Maluma Wants to Be Your Daddy

Las Vegas is a town where the drinks are strong, the tables hot and the women even hotter, with velvet ropes and bottle service and the penthouse suites overlooking the Strip. It’s a hedonist’s paradise, the sort of place you’d expect a superstar sex icon like Maluma to unleash his womanizing alter-ego. But these days, Sin City has surprisingly little to offer Maluma apart from work, like the concert he performed for Super Bowl weekend. Instead, he’s aching to be 3,000 miles south in his hometown of Medellín, next to girlfriend Susana Gómez and their soon-to-be baby girl, Paris.

Back in October, the reggaeton trap-pop hitmaker — born Juan Luis Londoño Arias — announced the couple is expecting in the music video for “Procura,” an urbano-bachata banger about a passionate, extraordinary romance from his latest studio album, Don Juan. Beginning with footage from a concert where he declares his love for Susana and Paris, it’s clear the 30-year-old now has different priorities. He knows he’s already spent the past decade enjoying the spoils of his “nice life,” with enough V.I.P. clubs, “crazy” sexcapades, and last-minute trips to Miami, where he was “living hard” by “drinking a lot and spending a lot of time with women.”

Playgirl’s March 2024 cover • silk set by Delos.

In retrospect though, Maluma knows it was a hollow existence, filled with meaningless sex. At the same time, he was “pretty young,” brand new to celebrity as part of a group of young Colombian artists sweeping award shows, topping the charts and selling out stadiums.

“I was living a moment that I dreamt about,” he recalls. “But if you really think about it, it’s not a healthy life or a way to celebrate your success.”

Maluma sighs, “I just got tired of feeling like nothing of this craziness was myself.”

The revelation is accompanied by a conscious “decision about being with my partner and having these serious relationships,” which the star — who was raised by open-minded Catholic parents — worked on through spirituality. He began looking into Buddhist practices, using meditation to keep him grounded and “disciplined to a new level that I didn’t know existed.”

“And when I met my partner, I was like, ‘I need some more work in my Buddhism and spiritual life again,” Maluma explains before praising Susana — an architect and designer who prefers to stay out of the limelight —  as the ultimate counterbalance to his jet-setting celebrity lifestyle. He’s happy with her, he says, and appreciates her support of his “totally different lifestyle.”  With her, he wants to embrace his new role as a family man, and she knows the way he’ll provide for them is by singing about sex and romance to millions of people. Not to mention, “training even harder, working out harder and getting hotter every day.”

He laughs, “Like she was super happy about me doing the [Playgirl] cover. She was like, ‘No way! I love it. You’re going to show the world that you’re stronger than ever. That you’re the best version right now. You’re showing the world that you’re killing it.’ Because she knows that’s my career.”

Even better, his experience with Susana has taught the “Según Quién” singer that the key to being both a dedicated family man and a suave sex god is understanding “how to balance his life” as both Maluma and Juan Luis Londoño Arias, while still staying true to who he is.

“I’ve been [acting sexy] for almost 10 years, since I started my career,” he continues. After all, while he may be in a devoted relationship, Maluma thinks people can still “admire someone and think that a person is sexy or that they’re hot.” And with Susana’s enthusiastic approval, he knows he’ll never have to be scared of his sex appeal or stifle his sexuality, simply because he’s entered a new stage in his personal life. “That’s something that I have in my DNA,” he continues, pointing out that there’s no reason he can’t be both a good father to Paris and “Papi” to his fans.

Of course, there will be a “period of time” where his sole focus will be his new family and caring for his new baby girl. However, there will be an inevitable day when his daughter eventually finds out “her dad is a sex symbol and that’s what people see.” Except when she does, Maluma says, he hopes it will have a positive effect on the way she thinks about her sexuality and bodily autonomy in a Puritanical world where most young women are punished and shamed for both.

Until then though, he’ll go to any length to keep her safe, to “protect my daughter,” he says, the passion in his voice lending weight to his forceful declaration. But Maluma also knows it’s impossible for any parent to shadow their child, meaning the best he can do is support her in “learning from her own experience” and helping her develop the confidence to assert her own boundaries.

Denim vest & pants by Garcias • boots by Sonora • bracelet by Diamonds Eternal Jewelers.

“Boys, of course, I’m super worried about it.” Of all people, he knows about the oversexualization of young women and how upsetting it feels to be treated as “an object.”  Like the time he was sexually assaulted by a fan who “grabbed [his] dick” mid-performance.

It could be a byproduct of the “Latin lover” fetish, I hypothesized, with Maluma adding that it doesn’t help that there were also “a bunch of Latinas and Latinos [who] were just…”

He pauses for a moment, trying to think of the best way to describe the crowd.

“All touchy like that,” he says, a little cagily. “I don’t know.”

Even so, it doesn’t matter that his signature brand of “Maluma music” is made with sounds associated with sex and sensuality: the flirtation of salsa, the visceral rawness of reggaetón, the slickness of pop, or the ass-shaking beats of Latin trap. And it doesn’t matter that he’s created an army of sexed-up characters — Don Juan, Papi Juancho, or Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy — to accompany these songs and the albums they’re on. Because like any woman who also revels in her sexuality, Maluma isn’t “asking for it” by posing near-nude, singing about sex, or gyrating during his performances. That’s just who he is.

It’s this awareness combined with his own unique experience that’ll make him a great parent to a girl who’ll eventually become a woman.

Maluma’s excitement is palpable in his little chuckle, as he describes his vision of Paris “backstage, running around with the musicians. Playing the drums, dancing with the dancers in every rehearsal. Oh my God.”

“[My family] is the best thing to happen in my life,” he goes on to say. “So I want to travel with them and create new memories together.” Meaning the only thing left now is to return home to Colombia, where he will finally meet little Paris after months of waiting.