Sex Work & Transactional Relationships
If you are black, chances are that at some point in your life you have experienced some form of well meaning racism. Well meaning racism is when someone — hint, usually, not black — pays you a compliment, or gives you reassurance about something (usually race related) while being blatantly, horribly, offensively, racist. One of my most stand out experiences with well meaning racism, was when I was in college, on a flight from Philadelphia to Miami to meet up with a group of friends for our spring break. I found myself sat next to an upper crust older white woman who was decidedly excited to have a conversation with a black person (probably no coincidence that this trip was my also my first encounter with weed; anyone would need a puff after being sat next to an old white racist for 3 hours).
She started by complimenting my skin tone (according to her, white women would just die for youthful black skin, she can NEVER tell how old a black woman is), and that segued into a charming story of her niece who married a black man and they all had to console her because her daughter didn’t have her hair and blue eyes. She then went on to tell me how proud she was of black people and how inspiring we were to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. But the real kicker was when she said she had recently watched the Oscars, and while it was nice to see a black rap group win for best music, she would be totally embarrassed if those were the people on TV representing her race.
Out of everything she said, I remember being struck most by that. Instinctively I wanted to deny any association with Three 6 Mafia; heck any association with being that sort of black. I was black, but I wasn’t black black.
This conversation would come back to me years later, when I was in a circle where Cardi B and Tiffany Haddish were being discussed; how it felt like they were representing “old ideas of blackness” in pop culture, and acted too much like cartoonish stereotypes, and were ‘setting us back’. They both represented something too sexual, too raw, too vulgar. In this time, many sleeps later, now very much awake, my opinion on the subject matter had traveled through many truths. “They are just being themselves”.…. Why are we so ashamed of that?
Humans have always had a complicated and uncomfortable relationship with the truth. In society, we prefer to hold our mirror up to polished veneers and shiny surfaces, while we demonize the dark corners and hidden murky depths, that forces our shame to dance in front of our faces. Earlier today, much of twitter was in an uproar over an interview by CNN host, Christiane Amanpour on her new show, Love and Sex Around The World where she investigates, well, exactly that. In the video (below) she speaks to two Ghanaian women, who basically suggest that sleeping with men for money is a necessary means of survival in their society.
The resulting uproar has been unsurprising and very typical. To not mince words, Africans do not enjoy smelling their own shit.
Moesha admits to a relationship with a married man, who in turn provides her with the financial assistance that she, as a single woman in a heavily sexist and patriarchal African society, finds difficult to achieve on her own. She is happy to do so, even though, she admits, he has other women he also has this arrangement with, and she cannot do the same (to his knowledge). This exchange is nothing new; mistresses have existed for centuries, all over the world. In Nigeria, we affectionately refer to such women as “runs girls”. What I imagine is inciting the blind rage, is the audacity of a woman to not only boldly own up to it, but in lieu of pretense of love and affection for her benefactor, spell out her relationship in such cold, financial terms. By admitting to something that is prevalent in our society, on CNN, no less, she has lifted the mask of false morality and the imagined piousness of our masquerading conservative society. She’s holding up the mirror, and those who do not like what they see are lashing out.
From a young age, as a woman, one of the most pertinent lessons you learn is how important sex is to men, and how you must protect it from them at all costs, until they prove they are deserving of it. You heed warnings of how to sit with your legs closed, how to comport yourself as a lady, how to avoid being in enclosed spaces with the opposite sex, whisper networks of why to avoid this uncle or that cousin, and of course, how your virginity is something that will belong to a man in the future, preferably one who will make you a Mrs. Virginity as a bargaining chip is our first experience with the transactional exchange of sex; Morality in exchange for respectability. The former only to be held by women, the latter only to be given by men. According to UNICEF, Before the age of 10, 1 in 4 young girls will experience sexual molestation, and 1 in 11 children before the age of 5. For the African child, especially the women, our relationship with sex, sexual violence, sexual harassment and sex as a tool of power, starts at a very young age.
Casual conversations between females reveals memories of grabby staff, creepy uncles who often plied you with compliments and even gifts, horny “cousins”, lesson teachers who doubled as predators, and uncomfortable encounters with male figures over the years. The older you get, the more direct these approaches and encounters become. In our local universities, young women can attest to being stalked by male professors, who want students to curry sexual favors in exchange for good grades, and who deliberately fail students who refuse their advances. In a country with little or lax sexual harassment laws, being propositioned by your boss or client is par the course. From this it is not very hard to deduce that the demand for sex is desperate and very high.
