Middlemen: between truck-driving clients and women who sell sex, Uganda

No figure is feared and misrepresented more than a man who facilitates the sale of sex for other people. Massive anti-prostitution generalisations about exploitation too often shut down attempts to understand how sexual cultures work by accusing all facilitators of being exploitative pimps and traffickers and ignoring different contexts and different meanings of the acts for those involved. Whether you want to regulate the sex industry or get rid of it, you have to understand how its many manifestations work. I advocate a cultural study of commercial sex, which you can read about here and here (with links to academic articles, too). Note also that talking about the variety of experience and subtlety of meaning within sex-money exchanges does not imply that everyone involved is happy, satisfied, unexploited or anything else. That middlemen are sometimes fair does not mean all of them always are.

Here are excerpts from an academic study* of one small place, a truck-stop in southwest Uganda. The authors situate what some might see as a conventional prostitution economy within general sexual culture that involves third parties.

Mediation customarily plays a central role in regulating sexual relations in local Kiganda culture. In selecting a suitable spouse, introductions, the process of betrothal through to the hand-over ceremony, the senga, or paternal aunt, played (and still plays) a pivotal role as mediator .  .  .

They then show how the middleman is seen as useful by both buyers and sellers in the commercial sex market of the truck stop.

Passing truck drivers usually do not have the time to Žfind themselves a suitable woman for the night because most must leave early the next morning, so they turn to a middleman to get them a woman quickly.

The driver pays the middleman according to a variety of factors, depending, for example, on who took the initiative, and how satisfied the driver is with the woman.

When the driver and the middleman know each other, or get along well, no payment is expected, but a gift may be offered, or they might share beer together. The middleman accompanies the driver and personally introduces him to the woman.

The most important reason women gave for using an intermediary is discretion. Although everybody knows that serving beer and food and cleaning are not the only work the women in bars and restaurants do, it is still necessary to keep up a certain degree of formal decency in such small communities. . .  Decency is maintained by outward appearance: it does not matter how many partners a woman may have, as long as people cannot see her actually recruiting them.

The driver spends the night with her and gives her an amount of money which usually exceeds the amount which she would get from men she contacted herself. Afterwards she gives a small part of what she earned to the middleman to show her gratitude and in the hope that he will send more men to her in the future.

The women also mentioned that when middlemen are involved, they can expect to receive more money than from the men who approach them directly. In this way, they meet men who are better off, who can afford to spend something on mediation.

The women saw mediation as providing insurance when establishing contact with a customer, as the clients are seen as being socially indebted to the middlemen. The transaction is also clearer from the start: frequently the clients tell the middlemen to inform the women that ‘money is not a problem’.

*Gysels, M. , Pool, R. and Bwanika, K.(2001) ‘Truck drivers, middlemen and commercial sex workers: AIDS and the mediation of sex in south west Uganda’, AIDS Care, 13, 3, 373-385.

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  1. Pingback: Twitter Trackbacks for Uganda | Middlemen | Truck drivers | Sex work | Sexual culture | Border Thinking on Migration, Trafficking and Commercial Sex [lauraagustin.com] on Topsy.com

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