The Cost of Sweetness

As I approach seven long years living away from my home country, without a single visit during this time, I feel a sense of hiraeth enveloping me—something beyond homesickness, a nostalgic yearning for a place that, even from afar, still feels like mine. The fierce clashes of pink and orange that set the skies ablaze at sunset. The smell of salt wafting through the air as we drove down the streets of the Baía. Now, I find solace in the little knick knacks and food my parents bring when they visit. Since I cannot yet return, I decided that I would at least find ways in which I can feel closer to Angola. For me, that’s been literature, history, culture, and politics—after all, in more ways than one, these subjects always seem to find a way to interlace themselves.

In my latest rumination, I found myself comparing hook up culture in Europe to the standards back home. Once I moved past the initial culture shock (the casualness, the language, the emotional detachment) I began reflecting more deeply on how teenage Angolans from my generation navigated desire. What emerged wasn’t just contrast, but clarity. I realized how deeply layered our experiences were. Beneath every teenage crush or whispered flirtation, there were three truths, all of them inescapably gendered and deeply rooted in power, running in the background: the “sexual terrorism” young girls endured, how sex shifted from something shameful to something strategic, and how, eventually, an entire economy formed around it. What started as a cultural contrast quickly unraveled into a much darker social commentary.

I started thinking back to my early teenage years, a couple of years before I entered high school. Before I go any further, I should probably contextualize my background, since my perspective is shaped by the environment in which I grew up in. I was raised middle to upper-middle class and attended one of the best private schools in the country—a space where many students came from families with significant financial and social capital. It was there that I witnessed a social phenomenon known as mundinho. Literally translated, it means “little world,” which feels apt. It referred to the closely-knit circles that defined a certain social scene at the time. While privilege often played a role, it wasn’t the only factor. Some found their way into that world through friendships, others through charisma or talent. This was also the era of Angola’s emerging “New School”—a wave of SoundCloud rappers and creatives who, with growing popularity and varying degrees of access, became part of that cultural moment.

It was within this mundinho—that tightly woven world where everyone knew each other—where the stage was set for the rapid and relentless spread of misogyny and slut-shaming among the youth. I’m sure similar things happened outside of that bubble, but that wasn’t the world I had access to. What I did witness was how girls my age were punished for their sexuality, while our male peers were celebrated as rei delas, a term that essentially crowned them for their sexual conquests and ability to “dominate” women.

This rei delas moniker was often best exemplified by the SoundCloud rappers mentioned earlier. It was part of the male social capital; they could “hop on tracks” and braggadociously talk about the number of women they’d slept with, even tallying up the number of abortions they’d caused like trophies.

This never gave us any pause. It had always been ingrained in us that the more girls a boy “conquered,” the more respect he earned…from other boys. That social capital, that untouchable status, often gave boys impunity. And as girls, we were taught early that it was our job to keep ourselves safe, not theirs to not harm us.

There were WhatsApp groups dedicated to exposing and circulating private images and videos that girls had entrusted to boys they liked, boys they thought they could trust. I remember how leaks could happen over the weekend, only to be the central drama at school on Monday. The girls caught in those storms often had to disappear from classes for a week, waiting for the buzz to die down.

That is what I meant by “sexual terrorism”: the way teenage girls were persecuted for exploring their sexuality, for acting on desire, for trusting young men with their bodies and paying the price for it in public shame. Bodies became battlegrounds, desire was punished like crime.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a reclamation of sorts. Young women and girls began coming forward to speak about their abusers. An Instagram page was created to give platform to these voices, allowing stories to be told anonymously. As a victim myself, I felt an urge to read every single post. Maybe I found comfort in the fact that I was not alone. In the fact that, like so many others, what happened to me was never about what I did, but about a disrespect to our voices, our agency. It was disheartening to read how many girls spoke of their uncles, step-fathers (some even fathers), brothers. At the time, all I could feel was anger and disbelief.

Today, those feelings remain. But I’ve also spent time trying to understand why a phenomenon like this keeps repeating—and why these men always seem to walk away without consequence.

It is said that our education starts at home, but it is also correct to say that so do our traumas. It is from our parents where we first learn to perceive the world, yet it is also from them where we inherit our first fears and biases. For young girls, those traumas manifest from our mother wound (and here I’d like to include older sisters, aunties, and any other maternal figure). To no fault of these mothers at all, they are also victims of their own traumas and internalized patriarchy.

