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Zvifadzo Lubombo
AT 17, Tinotenda desperately needed a smart phone so that she could join everyone else on WhatsApp.
She was sure that she was the only person in the world who did not have a smart phone and there was no way her parents could afford to buy one for her.
For Matida it was to pay for her education and to look after her two younger siblings. At 18 and in essence still a child herself, she is already the head of the family.
Because of the law of diminishing returns, she had stopped begging for help from relatives.
Violet is a single mother of one at 19 and she is into it. She needs the extra money to supplement the meagre income she earns as a shop assistant in a store selling cheap Chinese goods downtown.
Gloria (16) just drifted into it and has stayed there because she has found it to be a comfort zone. It looks like an easy life where she gets to go places she would never catch a glimpse of in her otherwise humdrum life.
A middle class background for Trish has left her yearning for just a little bit more.
She is not satisfied with imitation fashion and design labels.
And the excitement of being treated like a queen is intoxicating in itself. At 17 she believes that having fun means breaking and bending the rules. So she also got into it.
These are five different young women with totally different backgrounds, problems and aspirations.
Yet they all have one thing in common: They are all “sugar babes” who have sexual relations with far older men in return for financial support.
We live in a patriarchal society where tradition and culture decree that a man must look after a woman.
The custom of lobola through which a man financially asserts his position as the dominant partner is alive and vibrant.
Although we have a strong activist culture, the true situation on the ground is that women empowerment and self-reliance are tempered by these strong social mores.
Most women would rather live off a man, even if they are capable of earning a living. And being looked after by a man is a perfectly acceptable and perhaps even desirable state of being, for most women.
Although some of the young women are pushed by real need, many of them go for sugar daddies out of choice.
And as long as society refuses to acknowledge that fact, we are stuck in serious denial which will see us continue to be perplexed by the high incidences of young women who chose to date older men.
So with high unemployment for young men and very low incomes for those of them who are working, it means young women will continue to turn to older men who generally have higher and steadier incomes.
The Zimbabwe Demographic Health Survey 2010-11 reported a high rate of teenage pregnancies (15 percent), for the 15 to 19 age group attributable to common sexual relationships between adolescent girls and men five to 10 years older than them.
Gloria, the single young mother, says she has opted for an older man for the simple reason that she needs someone to take care of her:
“My baby daddy did not really abandon me. But he is unemployed and lives with his parents. So when I got pregnant it meant that I could either add the burden on my parents by giving them another mouth to feed; or I could do what I can to look after myself.
“I earn US$240 a month. For me to pay the maid who looks after my daughter, pay rent, buy food and other expenses from that would be impossible. So when an older man took interest in me and promised to look after me, I jumped at the chance.
“He moved me into bigger lodgings, bought me furniture including a flat-screen TV and a fridge which I would never otherwise afford. Now I am financially secure and I even help out my parents look after the other kids because he buys me a lot of groceries which are more than I need.”
But not everything is all rosy in these older man-far younger woman affairs.
Intergenerational relationships have arguably been a major driver of the spread of HIV and AIDS among adolescents who were born HIV negative.
The young women view the older men as ATMs from which all they want is money. For love, they turn to younger men their own age.
As the sugar daddies pay through the nose for the priviledge of laying a claim on their young lovers, the couples usually do not use protection when having sex.
Then the girls go on to have unprotected sex with their “proper” boyfriends thereby exposing everyone to HIV infection if one of the partners in the chain is infected.
And the relationships tend to be short-lived with new partners coming into the fray all the time. Others end in tragedy:
Last month, myzim.com revealed that Samuel Mbombombo (54) of Gaza Township in Chipinge killed himself after impregnating 19-year-old Nancy Muzungunde, saying that marrying her would be a disgrace to his family. Gender-based violence is another ugly side of these relationships as the girls usually fall prey to beatings by their older lovers when they are caught cheating.
A few weeks ago, our sister paper H-Metro had the picture of a younger woman who had been beaten by her older lover when he caught her with a man her own age.
He bragged about beating the young girl and even took pictures of her naked to give to the tabloid as he felt that he needed to shame her.
He himself did not feel ashamed of admitting that he had invested in an extra-marital relationship. He also did not seem to appreciate the irony of expecting fidelity from a woman with whom he was cheating on his own spouse with.
And teenage pregnancy remains a serious social problem and as more teens become moms without adequate financial means to look after their offspring, they will keep on turning to the sugar daddies as more acceptable version of the oldest profession in the world.
Online Reporter