Crackdown on prostitutes may reduce condom use
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Clampdown
on sex workers around the Olympic Stadium may mean that most of the 15
condoms allocated to each of the 10,500 athletes in camp may have to be
used in other areas.
At major games such as the Olympics, sex
itself is an athlete. The organisers may not have created a specific
event for it but they recognise that it is a dominant force that has to
be accommodated in certain ways.
This is evident in the number of condoms
already awarded to the 10, 500 athletes in town – 150,000, which comes
to 15 per head. It does not matter whether or not you win any gold or
bronze, everybody is thus a medalist when it comes to the condom
largesse.
A mischievous folk says if he were the
spouse or lover of any of the athletes, he would simply demand that they
text to him the particulars of the condoms they received, so that on
returning home, he would demand that they account for all the condoms
allocated to them.
Beyond such a joke, the development has
been raising nerves in some ways. Some people are alarmed that ‘unholy’
sex has to be so much anticipated and accommodated. But there is the
indication that some athletes have already started putting the golden
‘gloves’ to appropriate use.
“There’s a lot of sex going on at the Olympics,” Daily Mirror quotes
women’s football goalkeeper Hope Solo as saying. “I’ve seen athletes
having sex out in the open, getting down and dirty on grass between
buildings.”
It is not clear how long the saintly
goal tender will be able to be a mere observer, and how many other
athletes feel the way she appears to do. Curiously, the intra-camp sex
festival – sexlympics, if you like – may be compounded by the fact that
in the months that preceded the commencement of the games, the police
drove away many sex workers around the Olympic camp in East London.
Particularly affected are sex workers in
several brothels in Newham, an area that is although “a deprived area
of London borough”, will remind many Lagosians of Allen Avenue, Lagos,
where commercial sex workers are usually found on the street under the
cover of darkness. Ordinarily, the proximity of Newham to the stadium
should mean big business for the sex professionals but they were cleared
off the streets to make the place more presentable.
With up to 80 brothels closed, a
government initiative supporting East London prostitutes, Open Door, has
intervened in the plight of the sex workers. The principal coordinator
of Open Door, Georgina Perry, recently said, “For the last two years
we’ve seen a real increase in police activity in relation to sex work in
the Olympic host boroughs,” said Georgina Perry, who runs Open Door, a
government project supporting east London prostitutes.
“Some of the women who sell sex have
experienced so many brothel closures that they are now working on the
street, and that is a much less safer place.”
Our correspondent’s survey of the
affected parts of Newham day and night in the last few days shows that
the government’s big but controversial stick has shattered the dream of
the sex workers to make good money as many other Londoners now do. The
fallen brothels did not rise while no prostitute was seen lining the
street, at least not the way you easily see on Allen.
Unlike in Nigeria where sex workers are
still largely officially marginalised, prostitution is legal in the UK.
This means that sex workers too were sure to earn from the £13bn that
Prime Minister David Cameron has predicted the Olympic Games will
attract to the economy in the next four years.
While a media report notes that the
Metropolitan Police say the intention behind the raids on the brothels
goes beyond the Olympics, the fact is that the prostitutes are only
peeping from afar while their darling trade is being coveted within the
Olympic Park or stadium.
Tit bits … Tit bits … Tit bits
Visiting Nigerians dazzle with raw pounds
To put the records straight, the
Nigerians in question, who are among those attending the Olympics in
different capacities, are not indiscriminately spending money. They are
not doing a festival of pounds, if one may put it that way.
Yet, some of their counterparts based in
London feel oppressed, if not puzzled, at the manner and rate at which
some of the visitors bring out raw cash, whether at restaurants or at
some shops. Since the London-based chaps are used to cards, seeing
people bringing out £50 and giving it to a cashier looks strange to
them.
One of them could not help saying, “You
people are oppressing those of us here. When last did I hold a £50 note?
I am sure none of my children has ever seen a £50 note since they were
born.”
Can Cameron really arrest rain?
About five days after the opening
ceremony of the games was held in a grand manner, founder of Zmirage
Media and the brain behind the Open Door Series/Soyinka Festival, Alhaji
Teju Kareem, still wants to be convinced that the Oyinbos did not
employ their own kind of juju that Friday. Like many other fellows,
Kareem, in London with artistes and some scholars for the London end of
the international cultural exchange, likes the mastery displaced by the
organisers of the ceremony – like many other people do.
What, however, unsettles him is how rain
that threatened to fall shortly before the ceremony began had a change
of heart and stopped dramatically. Perhaps the Prime Minister, David
Cameron, and the director of the ceremony, Danny Boyle, did something
smart about it.
Kareem insists, “Those people also know how to arrest rain. It is not only Africans that have the medicine that can catch rain.”
Joke Silva: Lest a train put asunder
Since the Olympics rush began in the
city, catching a train has become a challenging task, especially during
rush hour. On Sunday night, Nollywood couple, Olu Jacobs and Joke Silva,
experienced this in an interesting way. That was after they, alongside
other actors, had dazzled the audience when they acted in Sefi Atta’s
play, The Naming Ceremony, at the Nigerian House.
At one of the bus stops, the train moved
before Joke could step in – while, man must be man, Olu had already
somehow found his way in. While another Nigerian in the train suggested
that the husband would have to go and wait for Joke at the last bus
stop, Olu thought otherwise. Not wanting to leave the woman for so long,
he simply alighted at the next stopping point and waited for her. The
husband and wife soon reunited, and joined another train, a way of
saying what God has joined together, let no London train put asunder.