The policing of daughters’ bodies begins early, instead of protecting them from the male gaze. What this creates is a dynamic in which girls are seen as suspects and not grown men. I hold many memories of my mother telling me to change my clothes to something more “modest” because our tios were coming over. As a child, I remembered asking myself why I had to be the one to change. As an adult, I ask myself why these men weren’t the ones to being warned, watched, or kept away? And why is it that the children were suspect of being able to seduce adults?

This was the beginning of a lesson too many of us learned early: our bodies weren’t just our own, but public, provocative, punishable.

It’s known as the Lolita complex. It’s a term that was popularized because of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name. In the story, Dolores Haze—often referred to as Lolita—is described by the narrator as a seductress, a sexual being who tempts her predator. A 12-year-old girl, on the cusp of puberty, a seductress… Nabokov himself never condoned this dynamic, rather it was us, as a society, who co-opted it to justify or glamorize adult attraction to underage girls, so we don’t have to hold men accountable.

And this Lolita-fication is exactly what happens in Angola. Blame is displaced onto the girl who is often seen as fast (or rápia, as we would say), or “mature for her age,” or who might even be objectified for being “well-developed for her age.” And because of this, the adult man’s desire is seen as natural—even when it is projected onto children. The man is, then, provoked by her appearance, clothing, or behavior.

I don’t know if it’s our cultural dependency on men—men who are so often heads of households, providers, and power-brokers—or if it’s the deeper belief that it’s (almost) always the girl who is to blame. But somewhere along the line, mothers started protecting their husbands, defending the honor of their sons, swearing that no such atrocity could come from their home. And if it did, well…it must have been a moment of weakness. A mistake. A misunderstanding.

One that leaves traumatized a child in its wake.

Mothers, shaped by fear, by dependence, by inherited helplessness often choose to manage discomfort instead of confronting danger. They police their daughters, not just to protect what they see as family “property”, but to preserve peace in a system where the man’s income is essential to survival.

Perhaps that’s the cruelest part: protecting the predator because he pays the bills.

And when that same grooming logic leaves the home and enters the street, the cycle continues. Only now, the older man isn’t the uncle or the stepfather. He becomes the pagante.

Sugar daddy culture has always been a foundational mark in our society. What we now see is simply a rebranding (as a friend of mine put it) of a dynamic that was once secretive and frowned upon—the kind that kept mistresses in paid apartments, gifted Chanel bags, and promised silence in exchange for loyalty. A secret quietly perpetuated by wives who believed that as long as their husbands came back home, or separated their affairs from family life, then there was no reason to disturb peace. What used to be whispered is now out in the open, bolstered by the rise of social media, and, more urgently, by the worsening economic crisis.

I spoke to a few friends after I began writing this piece. All in all, we agreed on most things (with some deviations here and there), but it was interesting to see how each of them approached the topic. I wish I could share all of their thoughts because each one was so insightful and valid, but then we’d be here for an eternity. So, I’ll share something my friend Nair said: “This culture grew inside our houses not told in shocking tones or appalled side looks but in normalcy and incentive. And it grew to nothing more than a path many young people think is correct, and show pride in display.”

There are many ways why pagante culture took root and spread. For the sake of time, I won’t list them all. But one that stays with me is how older men began seeking out girls (barely in their teens) to satisfy cravings they could not act on at home. These girls were often lured in, then slowly groomed, with promises of iPhones, tuition, or just a steady allowance in exchange for sex.

Girls like me didn’t have many reasons to reach out to tios to help us financially. Our parents paid the school fees, bought the phones, handled the occasional luxuries. But within the mundinho, wealth wasn’t the only currency. Popularity, proximity, access could also get you in. As mentioned before, some people became known just by association: a cousin of a rapper, a best friend of someone popular, the pretty light-skinned girl (we have a big colorism problem). In those circles, being seen with the right person or invited to the right party could elevate your status.

But not everyone in that little world was rich, yet wealth dominated dynamics. Proximity gave you access, yes, but to stay in, to keep up with the trends, the outings, the summer trips to Lisbon—that required money. There were girls who weren’t poor, but who also weren’t ultra-wealthy, that had a tio to help keep up with the curated lifestyle. It wasn’t out of desperation, it was part of the game, part of being wanted, noticed, known.

