"Right now the ass is the new brain, and this is what you use to get what you want"

[Rhapscallion Démone]

SEX AND THE SUGAR DADDY

In Kenya, more and more young women are using sugar daddies to fund a lifestyle worth posting on social media.

Transactional sex was once driven by poverty, says film-maker Nyasha Kadandara. But now, increasingly, it's driven by vanity.

(Warning: Contains adult themes and graphic images)

Eva, a 19-year-old student at Nairobi Aviation College, was sitting in her tiny room in shared quarters in Kitengela feeling broke, hungry, and desperate. She used the remaining 100 Kenyan shillings she had in her wallet and took a bus to the city centre, where she looked for the first man who would pay to have sex with her. After 10 minutes in a dingy alley, Eva went back to Kitengela with 1,000 Kenyan shillings to feed herself for the rest of the month.

Six years ago, when she was at university, Shiro met a married man nearly 40 years her senior. At first, she received just groceries. Then it was trips to the salon. Two years into their relationship, the man moved her into a new apartment because he wanted her to be more comfortable. Another two years down the line, he gave Shiro a plot of land in Nyeri county as a show of commitment. In exchange, he gets to sleep with Shiro whenever he feels like it.

Eva's experience is transactional sex in its most unvarnished form - a hurried one-off encounter, driven by desperation. Shiro's story illustrates an altogether more complex phenomenon - the exchange of youth and beauty for long-term financial gain, motivated not by hunger but by aspiration, glamorised by social media stars, and often wrapped in the trappings of a relationship.

Older men have always used gifts, status, and influence to buy access to young women. The sugar daddy has probably been around, in every society, for as long as the prostitute. So you might ask: "Why even have a conversation about transactional sex in Africa?"

The answer is that in Kenya, and in some other African countries, "sugar" relationships seem to have become both more common and more visible: what once was hidden is now out in the open - on campuses, in bars, and all over Instagram.

Exactly when this happened is hard to say. It could've been in 2007 when Kim Kardashian's infamous sex tape was leaked, or a little later when Facebook and Instagram took over the world, or perhaps when 3G internet hit Africa's mobile phones.

But somehow, we have arrived at a point where having a "sponsor" or a "blesser" - the terms that millennials usually apply to their benefactors - has for many young people become an accepted, and even a glamorous lifestyle choice.

You only have to visit the student districts of Nairobi, one recent graduate told the BBC, to see how pervasive the sponsor culture has become. "On a Friday night just go sit outside Box House [student hostel] and the see what kind of cars drive by - drivers of ministers, and politicians sent to pick up young girls," says Silas Nyanchwani, who studied at the University of Nairobi.

Until recently there was no data to indicate how many young Kenyan women are involved in sugar relationships. But this year the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics conducted a study for BBC Africa in which they questioned 252 female university students between the ages of 18 and 24. They found that approximately 20% of the young women who participated in the research has or has had a "sponsor."

The sample size was small and the study was not fully randomised, so the results only give an indication of the possible numbers, they cannot be taken as definitive. Also, only a small percentage openly admitted to having a sugar daddy; the researchers were able to infer that a number were hiding the truth from answers they gave to other questions, using a technique called list randomisation. But interestingly, when talking about others, not about themselves, the young women estimated on average that 24% of their peers had engaged in a transactional sexual relationship with an older man - a figure very close to that reached by the researchers

THE STUDENT

Jane, a 20-year-old Kenyan undergraduate who readily admits to having two sponsors, sees nothing shameful in such relationships - they are just part of the everyday hustle that it takes to survive in Nairobi, she says.

She also insists that her relationships with Tom and Jeff, both married, involve friendship and intimacy as well as financial exchange.

"They help you sometimes, but it's not always about sex. It's like they just want company, they want someone to talk to," she says.

She says that her religious parents brought her up with traditional values, but she has made her own choices. One of her motives, she says, is to be able to support her younger sisters, so they won't need to rely on men for money. But she has also been inspired by Kenya's celebrity "socialites" - women who have transformed sex appeal into wealth, becoming stars of social media.

