Sex on Sunday: Taxi queens, English teachers in Korea and Picasso’s soliciting prostitute

On Sundays I stray outside the usual focus of this website into all sorts of sexual, sexy and gender themes I have run across and consider specially interesting. Welcome!

The taxi queens of South Africa, by Iva Skoch at Global Post

In some of the roughest neighborhoods of Cape Town, as minivan taxis line up to pick up kids and take them to school in the morning, drivers or their assistants routinely select a pretty school girl — some as young as 12 years old — who would be their “queen” for the day. She’ll sit in the passenger seat, act as eye candy and be in charge of the stereo, which is widely considered to be a high-status gig. Once declared taxi queen material, the girl is allowed to ride the minibus for free, saving the equivalent of about $1 a day, not an insignificant amount of money for children from impoverished urban neighborhoods.

South Korea: Should Foreign Teachers Be Tested for HIV?, by Emily Rauhala at Time

This summer, a Korean newspaper, the New Daily, ran an exposé on Itaewon, a Seoul nightclub district popular with teachers and tourists. The headline called the area a “loser’s paradise” where Korean women are “ruined.” “Among foreigners in Itaewon clubs, you’ll see that there are almost no decent ones,” said the story’s lone source, Lee Eun-ung, a prominent anti-teacher campaigner. “Black people or southwest Asians especially like to lie about their nationality and approach women saying they’ll teach them English,” he said. But, he warned, they’re only after one thing: “perverted sex.”

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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