular dating, there’s a game you kind of have to play. ‘No, thank you, I’m bored, this sucks. And you’re not paying my bills?’ Ew.” Labeling sugar dating a “lifestyle” further removes it from the messy emotional investment of dating, turning it into a sort of branded experience.
Daisy thinks these are just ways for people in the industry to protect themselves. “Not only legally, but I think they also want to believe that,” she says. “I think that sugaring is a job.”
In this job, both employer and employee bear risk. In October, local news outlets reported the story of a twenty-something sugar baby robbing her fifty-something sugar daddy of $50,000 from his hotel room safe. The two had gone to see U2 at Sphere, when the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom and never returned. Police took her into custody two days later.
Hannah says that when she warned one of her sugar dads about leaving his phone, wallet, and keys on the counter, he told her he had already been robbed by a baby. Even when the worst-case scenario does occur for a sugar daddy, she says, it may not deter them from sugaring. The worst-case scenario for sugar babies, however, is much darker.
AN HOUR BEFORE Daisy and I are set to meet at a downtown cafe, I receive a text. “I had a really hard night, can we call instead?” I ask if she’d like to reschedule, and she insists we talk that day. “It’ll be good for you to see the reality of the job,” she says.
Later that afternoon, Daisy appears on my laptop screen wearing a plain black shirt, no makeup, and her dark hair pulled back. She looks away from the camera as I ask what happened.
“This is the first time I had met him,” she says. “He didn’t seem like the sugar daddy type and said he doesn’t do this a lot.” Between telling the story, Daisy keeps assuring me that she’s okay. Then, she reveals something painful: “I’m an addict. Some things got complicated … I ended up in a car with some random dude that beat me up pretty bad.” She lifts an arm to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear, and I see fresh bruises on her forearm.
I almost ask whether Daisy called the police to report her attack, but I catch myself. What would she say? Even if police did apprehend her attacker, Daisy herself could face charges for prostitution. Victims in these situations typically fear being dismissed, disbelieved, or even blamed.
One option sugar babies have for recourse is to report an attacker’s account on the site where they met. But sites such as Seeking — despite the obvious intention to create sugaring platforms — avoid legal issues by claiming that engaging in sexual activity breaks the user terms of service. Even if the site were to remove a violent person’s account, what’s to stop them from creating another (and another, and another)?
Daisy’s experience reflects the truth about autonomy: Sugar babies may not have as much control over relationships as they believe. In a Psychology Today article, “Why Sugar-Daddy Relationships Are on the Rise,” Aaron Ben-Zeév writes, “Sugar babies are in enticing circumstances where, once they take the first step on the risky slippery slope, they often slide all the way down the hill.” Because the line between sugaring and prostitution is a fine one to walk, Ben-Zeév says, “the involved coercion” between a sugar baby and sugar parents is less obvious than in a John/prostitute dynamic, and babies are “less likely to identify its risks.”
I ask Daisy if her assault makes her reconsider sugaring. “I don’t do this unless I need it,” she says. “I don’t have an income. That’s the scariest part. I have to follow through on things because I need the money. I never reconsider because to me, it’s a safety net.”
I ask if she considers sugaring a form of prostitution. “I’m very open with myself in the fact that I am doing sex work, and that’s fine,” Daisy says. “But I think a lot of people who do the ‘sugar lifestyle,’ people who are having sex for money, don’t consider themselves prostitutes. They are ashamed and want to be the exception.”
She also says she’s happy to see sex work being recognized as an authentic form of labor, but she worries about the image young people see on social media, which is vastly different from reality. “Sugaring is dangerous,” she says, “and it’s traumatizing.”
Does it have to be this way? The work of Comella and other researchers suggests Las Vegas’ identity as a site of sexual entertainment could position it to destigmatize sex workers by highlighting their role in the city’s economic growth. Public officials could establish policies protecting those facing coercion or violence, and advocates could lead national discussions about the professionalization of sex work, worker safety, and work conditions. Or, the Las Vegas sugar baby could be another addition to the list of workers who uphold the service that the city has gained a reputation for, yet whom it prefers to keep hidden.
There are many kinds of sugar relationships, including healthy ones. But the dark underbelly is there, for those who choose to exploit it.