Among them are the stars of the reality TV show Nairobi Diaries, Kenya's own blend of Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. The show has launched several socialites out of Nairobi's slums and on to yachts off the coast of Malibu or the Mediterranean.

"Nairobi Diaries is like the Kardashians playing out [on screen] in real time. If I look hot, I look good, there has got be some rich guy who will pay good money to possess me," says Oyunga Pala, Nairobi columnist and social commentator.

The best known of the Kenyan socialites is probably Vera Sidika, who went from dancing in music videos on to the set of the Nairobi Diaries, and from there launched a business career based on her fame and her physique.

"My body is my business - and it is a money maker," she said back in 2014, when discussing her controversial skin-lightening procedures. Nowadays, Vera is keen to promote herself as an entrepreneur, and runs a successful brand of "detox" herbal infusions called Veetox Tea.

Equally famous is model and socialite Huddah Monroe, who also rose to fame on reality TV - in her case Big Brother Africa, in 2013 - and who now runs a well-established line of cosmetics. "If you have to expose your body, make money out of it," she was reported as saying, referring to the semi-nude images that she shows off to her 1.3 million Instagram followers.

In the past, some of Kenya's socialites have styled themselves as #SlayQueens, and have been quite upfront about the financial benefits that have come from dating tyc00ns. Having made it to the top, though, they often begin to cultivate a different image - presenting themselves as independent, self-made businesswomen and encouraging Kenyan girls to work hard and stay in school.

The millions of fans scrolling through their Instagram posts, though, are not blind. The sudden emphasis on entrepreneurship does not hide the fact that these women used their sex appeal to create opportunities in the first place. And many - quite understandably - are attempting to apply this methodology to their own lives.

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

THE SOCIALITE


One of those who has succeeded is Bridget Achieng, a woman from the sprawling Nairobi slum of Kibera, who worked as a domestic servant - a house girl - but who gained a social media following on the back of a sexy photoshoot, and then found her way on to the cast of Nairobi Diaries.

Her message to aspiring socialites, though, is that nothing is free. "You want a million bucks, you will do something that is worth a million bucks."



If one end of the sugar spectrum features young women with their sights set on a hot pink Range Rover, a luxury condo and first-class tickets to Dubai, at the other are women angling for little more than some mobile phone credit and maybe a lunch at Java coffee house.

But the gulf between them may not be so deep as it seems.

"Should I leave all these Gucci Prada? Na which young girl no dey fear hunger?" sang the Ghanaian singer Ebony Reigns, encapsulating the mixture of social aspiration and economic anxiety that many young women feel. The desire not to go hungry and the desire to taste the good life can easily run side by side. And the fortunes of a woman dependent on a sponsor can change in an instant - either for better or worse.


THE HUSTLER


Grace, a 25-year-old single mum from northern Nairobi, has a regular sponsor, but is actively seeking a more lucrative relationship with a man who will invest in her career as a singer.

She is poor by the standards of middle-class Kenyans, often living hand-to-mouth, dancing for cash in a nightclub, and struggling to put her daughter through school. But her determination to feed and educate her child coexists with a naked ambition to become rich and famous through modelling and music.

"I need to be a star," she says, citing not just Vera Sidika but also Beyoncé. Is she driven more by vanity or poverty, aspiration or desperation? The lines are blurred.



Both Grace and Jane have come of age in the last decade, bombarded since childhood with images of female status built on sex appeal. But according to Crystal Simeoni, an expert on gender and economic policy, Kenyan society encourages sugar relationships in other ways too.

If women have become more willing to profit financially from their youth and beauty, she says, it's partly because of Kenya's gross economic inequalities, lack of social mobility, and widespread corruption.

"The way things are constructed in this country makes it so much harder for a smaller person to make ends meet," she argues. Hard work won't get them anywhere. "They have to get a sponsor, rob a bank, or win a tender."

Michael Soi, a well-known artist whose paintings satirise Kenya's culture of transactional sex, takes a similar but more cynical view, attributing the phenomenon more to laziness and a get-rich-quick mentality than to structural injustice.

