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The Independent (London) 12/14/95 Like the new democracies of Eastern Europe, South Africa is undergoing a sexual revolution that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. "Johannesburg is becoming like Bangkok," says Dr Woolf Solomon, also known as Dr Paul, the country's leading sex psychologist. "People have been let out of a cage and they're wondering which lolly to lick." The flavours are many. Next to the sweet counter in any corner shop you can buy porn magazines; few stores bother to consign them to the top shelf. The back pages of most quality newspapers feature photographs of topless models advertising strip shows, escort agencies and massage parlours. In rich white suburbs of Johannesburg, clubs and bars with names like Erotica, Oriental Palace and Yab Yam offer naked girls in Jacuzzis and "special delights" for rugby fans. Shops sell sex aids and X-rated videos that get puritans and churchmen all hot and flustered. "It's all part of the rainbow nation," says Jeff Zerbst, once an acclaimed journalist and religious philosopher and now associate editor of the South African edition of Hustler magazine. "White men are reading magazines like Asian Babes and Black and Blue and mixed race-sex is commonplace. People are discovering these once-forbidden things are exotic." The reason for the sex-fest is South Africa's sudden freedom from draconian laws which suppressed any form of sexuality in order to uphold a Christian view of life. The Immorality Act that banned sex between races was a cornerstone of apartheid until it was abolished in 1986. In those days security police sat in trees with cameras and binoculars, spying on mixed- race couples. They would raid homes hoping to catch lovers in the act and strip beds in search of tell-tale pubic hairs. A black man could get six months in prison for sleeping with a white woman, and vice-versa. Naked men appear in For Women, which has a readership of 30,000. Asian Babesattracts a mixed-race readership of 50,000. The first Afrikaans porn publication, Loslyf (Loose Body), was an instant success this year. The first edition had a girl posing nude in front of the Voortrekker Monument, the venerated Afrikaner shrine to the Great Trek. But this is small beer compared to the success of Hustler, the American-founded magazine also published by Theron. This year sales have doubled to 200,000 a month, making it the biggest selling magazine in the country. LA Times 1/5/96 The Sunday Independent, a respected Johannesburg weekly, boldly investigated its own back pages last month, publishing a reporter's no-holds-barred account of a night in a bordello. "The mushrooming of brothels in respectable neighborhoods . . . may well be one of the least-reported sociological revolutions brought on by democracy," the Independent explained. Democracy also has brought the first hard-core adult book and video stores. Joe Theron, publisher of a dozen sexually explicit magazines, including the South African edition of Hustler, estimates 300 such stores have opened in the last year. He plans to open 40 more this year. "That's the main growth in the industry now," Theron said. The law is murky, he admits: "Even though they haven't legalized it, no one can say you can't do it." The Herald (Glasgow) 5/10/97 SEX sells, and in South Africa, where people can't buy enough, the government is taking its first steps towards legalising the oldest profession. Now a bitter fight has broken out between government advisers advocating liberal laws, and the cash-strapped agencies helping these desperate women and girls. Recently a final, polished report was delivered to Johannesburg's government offices by a special advisory task-force set up to investigate the burgeoning sex industry. The task-force - part of the Department of Safety and Security - is calling for prostitution to be legalised, brothels to get special licences and prostitutes to be registered. |