Dear Mr Andrews

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Sugar dating is something Latham had tried herself for a few years, before realising she’d prefer to work as an escort and be paid fair and square. Andrews is sweet and bitter and perfectly baked, cutting the lines between sugar babying, escorting and civilian work in a turbulent loop of righteousness.

Although what they’re touting is akin to solicitation, they soften their comms with imagery of gentlemen catching the bill. They assumed we would aspire to their luxury retail, but no one would ever be able to afford anything on their salaries unless they were doing sex work on the side.Latham’s Tracey Emin-like drawings are scattered throughout, but Latham herself is a blank canvas, parachuting us into different engagements across Europe without the tethers of backstory.

The fantasy of sugar dating: ‘They don’t want you to be a sex worker – they just want to pay you for sex. A lot of the time sugar daddies don’t think they want a professional sex worker because of the negative connotations and because they don't want to identify as a John. The stigma of being a John doesn’t get talked about as much as the stigma of being a sex worker, but the idea of being a John is seen as desperate and they like to think of themselves as people that can access young hot pussy because of their wealth and status. Part of her healing process was documenting her story in a book, Dear Mr Andrews, an illustrated memoir addressed to a sugar daddy who didn’t come good on his side of the bargain. That isn't a very clean exchange at all and I kind of resented myself for even putting on that ruse to try and get hold of anything.In reality, the parameters of the relationship are often unclear, different daddies want to ‘provide’ for their sugar babies in different ways. The UK’s 2022 National Student Money survey, meanwhile, found that 3% of students had done sex work and 8% would consider it in a cash emergency. Latham embodies the modern-day hedonist, a frank and daring narrator inviting us to experience a secret world of debauchery and excess. There’s a thriving erotic fiction subgenre and podcasts such as the Sugar Daddy Formula and the Sugar Baby Confessionals. Sometimes, exchanges come in the form of expensive goods: a laptop, a cash bailout, or being taken on an exotic holiday.

Rents going up and the prospect of graduating into like gig economy stuff makes the prospect of being a sugar baby more appealing. It’s not a moral defence of prostitution, it’s about arming sex workers with basic rights to address the inherent power imbalance. Sugar dating] is in this wishy-washy romantic place where the daddy thinks he's above lots of standard things that would keep a sex worker safe. And terms like “high-value dating” and “hypergamy” have had hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, detailing tactics for women to meet “high-value” men – meaning, those with money.Over the past six or seven years I’ve been in and out of sex work, leading a normal life and a smutty one in parallel.