The days of waking up early and working from morning to night are behind us, he says: "Right now the ass is the new brain, and this is what you use to get what you want."

The phenomenon isn't confined to women.

George Paul Meiu, who studies transactional relationships between men of Kenya's Samburu tribe and older European women, has described how their youth and good looks have become valuable commodities in Kenya's beach resorts.

Thanks to a set of "African warrior" stereotypes and myths about tribal sexual prowess, the Samburu and others like them are particularly appealing to both local and foreign sugar mummies. Some Samburu villages, he says, claim they have been unable to defend themselves against cattle raids from neighbouring tribes because so many young men have migrated to the coast to become beach boys.

"A beach boy is someone who gets up in the morning, smokes a joint, lies under a coconut tree waiting for bikini-clad white woman passing on the beach and runs after them," says artist Michael Soi.



But as most of those dependent on sugar relationships are female, they have dominated the public debate. There are concerns about the morality of their lifestyle, but also about its consequences for their health.

Kerubo, a 27-year-old from Kisii in Western Kenya, maintains that she has control of her relationship with her sugar daddy, Alfred. But when I ask her about safe sex, this illusion quickly evaporates.

Both Alfred and her other sponsor, James, prefer not to use condoms, she says. In fact she has had unprotected sex with multiple sugar daddies, who then have sex with other women, as well as with their wives, exposing all of these partners to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.

Dr Joyce Wamoyi from the National Institute for Medical Research in Tanzania says girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 24 have consistently been at higher risk of HIV infection than any other section of the population in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sugar relationships, she says, are contributing to these risks because the women who engage in them do not have the power to insist on the use of condoms. "With sex work, men are more likely to use condoms because it's more explicit that this is selling and buying."



A look at the Kenyan tabloids also suggests that women are at risk of violence from their sponsors.

It's not hard to find headlines such as "Stabbed to death by a man who has been funding her university education," "Kenyan 'sponsor' threatens lover, posts COFFINS on Facebook and she DIES afterwards," "Pretty 22-Year-Old Girl Killed By Her Sugar Daddy." These articles all describe, sometimes in graphic detail, sugar relationships that led to murder.

Jackie Phamotse, a South African businesswoman who survived an abusive relationship with a "blesser", described her experiences in a tell-all book, Bare: The Blesser's Game.

Most young women, she says, are not aware of the dangers. "Some of the girls who disappear around our continent were in these transactional relationships… Looking at the police reports, these are cases of girls who were in relationships with older people, and they were rejected at some point and someone decided to kill them."

Phamotse eventually fled her abuser, with nothing to show for the relationship. "I had to escape so I didn't find any financial privilege," she says. "I left the house and the car, and had to rebuild my life."

No-one really knows how many sugar relationships end in sexual abuse or physical harm. Kenyan academics and NGOs have made extensive studies of domestic violence, and of the risks faced by sex workers. But on the subject of transactional sex there is no research - only the lurid anecdotes of the tabloids.


Among Kenyan feminists, the rise of sponsor culture has provoked intense debate. Does the breaking of old taboos around sex represent a form of female empowerment? Or is sponsor culture just another way in which the female body can be auctioned for the pleasure of men?

"There has been a rising growth of the women's movement in Africa and a rising feminist consciousness," says Oyunga Pala, the Nairobi columnist. "Women who were vilified for being sexually active have been given license to just be. There is less slut-shaming than before."

But while some feminists argue that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist - because it was made by a woman - others question how free the choice to enter a sponsor relationship really is.

"A feminist approach to freedom of expression, even with sex work and prostitution, is a northern perspective that says you should be allowed to do what you want to do," says Crystal Simeoni. "But that is coming from a point of privilege. A lot of times these women don't have a choice - it's life or death."

Mildred Ngesa, an ambassador for the global activist group Female Wave of Change, makes a similar argument. After decades of women struggling for the right to vote, to own land, to go to school, she argues, the "choice" to engage in sugar relationships is steeped in contradiction.

"If we say it's her right to be a prostitute, we are sending her right back into the jaws of patriarchy."

