The older rich man and his much younger girlfriend form a tandem that is currently raging. It is often said on Manosphere not without very good reason- that women seek the highest-status men that they can find for the specific purpose of securing comforts for themselves. It is also often said, again with very good reason, that men are attracted to youth and beauty, while women are attracted to wealth and power. there is a point at which the demands of rich men meet the demands of hot young women. And the method by which the costs of the transaction are minimised is a "dating" website, which as it happens is actually an extremely efficient way for both parties to obtain what they want.The relationship between the two is rarely stated explicitly, but the arrangement is this: the older man receives companionship (of what kind?) in exchange for compensation. Morally, it’s an interesting transaction. Though both parties engage in what’s nominally a romance, there’s an undeniable exploitation of a young person needing money by someone older who can provide it. He’s her “sugar daddy”. She’s his “sugar baby”. Today, the sugar-daddy business is booming as girls and young women — and some men — struggle to finance their higher education. In Africa, it provides an income for many girls and women, and authorities believe that sugar daddies are the reason that HIV remains out of control across the continent.A Google search for “sugar daddy” will reveal an entire industry dedicated to this unique form of “dating”. The largest such site is Seeking Arrangement, which according to Business Insider, has 10 million clients.“There’s no way I’d date most of the men on these sites if I’d met them in a bar or in the grocery store,” says Maggie, a 26-year-old Natalie Portman doppelganger from Toronto whose social calendar is dominated by two sugar daddies currently in rotation.“If I’m going to date anyway, it makes sense to spend that time and effort on men who are going to give me something in return.”She expects at least $3,500 a month plus expenses, dinners and some travel. In return, she says, “I give them what they want — a hot girl to accompany them to events and no-strings-attached sex. I understand the game. They’re men. They want sex. And I want their money.” It’s not exactly the stuff of Shakespearean love sonnets.But it has become common vernacular for the growing ranks of dating mercenaries.Las Vegas-based seekingarrangement.com reported a 240-per-cent increase in member sign-ups during Valentine’s Day weekFinding a sugar daddy can be the only solution a student finds in the face of a mounting higher-education tab. With tuitions steadily rising, Americans owed 1.3 trillion in student-loan debt in June 2017, two-and-a-half times the amount 10 years ago, according to Pew Research. That works out to an average of $28,400 per person, which takes an average of 14 years to pay off.So the sugar-daddy business is booming, especially in 2014, and in the southern U.S. One school in particular, University of Texas at Austin, saw a 227% increase in the number of its sugar babies between 2013 and 2014.In Africa, the sugar-daddy phenomenon carries with it all the moral ambiguity of the Western version, but with an added, potentially deadly, aspect: Sugar daddies may be a significant factor in Africa’s ongoing struggles with HIV. The power of their force young women to have sex without protection.22% of all the world’s new HIV infections in 2016 were in young women from West and Central Africa. Those areas contain only 7% of the world’s population but 17% of all the people living with HIV, and with 30% of the entire world’s HIV-related deaths in 2016.South Africa has the largest number of HIV infections in the world: 7 million people infected. (Number 2 is Nigeria.) In 2016, 40% of the 270,000 people newly infected were young women aged between 15 and 24.Even more chillingly, a study of seven African nations revealed that 46.3% of HIV-infected adolescent girls and young women didn’t even know that they HIV-positive and could be unintentionally spreading the disease. Only 45% were being treated with retrovirals that control the disease and make it less communicable. Many experts agree that sugar daddy relationships are part of the cause, including UNAIDS, the U.N. agency for HIV/AIDS.

In Africa, these relationships are called "blessings," after the Instagram hashtag #blessedwas adopted by some of the young women involved. Johannesburg academic Karabo Sitto tells Reuters, “There is actually a group of women who are happy to be called ‘blessees’, who own it, who are at the mercy of this person that can provide them with money for as long as they’re willing to comply.” The men are called “blessers.” Nonetheless, "Women often do not have the power to negotiate safe sex in these relationships, especially as some men offer more money for sex without a condom," says Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge of charity Embrace Dignity tells Reuters. African governments can’t do much about the problem other than launch mind-changing campaigns — such as the “Say No to Sugar Daddies” campaign in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal — that don’t address the underlying economic inequality issue. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations such as Embrace Dignity and Safe Love International are stepping up to help. Safe Love founder Sandra Omo Idugboe tells Lagos, Nigeria’s This Day Live, “The number one thing you can do to change anything is to not be quiet about it. In Nigeria, a lot of people live in denial. They think HIV is something that is so far or something that will never happen to them. They don’t understand that it is so close if you take statistics into consideration. So we will go on to teach young girls how to recognize when an older man is preying on you for sex and what to do about it.” Safe Love has brought a 30-minute educational program called “No Sugar Daddy, Bright Future” into Nigerian classrooms, and has already been presented to 10,000 students. Omo says Safe Love’s campaign has already been successful in six other African countries. Read more at www.flashmag.net Sources THE NEXT BIG THING