In those cases, the transaction wasn’t just about survival. Sometimes it was about belonging. And that, too, made us vulnerable.

Meanwhile, outside these gated circles, girls weren’t chasing image. They were chasing lunch money, tuition, diapers. In musseques and peripheral zones, the pagante wasn’t a luxury. He was a lifeline.

In a 2016 study titled Sex, Love and Money along the Namibian-Angolan Border, published in Culture, Health & Sexuality by Pinho et al., researchers observed that girls (especially those excluded from the formal job market) turned to emotional-sexual networks not just for gifts, but to survive. I reference this study here because when I first began researching for this essay, I assumed these kinds of transactions fell neatly under the category of sex work. And in conversations with some friends, many seemed to agree. But the study complicated that assumption. These relationships weren’t always framed as transactional in the formal sense. The men weren’t considered “clients.” The girls didn’t consider themselves sex workers. Instead, these were “relationships”—sometimes romantic, sometimes strategic—rooted in exchange, yes, but also in care, routine, and blurred lines of affection.

The study showed that, in these marginalized communities, some girls didn’t like it, some were even forced by their mothers. Others, even when not entirely desperate, saw it as the only path toward access: to city life, to modernity, to the possibility of being someone. The study documented how gifts, money, and even affection circulated in these relationships, anchoring both material survival and social ambition.

What this study made clear, to me, is that not all survival strategies take the shape of formal sex work. Intimacy itself, when mediated by material need, becomes transactional in ways that resist neat categorization. And this distinction matters. It challenges the binary of victim or agent, sex worker or girlfriend. It forces us to ask what happens when affection, survival, and inequality intersect so deeply that even naming the dynamic becomes difficult. If girls on the margins entered these relationships to survive, their urban counterparts (often better positioned and digitally connected) began curating them with intention.

Allow me to quote Nair again, because I couldn’t have phrased it better myself, and it completely encapsulates the argument I’m trying to make: “Sex is now a weapon. Women display this idea out loud. Same as men do. The dynamic of relationships between everyone is based on social status, money, exchange, and power. And sex runs as a manipulative machine—to get people to do what they want, to give them what they desire, and as a shortcut to instant success and a step on a social or power ladder.”

With the rise of social media, the performance of femininity and desirability in Angola found a new stage. Many women began to “own the exchange”: setting the terms, naming their worth, choosing their benefactor. The so-called gestoras—managers of multiple pagantes. What was once hidden in shame became trendy, even humorous. A badge of wit, strategy, and soft power. But beneath the cleverness lies a truth we’ve seen before: the man still pays. The woman still negotiates her value in proximity to male provision. The conditions have changed, but the dependency remains.

That’s the part we hesitate to admit, isn’t it? That this, too, is a kind of captivity. It may look like control or agency, but it’s still shaped by the same structural precarity. A precarity that decides who gets protected, who gets chosen, who gets left behind. That rewards desirability while punishing aging, pregnancy, and emotional expectation. And when survival is on the line, there’s only so much room for power play.

This isn’t just about gender. It’s about the economy: the cost of living, the lack of social safety nets, the systemic erosion of alternatives.

At a time when youth unemployment remains critically high, when job creation and opportunities for women are scarce, when education is underfunded, and the state fails to offer protection or mobility; it is no surprise that informal economies of care and survival begin to flourish. Pagante culture isn’t just a cultural shift, it’s an economic symptom.

Angola is a country of hustlers, people who fight every day for their daily bread. In an environment shaped by repression, this was never going to be a story of liberation, but of adaptation. In the weeks I spent trying to make sense of this landscape, in conversations with women who shared their exhaustion, frustration, and even compassion, I came to understand just how many tangled branches creates this mess (as you’ve seen along the way).

I’m not looking for heroes or villains. I’m searching for a language that can translate the contradiction we live in. This not a cautionary tale. It is not a feminist triumph. It’s something stranger: a survival story disguised in sugar and sex and silence.

I’m leaving this essay open-ended, because none of us know what the next chapter will look like. We are still not free. We are surviving.

And since there’s no moral to this story, I’ll leave you with a question instead: what does empowerment mean if it’s always priced in flesh?