But is it prostitution, or something different in subtle but important ways?

Jane, the student, makes a distinction, arguing that "in these relationships, things are done on your terms", and Dr Kirsten Stoebenau, a social scientist who has researched transactional sex in Kenya, agrees that this is significant.

"It only becomes sex work when the woman engaging in these relationships describes her sexual partners as clients, when she describes herself as engaged in the sexual economy and when the encounter and exchange is pre-negotiated, explicit, usually immediately remunerated, and often devoid of any emotional connection," she says.




Grace, the aspiring singer struggling to put food on the table, has a slightly different perspective - to her the similarities with sex work are more apparent.

"I prefer the sponsor thing, rather than standing on the street," she says. "Because you have that one person who is supporting you… you don't need to sleep with so many men."

The artist Michael Soi notes that Kenya remains on the surface a religious society with traditional sexual mores - but only on the surface. Those who deplore sex before marriage and infidelity within marriage rarely practise what they preach, he argues, and the condemnation of sugar relationships is tainted by the same hypocrisy.

"We're constantly bombarded with moral ethics, and with what religion does and doesn't allow. But it's all a pretence," he says. "We're just burying our heads in the sand and pretending these things don't happen."

For many young Kenyans, the values espoused in families, schools, and churches simply do not align with the economic realities of the country, or cannot compete with the material temptations that, in the age of reality TV and social media, are everywhere visible.

Even within the family, most Kenyan girls have it drummed into them from an early age that they must marry a rich man, not a poor one. It's taken for granted in these conversations that men will provide the money on which women will survive. So for some it's only a small step to visualising the same transaction outside marriage.

"What is wrong about sex anyway?" asks Jane. "People just make it sound wrong. But sometimes, it ain't wrong at all."

Some names have been changed.

Nyasha Kadandara is a Zimbabwean journalist and film-maker who works mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

SEX AND THE SUGAR DADDY - BBC News

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

The Blesser's Curse
How sugar daddies and vaginal microbes created the world’s largest HIV epidemic

VULINDLELA, South Africa—Mbali N. was just 17 when a well-dressed man in his 30s spotted her. She was at a mall in a nearby town, alone, when he called out. He might have been captivated by her almond eyes and soaring cheekbones. Or he might have just seen her for what she was: young and poor.

She tried to ignore him, she told me, but he followed her. They exchanged numbers. By the time she got home, he had called her. He said he wasn’t married, and she doesn’t know if that was true. They met at a house in a different township; she doesn’t know if it belonged to him. Mbali, who is now 24, also doesn’t know if he had HIV.

She enjoyed spending time with the man during the day, when they would talk and go to the movies. But she didn’t like it when he called at night and demanded to have sex, which happened about six times a month. When she refused him, he beat her. For her trouble, he gave her a cellphone, sweets, and chocolates.

At the time, she had another boyfriend, who was her own age. The older man ordered her to leave the younger boy, and when she refused, he beat her again. Eventually, she grew tired of the abuse and ended the relationship.

Today, Mbali lives with her grandmother in Vulindlela, a verdant rural area near the eastern coast of South Africa, in the humid, hilly province of KwaZulu-Natal. Vulindlela means “open a way” in Zulu, but like many young women here, Mbali faces a lot of closed doors. She graduated high school but didn’t have the money for college, so she spends most of her days helping her grandmother with housework and taking care of her 2-year-old son. I asked if her experience with her “blesser,” as men who initiate transactional relationships are known here, prompted her to warn her friends against dating older men. She let out an exasperated little laugh.

“No!” she said. “They’ll just say I’m so jealous.”

Mbali is HIV negative. But 36 percent of the adults in Vulindlela are positive, as are about 60 percent of the women aged 25 to 40. Although HIV infection rates have stabilized globally, hundreds of thousands of South Africans are infected every year; more than 7 million live with the virus in their bodies. And in the midst of this, the largest HIV epidemic in the world, the HIV prevalence among adolescent girls is roughly five times greater than that of boys. By performing genetic analyses on samples of HIV virus in Vulindlela, researchers have concluded that the high rate of infections here—among both sexes—is driven in part by relationships like the one Mbali had when she was 17.

