In the Oyam district in northern Uganda, hardworking women are now using s*x as a way to increase agricultural production by denying their lazy husbands s3x.
According to Ms. Hellen Odur, the chairperson of the women’s farmer group, lazy men would be denied s*x so that they would be forced to assist women on the farm.
Her sentiments were shared by the district’s LC5 chairman, Mr. Nelson Adea Akar, who challenged women to stop offering s*x to ‘lazy husbands,’ who only waste their time and energy-consuming alcohol.
“Somewhere in Apac District, women tried this trick and it worked so well. If your husbands are lazy and are not helping you with garden work, go and dig alone, but at night when they ask for s*x don’t give them.
It will not even take one week before they start going together with you to the garden and even working harder to please you so that they can benefit from s*x at night,” Mr. Adea, reported to the Daily Monitor.
Akar made these comments during the commissioning of a multi-million modern milling machine, which was donated by Uganda’s Ministry of Agriculture to the women’s farmer group in Abok Sub-county.
Being the stronger s3x, men’s contribution to the farm work would go a long way towards providing food security for the households. The lack of their participation often leads to less-than-ideal harvest from the fields.
So the women in Oyam have collectively made a resolution to deny the men s*x until they join them in the farms and make a positive contribution.
The women believe that denying man s*x, works better than denying them food. Denying them food often leads to domestic violence as often the men would resort to getting physically abusive with their wives.
Else where in the city, schoolteacher Annet Nanozi was mad at her husband who refused to help raise their four children. She realized he was instead spending his paycheck on alcohol and his time sleeping with barmaids.
The 34-year-old decided to teach her husband a lesson. Now, when he comes home and wants s3x, he needs to pay her first.
It’s a controversial strategy, but it’s picking up among Ugandan women, as increasingly emboldened women — backed by rights organizations — battle a patriarchal society where responsibilities and moral norms are both skewed against them.
What started out with isolated instances in the capital, Kampala, has exploded into a tactic more and more Ugandan women are employing to get their husbands to pay up for household expenses and atone for refusing to take on home chores.
Three years ago, 150 women first reported demanding money from their husbands for s3x to the Mothers Union, an Anglican organization that has been in Uganda for more than a century, says the body’s secretary, Ruth Nalugwa. That number increased to 5,000 by 2016, and now more than 30,000 women have reported employing the strategy, she says.
The spread of this practice is dividing Ugandan society. Some husbands have agreed to pay up, and a few have turned more responsible toward their families.
Others have refused to pay for s3x, and in some instances, demands from wives have spiraled into domestic violence — and even occasional deaths.
Some religious leaders and government ministers have weighed in against the practice, calling it immoral and irreligious.
But most women and rights organizations are supporting the strategy, arguing that any approach that gets irresponsible husbands to contribute toward the welfare of their families is justified.
After all, it took hunger strikes and arson attacks from the suffragettes in the U.K. to drive a national conversation about voting rights for women.
“If the men are irresponsible and it is the only way their wives can get money from them to run the homes, let them go ahead and tax s3x,” says Tina Musuya, a leading women’s rights activist and executive director of the nonprofit Centre for Domestic Violence Prevention (CEDOVIP).
