Commodification, Precarity, and Identity: A Review of Professor Bridget Crawford’s Taxing Sugar Babies 

Abstract

Early in her article, Taxing Sugar Babies, Professor Crawford nudges the reader to bring any preconceived notions or biases to the forefront of her mind. She writes: In many ways, sugaring is simply a modern twist on relationships that have existed in one form or another for centuries, if not millennia. Paid companionate, non-sexual relationships are amply documented throughout history. Indeed, the compensated female companion is a well-known trope in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novels. Paid companionate relationships are not merely vestiges of the past, either. In modern times, there are compensated companions for older adults or persons with disabilities, and even paid online “friends” . . . . Likewise, paid companionate relationships with a sexual component have an equally long and reported history. . . . Now, in the contemporary United States, there are an estimated one million to two million in-person sex workers, “an umbrella term for the provision of sexual services or performances by one person for which a second person, the client or customer, provides money or other markers of economic value (i.e., goods, services).” In short, paid companionship, both without and with a sexual element, is nothing new.1  With this passage, Professor Crawford deftly pushes the reader to take seriously the tax treatment of relationships that are often the subject of ridicule.2 

Keywords: tax, tax policy, gender, sex