“Sugar babies” are making a comeback, from Lana Del Rey’s music and image, to Anna Nicole Smith’s infamous 90-year-old billionaire boyfriend.
Shaming a woman for a decision she makes with her own body is never OK. But I can’t help but wonder — are the “sugar babies” hurting my gender? Or is it just the women who disapprove of them?
A recent talk show segment on “sugar babies” made me uncomfortable. But what made me uncomfortable about the interview wasn’t what the sugar babies were doing — it was what the women in the audience said. “I’m in med school,” one of the women said in defense when another woman accused her of having no self-respect.
“A boy is just going to break your heart anyway, so why not get money?” said another when she was called a prostitute. “I don’t have a sexual relationship with him.”
Women should acknowledge that men have kept them from achieving their goals. And that before the women’s liberation movement, women were housewives not able to go to school or have a career of their own.
Women need to know that being a sugar baby keeps that 50’s housewife ideal in our culture. That we need a man (a father, specifically) to take care of us — that we cannot take care of ourselves and must depend on him.
That is not equality — that is not feminism. But if I say a woman shouldn’t do something with her body, I am also feeding into that pre-women’s lib age. And that’s not feminism, either. So it’s a catch 22.
There really was no difference between the women on the stage being interviewed and the women in the audience. They were all women; women who, despite of their feminist and moral views, were very much alike. They, like all women, have dreams, they all have flaws. To bash another woman is to hurt our gender, just as much as the women who date older men to get further in their lives.
It’s a woman’s business (notice: a woman, not a girl under 18) what kind of relationship she has in her life. While it is not the best of choices in the fight to be equal with men, we need to stick together — not tear each other apart in order to go forward as a gender.