Economically, the factors shaping young women’s premarital and married men’s extramarital behavior that is sexual complex.
Whilst it could be an error to assume that all men’s extramarital sexual behavior takes the type of so named sugar daddy relationships, where young ladies are observed to take part in intimate relationships with older hitched guys for financial gain, or even to guess that young unmarried women’s intimate relationships could be entirely subsumed under this label (Luke 2005), that is definitely the scenario that such relationships are normal in southeastern Nigeria. A number of the characteristics that are typically glossed both in educational and popular Nigerian interpretations beneath the label associated with sugar daddy occurrence accurately characterize top features of the relationships between more youthful unmarried ladies and older married male enthusiasts. Age and economic asymmetry feature prominently in both Nigerian discourse about women’s premarital sexuality and hitched men’s infidelity plus in the specific landscape that is sexual. But even yet in sugar daddy plans, the motivations of both women and married males are frequently multifaceted. Although married males who cheat on young single women to their wives are truly looking for sex, my interviews and findings declare that men’s motives are attached to a selection of aspirations linked to the performance of social course plus the enactment of socially rewarded masculinity for male peers (Smith 2007a, 2008).
For young women that are unmarried partner with older hitched guys, financial motivations are prominent. It could never be incorrect to claim that the proven fact that ladies use their sexuality for financial purposes is a result, in component, of sex inequality.
But this kind of interpretation misses their education to which, for several women that are young the capacity to use their sex for strategic objectives practical knowledge as agentive. In past research, We worked extensively with unmarried young adults (Smith 2003, 2004a, 2004b). Numerous unmarried women demonstrably viewed their sex being a positive resource, not quite as a thing that demeaned them. In a culture where most people faces significant obstacles to attaining their social and financial objectives, women’s sexual agency offers numerous desired advantages, including possibilities to carry on advanced schooling, use of employment, while the capability to assist kin. Indeed, the young ladies who are likely to be hitched men’s lovers in sugar daddy relationships aren’t the poorest regarding the bad, dealing sex for financial assistance as a result of abject poverty, but instead an even more educated and trendy group who’re more disposed to see themselves as agentive.
The process why these young ladies face is the fact that even since they are in a position to use their intimate desirability to fulfill educational, financial, and social objectives, they need to eventually navigate the wedding market, where culture generally speaking and males in specific have actually various objectives for just what they desire in a lady. Igbo culture expects a spouse to be faithful to her spouse and specialized in her young ones. The idea that a young woman has been something of a free sexual agent, utilizing her body for economic purposes, or even just for her own pleasure, contradicts the ideal typical image of a good wife for most men. In addition, the increasingly provided expectation that wedding must be centered on intimate love is notably in conflict with a far more notion that is strategic of sex. For that reason, young unmarried women can be traversing a complex landscape before wedding, while they look for some intimate lovers for solely economic purposes while also keeping an eye fixed away for the love match, or at the very least a guy whom could compatibly confer the status of spouse and mom. Exactly just exactly How females steer through these perilous currents and exactly how they go through the transformation from agentive single girl to constrained wife, to the level where a husband’s philandering is usually tacitly tolerated, delivers a revealing screen onto the unfolding of sex characteristics within the context of modern southeastern Nigeria’s habits of change to marriage.
Research Practices
This paper attracts on significantly more than a dozen many years of ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Nigeria and particularly on two studies: one that analyzed the ramifications of rural migration that is urban the intimate behavior of adolescents and unmarried adults and another that focused on married women’s risk of HIV disease. The initial research addressed just exactly how young people’s intimate behavior was affected by the challenges of modification to life that is urban. The next study, called “Love, Marriage, and HIV,” examined the complex intersection between changing marital ideals and techniques together with effect of the changes on gendered sexual behavior, specially men’s infidelity. My Nigeria research ended up being section of a more substantial relative ethnographic project in that we also had colleagues involved in Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Vietnam (Hirsch et al. 2007, 2009; Parikh 2007; Wardlow 2007; Phinney 2008). 1
