When basic needs come with conditions: The normalisation of Sexual Coercion

It is a distressing reality that many women still try to get through every day, one so often swept under the rug as “just how things are.” It's the quiet, insidious expectation that access to opportunity, safety, or even basic necessities must come with sexual compliance attached. Woman after woman warned of men who grant jobs, an unwritten condition attached to each. Of men buying drinks at groove and acting as if a receipt has been given. Of men mistaking chivalry for entitlement. There’s something more chilling than that: this behaviour has never disappeared, it has just adapted. A new and very alarming trend has suddenly cropped up online. In one of the widely shared incidents, a man approaches a woman living in an estate without water. Instead of offering help in good faith, he uses access to water as leverage. His "solution" comes with a warning: he boasts about his sexual prowess, making it clear that his help is not free. It’s not assistance, it’s a transaction he never had the right to propose.

Consent is compromised if there is a demand for sexual favours in return for a reward, especially something so essential like employment, transport, safety, and water. The point is in the power imbalance it creates. It takes away dignity and agency from the other person, reducing their humanity to a bargaining chip. That is why this behavior feels so violating-because it is. What's even more alarming is the normalisation of it. Women are expected too many times to laugh it off, block, and move on, or cope with it as the price a woman pays for being alive. Meanwhile, perpetrators talk their way out of it: "It was a joke," "She could've said no," or "That's just how dating works." But there is nothing consensual about pressure. There is nothing romantic about exploitation.

That isn't a call to shame men for pursuing relationships or exhibiting desire. Healthy attraction is mutual, respectful, and free from manipulation. What deserves to be called out is that mindset which sees women's vulnerability as an opportunity. Wanting access to someone's body because you control something they need is not confidence; that's predatory behaviour.

If even a commodity as simple as water is being sexualized, where does this end? Especially in a nation already struggling to combat issues such as unemployment, service delivery infrastructure, and gender-based violence? We can no longer dismiss this as "bad behavior" or "creepy DMs." It is part of a larger culture that tells some men they are entitled to what they see as their power. And until we acknowledge it for what it is, a coercive, degrading, and very wrong behavior, it will continue to thrive out in the open.