Sugar, spice and all that's not nice

In December 1864, the Tirawley Herald reported on a discussion at the Ballina Workhouse that reveals more than the gentlemen involved probably intended. 

Two “pauper women of bad character” had been brought before the Board of Guardians for errant behaviour. Every Monday morning, they discharged themselves from the workhouse; every Monday evening, they returned seeking readmission. The relieving officer told the board that it was evident the women were leaving “for the purpose of prostitution” and asked that something be devised “to meet the evil”.

The law, however, was inconveniently clear. Anyone genuinely destitute could not be refused admission. The women knew this, and so did the board. In the course of the discussion, the chairman, Colonel Gore of Belleek Manor, added an aside that was even more revealing. He noted that there were also “persons who were mistresses to well-to-do people making this a lying-in hospital” - a quiet admission that some (poor) women were having affairs with wealthy local men, while relying on the workhouse hospital to give birth to their illegitimate children.

In other words, these women were not merely objects of scandal. They were navigating the systems available to them - men, money, welfare, and law - with a clear-eyed understanding of how each worked.

After much handwringing, the solution devised was bureaucratic rather than moral. The women would be delayed. Told to wait. Informed that their case would need discussion. Colonel Gore summoned the transgressors and solemnly warned them that if they next applied for discharge, they “might not hope to be readmitted”.

The women, on their way out, calmly replied that the law said otherwise and they would not be refused admission “whenever they asked for it”.

They were paupers. They were prostitutes. They were being lectured by powerful men. And yet they confidently knew exactly where they stood.

That story came back to me recently while watching my favourite YouTube show Financial Audit, where indebted Americans submit their finances for public dissection. One guest was a 20-year-old woman from Los Angeles. On paper, she was a chef, earning roughly $4,000 monthly. In reality, she made around $5,000 on the side as what she openly and cheerfully called a “sugar baby”.

This wasn’t desperation. She wasn’t trafficked, coerced, or forced by circumstance. She used dating apps and social media to recruit older men (sugar daddies) and was explicit in her messages about what she offered or expected in return. In her own words, she was a prostitute. She enjoyed it, opening messages with interested men with “How will you spoil me?” 

What unsettled the host wasn’t just the sex work, but the worldview that came with it. She spoke casually about shoplifting candles and slippers from large stores, dismissing it as harmless because the companies were big enough to absorb the loss. When challenged - what if everyone thought that way? - she seemed unmoved.

That question is no longer hypothetical. Shops in parts of Los Angeles now lock everyday items behind glass or close entirely. Security staff film thieves rather than intervene. Honest customers queue to pay while others calmly walk out with armfuls of goods. A friend recently described standing in a Target checkout line to buy toilet paper watching two people clear shelves of electrical items into bags without interference. 

“Are we the fools?” the man in front of her asked.

It’s tempting to judge - until memory intervenes.

I remember school trips cancelled because previous years had shoplifted so much that the school was embarrassed. I remember a visit to a shop after a football outing where a lad beside me slid a sports bag over an ice-cream freezer and whispered, “Throw them in”. I was terrified but I did. Not because I wanted him to have free choc-ices, but because I wanted to fit in. 

So perhaps judgement needs caution, and open minds.

The same applies to the sugar-baby arrangement itself. There are, again, two predictable reactions. One reaches for religion, shame, and condemnation. The other insists that such arrangements must involve predatory men and exploited women.

But neither framing holds.

This young woman wasn’t forced. She wasn’t broke. She wasn’t trapped. She was making a conscious decision to monetise attention, intimacy, and sex - and doing so efficiently. Many of the men responding to her messages knew exactly what they were signing up for, many didn’t but ultimately she was the one directing matters, she was in control and told Caleb Hammer that many girls in Los Angeles were just like her, some doing much better.

I’ve encountered similar arrangements among Ukrainian women who arrived in LA with government support and housing assistance. They weren’t destitute. They had money. They simply chose to be supported by men in return for attention, companionship, and sex.

This isn’t new either. Long before social media, dating agencies connected Western men with women in Ukraine and Russia. Men paid for access, translations, and gifts. Women learned how to manage multiple suitors at once. When war displaced many of these women, the same model resurfaced - just faster, cleaner - with smartphones, without the middleman (or middlewoman, especially when it came to dating agencies).

What’s striking is that in many cases the men are unaware, believing they are building something meaningful. Some pay portions of rent. Some talk about marriage. They may not realise others are doing the same thing simultaneously. The most stressful part of the arrangement is for the 18 to 45-year-old sugar babies ensuring none of these men ever collide.

There is no coercion here. No duress. These are consensual arrangements entered into willingly by adults. If anything, one could argue that the men are often the ones being quietly deceived - paying for intimacy they believe is exclusive when it isn’t.

And that brings us back to Ballina in 1864.

Chairman Gore and his fellow guardians were scandalised, but they were also flummoxed. They could thunder about morality all they liked, yet the women knew the law better than the men lecturing them. They knew when they could be turned away - and when they could not. They knew how to combine discreet relationships with well-to-do men and the institutional safety net of the workhouse. What the board saw as moral disorder was, from the women’s point of view, simply navigation.

That is what links Ballina in 1864 to Los Angeles today. Then, the women were framed as immoral and manipulative. Now, the instinct - particularly in places like LA - is to reach for performative outrage and recast similar arrangements as stories of helpless victims and predatory men. Neither account fits particularly well. It doesn’t fit the Ballina women calmly correcting the powerful Poor Law Guardians on the law, and it doesn’t fit the Los Angeles sugar baby proudly explaining her income on YouTube.

Years tick by, but human behaviour is remarkably consistent. And the mistake, then as now, is assuming that moral certainty - whether Victorian or Woke - is the same thing as understanding how people actually choose to live their lives.

One man’s evil is another’s spicy sugar baby.