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Inside The World of Sugar Babies, Sugar Daddies & Sugar Dating

The logo for Embodied, which features a person with brown skin wearing yellow pants, a white shirt and white glasses pulling back a starry curtain of the silhouette of a person that is roughly twice as large as the person in yellow pants. The word "Embodied" is at the top with the WUNC logo directly underneath it and the PRX logo in the bottom righthand corner of the illustration. All of the text is in white, and the background of the illustration is light blue.

Sugar daddies and sugar babies have a transactional relationship: money and gifts are exchanged for companionship and sometimes sex. A former sugar baby and a researcher take us inside the world of sugar dating.

When B. Chionne first heard about sugar dating in college, she was intrigued — what if in exchange for her time and attention she could earn enough money to pay her bills? She ended up dating sugar daddies on and off for about a decade. The former sugar baby tells host Anita Rao about what the sugar dating life looks like and how years of exchanging companionship for financial support reshaped the way she thinks about money, power and intimacy.

Plus, psychologist Lauren Cormier shares her research into the sugar daddy perspective and broader trends in sugar relationships.

B. Chionne is a digital content creator. Lauren Cormier is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of New Brunswick who studies human sexuality and relationships.

Read the transcript

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Kaia Findlay is the lead producer of Embodied, WUNC's weekly podcast and radio show about sex, relationships and health. Kaia first joined the WUNC team in 2020 as a producer for The State of Things.
Anita Rao is an award-winning journalist, host, creator, and executive editor of "Embodied," a weekly radio show and podcast about sex, relationships & health.
Amanda Magnus is the executive producer of Embodied, a weekly radio show and podcast about sex, relationships and health. She has also worked on other WUNC shows including Tested and CREEP.