In a country where two-thirds of people under age 25 are unemployed, some poor South African women and teens date older, wealthier men, who provide them with everything from food to hairpieces to school uniforms. In exchange, the men demand discreet, often condom-free sex. At the same time, many of these young women maintain more egalitarian relationships with boys their own age. Some of the sugar daddies, as these men are also sometimes called, infect the girls with HIV. When those teen girls reach adulthood, they find husbands and pass their HIV onto them. Those husbands, in turn, become the next crop of sugar daddies, infecting the next generation of teen girls and perpetuating the cycle.

This cycle of contagion, researchers are finding, is driven not only by economics and culture but also by the human body’s own microbes. The reproductive tract is home to a delicate balance of bacteria, some of which appear to keep HIV and other viruses at bay. The grooming practices some South African women use to entice wealthy boyfriends might be upsetting this balance, and increasing their risk of HIV infection.

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

Salim Abdool Karim, the epidemiology questions who is uncovering these connections, has a gray beard and enormous voice. When he was a student, everyone called him Slim, Afrikaans for “clever,” and the name has stuck. He’s of Indian descent, which meant that, under the country’s apartheid-era racial code, he was funneled into the country’s only medical school for nonwhites at the University of Natal, now known as the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban. It’s where he’s worked off and on for more than three decades, and it’s where he and his wife, the epidemiologist Quarraisha Abdool Karim, run the Center for the Aids Program of Research in South Africa, or caprisa. They spend their days trying to figure out why, exactly, South Africans keep dying of a disease that much of the world has nearly forgotten.

In the early ’80s, HIV was still relatively unknown in South Africa. Salim only realized the awful extent of the disease in 1987, when he moved to New York to study public health at Columbia University. It was a terrifying time: Around half a millionpeople in the city had the virus, which was poorly understood. A prostitute who bit a policeman and claimed she had aids was walked into the courtroom by officers wearing surgical masks. “You couldn’t escape HIV in New York,” Salim told me in his office one day in February. In New York, it became clear to the Abdool Karims that HIV was about to ravage southern Africa.




He and Quarraisha returned to Durban and zoomed in on a puzzling trend: While many in the United States still viewed HIV as a gay men’s disease, the South Africans with HIV were disproportionately young, heterosexual, and female. Though the disease was still relatively rare, girls were getting HIV five to seven years younger than their male counterparts. That, the Abdool Karims realized, meant young mothers would pass the infection onto their kids. A whole generation of nurses and teachers—the jobs dominated by women—might be wiped out. “Oh, my goodness,” Salim thought. “This is a tragedy on a scale that we have yet to even grapple with.”

the virus kills more than 100,000 South Africans—roughly the population of Green Bay, Wisconsin—each year. While antiretroviral drugs, widely available for free in South Africa, can halt HIV’s erosion of the immune system, there are simply too many South Africans with too high a risk of getting HIV for the country to treat its way out of the problem. Everyone seems to agree: Prevention is key.


In the ’90s, the Abdool Karims began studying different substances that had the potential to prevent HIV infection, especially in women. For the most part, they were a bust: When they tested nonoxynol-9, a spermicide, in a small group of truck-stop sex workers, not only did it have no effect on infection rates, but the substance also inflamed the women’s vaginas, causing burning and itching.

Their progress improved in 2003, when they began testing a drug called tenofovir, which prevents the virus from replicating and seemed to have few side effects. In 2010, Quarraisha presented the findings of their tenofovir gel study at the International Aids Conference in Vienna: When women applied the gel to their vaginas before and after sex, she reported, the risk of HIV infection dropped by 39 percent. For the first time, women had a way to reduce their risk of HIV infection that didn’t require their partners’ permission. It was a rare glimmer of hope in what had become a dismal field, and the conference attendees rewarded Quarraisha with a standing ovation.

The Abdool Karims were elated and proud. But still, they wondered: Why only 39 percent?

