Working through a Paradox about Sexual Culture in South Africa: Tough Sex in the Twenty-First Century

South African sexual culture appears to embody a paradox. Sex, and the comfortable fact that everyone is having it, pervades the surface of South African life. Yet South Africa is also a country where the stigma associated with being HIV-positive is notoriously unforgiving. Breezy licentiousness and dark opprobrium appear to live at close quarters. Recent scholarship has been stumped by this paradox; most scholars attempt to deal with it by dissolving one pole of the paradox, arguing that HIV stigma in fact has nothing to do with sexual shame. I argue here that easy public talk about sex and deep sexual shame do indeed inhabit the same sexual culture and are in fact symptoms of the same syndrome. In a context of chronic unemployment, where paths to adulthood have been delinked from work, the sex lives of young adults have been infantilised. Incessant public talk about sex is a manifestation of this infantilisation for it is a sign of the diminishment of the dignity of the sex lives of those who live in the aftermath of South Africa's ‘patriarchal bargain’.