In our unbalanced society, where sexism prevails and men hold most of the economic and societal power and are often chosen over women from a young age, in many aspects of life, to climb the rungs of the ladder of success, it is no surprise that many African women have found themselves systematically and financially disempowered, and at the mercy of men. In this same society, where the only real crime is poverty, and people do not have the tools or government assistance to change their financial situation if they are not born into privilege or associated in any way with privilege, we force our men and women to use whatever is at their disposal to empower themselves. On the low end of the scale we have scammers, thieves, kidnappers, and all other crime related methods of earning quick cash. Yet society seems even more critical of those who have quickly learned that they have something that the opposite sex wants, and it can be used as barter in the quest for survival— especially when they are women.
One can argue that most relationships are transactional. In essence, the creation of all sorts of relationships, be it friendship, working, parent-child, sexual, alludes to an exchange of some sort; love, affection, care, mutual interest, time, and even money. Where women are held up as beacons of morality and love, it is expected that the parts of ourselves we give in these situations are to given freely and without complaint. We romanticize relationships between two individuals as each person putting the other persons needs above their own, a blind commitment born willingly and organically; therefore to admit to the exchange, to whatever it is that you seek in the other person and what you are willing to give in return, is, in the eyes of society, to devalue the authenticity of the relationship, but in reality, is just the stone cold truth of that human exchange. We are all giving something to get something.
The furore over transactional sexual exchanges is borne of elitist morality and privileged outraged. What Moesha has admitted to is what goes on in a lot of of monogamous relationships, even marriages. As patriarchy demands that women be pliant and submissive to men, it also demands financial success as the duty of men, it positions men as “heads” who provide. Society has been historically tilted towards the working man, and this has dictated the relationship between men and women in a tale as old as time. As men become richer, they use their financial power to gain access to more women, and the more money a man has, the more women seek him out and are willing to do what they must for a financial safety net. Women and men are quick studies of what assets they have and where they land on the scale of desirability, and how to press that to their advantage.
Even the concept of a “first date” is transactional — in exchange for buying food and drink, you can have a conversation with me to determine if we decide to date or not. After a date the first question you are asked is if he paid; if he didn’t, he may be written off. Huddle amongst older African women and you can learn a thing or two about how best to extract money from your husband, and how its best to fulfill, albeit grudgingly, your sexual obligations to “keep your husband happy”.
Malcolm X once said the most unprotected woman in America is the black woman but I think the most unprotected woman in the world is the African woman. If we must be outraged, then we must be outraged at a society that is still debating sexual harassment bills and throwing out Gender equality bills. We must be outraged that our higher institutions have turned into harems for professors to abuse students at will while dangling their grades over their heads. We must be outraged at the lack of protection for sexual assault victims and lack of convictions for perpetrators. We must be outraged at the financial disempowerment of women stemming from having less access to education than boys, to workplace discrimination, gender discrimination and wage gaps. We must be outraged at the lack of adequate alimony and child support laws. We must be outraged at broken systems that demand we provide 2–3 years rent upfront, just to live, and then provide our own water, power and security. We must be outraged at our broken government that provides no assistance or path for upward mobility to the disenfranchised and the marginalized.
When I think back to how I allowed myself feel embarrassment over Three 6 Mafia, and how I now refuse to embarrassed by Cardi B or Tiffany Haddish, or angered by Moesha it all boils down to one thing: We have all walked different paths in life, and we have experienced different things that shaped us into the people that we are today. If we face the ugly truth, many will admit that they are disgusted by the idea of a sexually liberated woman; most especially one who is liberated outside of the careful constraints created to reign women in. A freak in ‘monogamous’ sheets, not a freak in whatever sheets she finds herself in, A stripper who is repentful and ashamed of her past, not one who revels in it, A woman who would love a wealthy man but not one who would admit to sex with a wealthy man simply because she wants to access his money. Everything teaches us that these people are meant to suffer, or be punished, for not adhering to the rules. When they flourish, anger follows.
It is disingenuous to sit in a place of privilege and hold people up, who are not harming anybody, to certain moral codes. It is posturing, to be angry with those who are just like us but less fortunate, who haven’t made it ‘out’ in the way we approve of, just to please our oppressors who forced us into those positions in the first place. Let us spare the fake moral outrage over a woman who has agency and is engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship between two adults. The fake outrage over women who are taking advantage of human nature and making it work for them. The outrage over a relationship which has always existed and will always exist, the women who are spitting in the face of convention to do what many wish they were bold enough to do. The difference between the position of two people is as simple as winning the embryo lottery; it is pure luck to be born into homes of financial privilege, care and opportunity; (Hypocritical) Morality is a virtue that can only be afforded by those who have never had to simply survive.
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