In Vulindlela, women walk alongside dirt roads with babies slung on their backs, and people still answer to the three local amakhosi, or Zulu chiefs. Older people smear red clay on their skin to protect it from the sun. Horses and cows roam the streets freely, and outhouses dot the rolling hills. Today, most people live in small, cinder-block houses, but when caprisa first began doing research here in 2001, many still dwelled in traditional mud huts.

In the late 1800s, in KwaZulu-Natal and several other areas, the colonial government imposed a tax on every hut “occupied by a native.” They exempted“houses of European construction” occupied by residents “conforming to civilized usage.” The tax burden forced many Zulus to work in the gold mines, some of which were hundreds of miles away. Miners usually lived in single-sex hostels for much of the year, returning to see their families only every few months. Separated from their wives, the men turned to sex workers, who became vectors of sexually transmitted diseases.

“If you want to create a society in which you wanted a sexually transmitted infection to spread,” Salim said, “you couldn’t do it better than the way in which the colonialists designed South Africa. They designed it to create family instability.”




Though the situation is less extreme now that apartheid has ended, itinerant labor remains common, and many men maintain multiple partners. Men who are able to get good jobs are sought after as patrons and partners by women who aren’t.

Salim and his colleagues wanted to pinpoint exactly who was getting HIV in KwaZulu-Natal, and from whom. In 2014, caprisastaff collected blood from the residents of nearly 10,000 households in Vulindlela. They looked at the HIV viruses inside the samples and analyzed each virus’s genes. They identified clusters in which people had passed the virus to one another.

They found that the girls in their teens and early 20s were getting infected by men who were, on average, about nine years older than they were. When they reached their late 20s, these women were infecting partners of their own age, who often didn’t realize it right away. With wandering eyes and high levels of the virus coursing through their blood, some of the men were then infecting the next crop of 16- and 17-year-old girls.




About 40 percent of the men who were passing HIV to younger women had older, female partners at the same time. I wondered aloud to Salim how a society could become so overrun by sugar daddies when the consequences—for women and men—are so severe. What he guessed was this: In many cases, the girls’ parents know about the blessers. “Many of them also support the girl’s family,” he said.

Gethwana Mahlase, a community leader in Vulindlela, told me that the poverty here used to be much worse, and the effects were often fatal. Under apartheid, the country’s rural areas had little infrastructure, and the sick had to be carried to the hospital. In the 1980s and ’90s, some women Mahlase knew had 16 children. They frequently died in childbirth from conditions like high blood pressure, which women in more affluent nations can typically survive with access to medical care.

Economic conditions have improved somewhat, but many people here and across South Africa are still sorely in need of jobs. Among the legacies of apartheid is one of the highest levels of income inequality on earth. On the beach in Durban, the largest city in KwaZulu-Natal, I saw a thin man pick a plastic bag out of a garbage can and lick off its residue—right next to a watchtower advertising the area as the Bay of Plenty. Many kids have no choice but to attend high schools where 60 students might cram into a classroom. Poor and middle-class families often don’t have the means to pay for college and can’t get loans.




Girls here are happy to have a boyfriend from Johannesburg to take them out of poverty,” Pamela Gumbi, a scientist at the Vulindlela caprisa clinic, told me. In the Valley of a Thousand Hills, a community not far from Vulindlela that looks exactly like its bucolic-sounding name, high schoolers told me local girls were dating the region’s big earners: the drivers of minibus taxis.

The blesser trend shapes men’s lives, too. In a village north of Vulindlela called KwaMsane, I talked with a group of men who were hanging out by a shipping-container snack store in the middle of the day, eating sugarcane as chickens pecked at the grass nearby. A 33-year-old named Zothani bemoaned the lack of local job opportunities, suggesting that leads to some of the sexual practices researchers and policy makers are trying so desperately to change. “The more time we are not working, the more people are giving birth, giving birth,” he said.

Several young men told me that they worry girls won’t want to date them unless they are able to buy them things—a modern anxiety layered on top of the Zulu custom of lobola, in which suitors pay a bride price of several head of cattle.

