Moesha Boduong is a 30-year old Ghanaian actress, model and social media influencer. Moesha likes to serenade her 2.3m followers on Instagram with pictures of her lavish lifestyle.
From fancy holiday trips to luxury cars and always showing off the latest fashion trends, the party never seems to stop with Moesha.
The era of social media has highlighted a new phenomenon of ‘slay queens’, a phrase whose meaning has varied over time; from the positive – women “killing it” in their careers and lifestyles to the negative – women dating rich, often married, men to fund their lavish lifestyles.
Moesha was for a long time tagged by bloggers as a slay queen. Many believed this was confirmed after she admitted in an interview in 2018 with CNN’s Christine Amanpour to dating a married man who took care of her because of the harsh economic conditions in Ghana. Another woman in that interview admitted to dating in exchange for being taken care of, although her beau was a single man. Slay queens’ take-over of social media, though met with a lot of condemnation, raises a fundamental question as to why one gender [male] irrespective of the level of their wealth can acquire sexual and domestic services from the other gender [ women] who for the lack of capital must exchange these services for capital or its benefits.
The bottom line is that it is evident women have no capital and no access to it as wealth is concentrated in the hands of men. According to Oxfam, the poorest gender is female, with women earning 24% less than men globally. This gap, Oxfam says, will take 170 years to close (see Why Majority of the World’s Poor are Women).
Women have for so many years been and continue to be aggravated by the oppression of patriarchy and capitalism (Lerner, 1986). Patriarchy’s systematic domination of women begins through the family unit which cunningly divides labour in such terms to exploit women for the sole benefit of men. The division of labour on the basis of sex or ‘gender roles (see Gendered Identities: Women and Household Work) supposedly instructed by god, is carefully constructed by the patriarchal machine to keep women in its cycle of oppression and exploitation for men’s endless benefit. Men as providers or breadwinners have automatic value on their labour which is remunerated while women’s natural talent of birth, childcare and other domestic work is given no value [monetarily] besides worthless accolades.
Women who offer their labour outside the home for payment be it in trade or corporations must figure out a way to balance that with unpaid domestic work whether for their husband’s parents or extended families’ gain. The working woman is even more strained by the adaptability of patriarchy and its certainty of maintaining male supremacy through the never-ending exploitation and oppression of women.
Women continue to be excluded from economic power even with their inclusion in paid labour. Women, even in modern times continue to suffer from structured and deliberate gender-based inequalities through unpaid work, unequal pay and/or lower earnings. “In no country have women achieved economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty”, (Why Majority of the World’s Poor are Women.)
The intentional exclusion of women from capital, from economic power, has created a global underclass of women, whose continuous existence in the patriarchal order cannot be without any form of dependence on men. The imbalance of capital creates a relationship of negotiation and exchange between men who have the capital and women who have it not yet need it in the capitalist world. Capital thus creates an unfair dependence of women on men who have power because they have capital.
In this situation of dependence, women’s way out has been through negotiation; giving men what they want, i.e. sex [birthing and domestic labour] in exchange for some capital or the benefit of capital. This would have been either through marriage or prostitution. This negotiation between men and women for capital/its benefit and sexual and domestic services, I’d like to call the Global Sex Exchange.[1] It comes in variations: prostitution, marriage, cohabitation or side relationships (sugar daddy, side chick and slay queen affairs).
This article was first published on FemInStyle.
Image: Getty
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