What does a young woman look for in a man these days? Well, if current research from Cape Town to Pretoria is to be believed, it’s the “triple Cs”.

Caring, compassion and confidence? Nope, it’s rather the more basic “car, cash and a cellphone”.

And men? Well, say young women, they want sex. And they’re prepared to pay for it in cash and gifts. And once a man has “invested” his cash, says a Durban youngster, “he will go for it, flesh to flesh”.

While the different intrepretations of “love” that men and women have is the stuff that women’s magazines are based on, the context for this discussion was a serious academic conference at Wits University last week looking at the social, cultural and historical reasons for the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Prevention programmes that emphasise abstinence, monogamy and condoms have had little success. Researchers are now turning their attention to the many factors at play in sexual interactions to try to find better ways of understanding – and combating – the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa.

“Girls are expected to stay away from boys, be submissive to elders and not have any children before marriage,” says Mzikazi Nduna from the Medical Research Council’s Stepping Stones programme. “But the reality is that mostly their parents are absent, so girls experiment with sex and alcohol and even drugs.”

“Girls say: ‘If your mother drinks and your father jorls, boys take you to be cheap’,” adds Nwabisa Jama, also from Stepping Stones. “A boy might even take a girl to a place where her mother is drinking or her father is jorling, and then she feels ashamed and feels like she can’t refuse him.”

Nduna and Jama have been conducting workshops with young men and women in the Western and Eastern Cape and Pretoria townships to try to change attitudes towards gender relations.

“Girls have a more romantic idea of sex than boys. But for girls, love means support while for boys, love means sex,” says Nduna.

Multiple partners for boys and men is widely accepted, and “roll ons” – or “secret girlfriends that you hide under your armpit” – are the norm, she adds.

Ironically, a young man is more likely to use a condom with a casual “roll on” than his regular girlfriend. “So the bad news for the girls who are faithful is that they are more at risk of HIV,” says Nduna.

For young men, trying to live up to the triple Cs is a source of tension.

“A man is expected to have a good job, a wife and support his family,” says Jama. “But there are no jobs and a man feels inadequate if he can’t provide. So he might get aggressive and force a woman to have sex.”

Tension between men and women over differing views of love and sex is a theme that came up time and again at the AIDS in Context conference.

“There’s a low intensity warfare between men and women. I see it in my township. The girls tell me that they need a minister of finance and a minister of transport and also a minister without portfolio,” said David, a young delegate from Soweto.

“The conflict between girls and boys has a lot to do with material need,” says researcher Mark Thorpe from his experience conducting 15 workshops for teenagers in Durban’s Umlazi and KwaMashu townships.

“This one, the beauty, will reflect on you so you get respect. In the process, she is sucking the money from you,” one Durban schoolboy told Thorpe.

“Sometimes people think it is their right to have a girl because of the money spent,” adds another.

The need for “investment” in many different partners was to ensure that a “real man” could “satisfy his needs”, said the schoolboys. In addition, “Women are like taxis. If one leaves there is always another one around the corner.”

The most taboo things for the Durban school pupils, said Thorpe, were “homosexuality, masturbation and virginity”.

Sunanda Ray, a Zimbabwean researcher, said that “sex has become a commodity” in relationships between men and women.

“Women need the status of being dependent on a man,” said Ray. “But men resent being seen as the source of goodies for the woman.

“We need to reach a point where a woman is proud of being independent and able to support herself instead of getting status from being with a man.”

Ray said that many men were unaware that some traditional sexual practices were harmful to women. Dry sex, or the practice of using herbs or chemicals to dry out vaginal fluids during sex, often causes lacerations in the vagina which heightens the risk of HIV infection.

However, to the 2 500 male Zimbabwean factory workers interviewed, vaginal fluids were considered “dirty, unpleasant and suggestive of infection”, said Ray.

“We grew up being told: look at this one, she is all fluids, there has been a lot of work there [she has had lots of men]. They are just stories, but you believe them from having been told by the elders,” said one man.

“There are clearly many misunderstandings about women’s physiology and response to sexual arousal,” said Ray.

Men from the cities returning to their wives in rural areas also tended to buy aphrodisiac herbs from traditional healers to try to impress their wives and pretend that they hadn’t had sex while in the cities.

“Some call [the herbs] six rounds, others six-to-six because after orgasm it remains erect and goes on like that,” explained one man.

Uncovering people’s deepest personal sexual habits and beliefs are important keys to unlocking the forces driving HIV/AIDS. But such studies take time, which is a luxury southern Africa does not have as the pandemic plunges on.