Others said they don’t mind if their girlfriends have sugar daddies; they think they stand to benefit. “I’m unemployed, so if she has an extra relationship, that money supports me,” said Sanele Ndlovu, a 20-year-old construction worker in Vulindlela, who was speaking hypothetically.


Like a few other men I talked to, Ndlovu is even starting to think he should try to find a sugar mama. The women are doing it, so why not? “There’s nothing wrong with falling in love with an older woman,” he said. “She’s cute, she has no husband, so capitalize on the opportunity.”

Almost as soon as the sugar-daddy trend became widely known in South Africa, it became oversimplified in the media and in popular imagination. There’s a perception, among some here, that the women who seek out sugar daddies are vain and irresponsible. They want nice weaves—considered more fashionable than close-cropped natural hair—and clothes that will look stylish on Instagram, the thinking goes. That makes it easy to blame women for the consequences of promiscuity. “You take a decision to say, ‘I will take off my clothes’—you just can never say it was a mistake,” said the KwaZulu-Natal health minister, Sibongiseni Dhlomo, addressing a tent full of schoolkids in 2016. “Let there be no one who will say they don’t know what happened when they fall pregnant ... Therefore, it is up to you to ensure that does not happen.”

These stereotypes are reinforced by the rise of websites like BlesserFinder, which tries to connect sugar daddies with those hoping to be “blessed.” (BlesserFinder was started by a man, according to news reports.)

My conversations with women who have had transactional sex, or who know those who have, revealed a more complicated picture. For one thing, the women who have blessers aren’t very promiscuous. In caprisa’s Vulindlela study, most people had fewer than five sex partners in their lifetimes. The average American Baby Boomer, by comparison, has had 11.

But the sex they are having is very risky. Many of the sugar daddies refuse to wear condoms, saying they “don’t want to waste their money on plastic,” as one teenager put it to me. Women avoid disclosing their HIV statuses to their sugar daddies out of fear they’ll be cut off financially. Since many of the sugar daddies are married, young women meet them at hotels and don’t tell their parents where they are, heightening their vulnerability to violence. In Pretoria, a 15-year-old was recently found dead in a pit latrine after telling her friends she had gone to meet an older man. The suspect, a 33-year-old man, had posted on Facebook that he wanted to find a curvy woman to bless.


“We are Zulus. We don’t talk about sex.”


The idea that women who have blessers are making bad choices also presumes that there are better choices available. I met A., a pretty, dark-skinned 31-year-old, in a cold, dark exam room of a clinic in Durban. She lives in Umlazi, a large township nearby. She calls it a place for “poor people,” with too many tsotsis—criminals.

A. had a baby at 16 and dropped out of high school. She and the baby’s father broke up because he beat her, she says, pointing to scars on her arms. She now has HIV, and when her mother found out she almost made her go to an inyanga, a traditional healer. She says no one ever told her about condoms. “We are Zulus. We don’t talk about sex,” was the attitude at home, she said.

How Sugar Daddies and Vaginal Microbes Created an HIV epidemic

 

[It is a mystery]

We are entering dark days

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

We are entering dark days

That Ed Buck thread and another thread made yesterday made me think about these articles

 

[Action Mike]

Whose reading all that shyt

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

Whose reading all that shyt

You are nikka......I've assigned you paragraph 2

 

[Megadeus]

Fascinating article....

Crazy how money can justify the most absurd and dangerous lifestyles. Smashing with rich oldheads raw in the midst of an HIV outbreak to make ends meet? and their boyfriend is cool w/ it??

Even the young dudes are out here on the beaches pulling sugar mamas. This is what true economic disparity looks like.

 

[Knowledge]

Boi I can't wait till them advance sex dolls hit the streets and bring all these birds back down to earth

 

[The Minister Of Culture]

You are nikka......I've assigned you paragraph 2

@Action Mike

 

[Big Simpin Losing Cheese]

Poverty is very sick

 

[Rozay Oro]

This is awful but that quote in the thread title is hilarious lol

 

[TrebleMan]

Beauty > brains in all parts of the world honestly.