Nonmonogamy in Modern Times | Meet Salty Monkey, South Africa's Female Gaming Champ

A study on polyamory finds that women are more comfortable with the idea of nonmonogamy than men.

“Why are you being so honest with me?” Hardly the most common complaint one hears from people who meet via dating apps — but alas, Brianna Rader, a queer woman, 27, had decided to speak the truth. She had been on a few dates with Karly, a woman she’d met on Tinder, and she wanted Karly to know up front that she wasn’t monogamous. Karly just laughed and wondered why Rader was sharing this in the first place.

Later, months into the relationship, Rader again raised the fact that she pursues primary and secondary romantic relationships. “I wanted to pull out the disclaimers early and remind her,” Rader says with a laugh.

The approach apparently worked because they’re still together. Rader, founder and CEO of the sexual wellness company Juicebox, and Karly are among the 4 percent to 5 percent of Americans who researchers estimate practice polyamory, where partners agree to have sexual or romantic relationships with multiple partners. Classic assumptions about male sexual appetites would lead one to assume men are more likely to be in such arrangements. But there’s scarce research specifically on preferences within the poly community — and what’s out there challenges those notions. A recent study found that women were significantly more comfortable with the idea of nonmonogamy than men.

Jana du Toit, an ace on both Counter-Strike and Hearthstone, is building South Africa’s female gaming community.

While most Afrikaans girls are brought up to be onderdanig — a word with religious connotations best translated as “submissive” — Jana “Salty Monkey” du Toit’s mom always encouraged her three daughters to read (psychology textbooks, the Quran, etc.) and to think. When the time came to settle on a course of study, du Toit selected chemical engineering. While the subject interested her, her decision had more to do with “proving that a woman can join a man’s world and legitimately so,” she says.

The 28-year-old du Toit is the standard-bearer for women in South African esports. In addition to captaining Bravado Finesse, a league-winning, all-female Counter-Strike: General Offensive (CS:GO) team, du Toit also placed fourth in the Asia-Pacific region for Hearthstone — a solo card game that couldn’t be more different from the blood and guts of CS:GO. In addition, she has hosted and cast some of Africa’s biggest gaming events. Meanwhile, in her role as an activist for female gamers’ acceptance on the continent, she dreams of a day when the term “female gamer” is redundant.

Hundreds have died of dengue this year, and scientists predict it’s only going to get worse.

Authorities in Brazil have reported an explosion in the number of cases of dengue fever as increasingly extreme weather patterns fuel the spread of the potentially lethal mosquito-borne disease.

In recent years, Brazil has suffered a string of outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases, including yellow fever in the São Paulo region last year as well as the Zika virus, which spread rapidly through the northeast in 2015.

Some scientists have argued that the current outbreak of dengue, which triggers severe flu-like symptoms, can be attributed to the spread of Zika, which they say left Brazilians more susceptible to the tropical illness. No matter the reason, the numbers are startling: in the first six months of 2019, Latin America's largest nation recorded almost 1.2 million dengue cases — a jump of almost 600 percent from the same period last year.