wiseMusings

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex.

I hope I’ve mentioned the word enough times to dull people’s sensibilities.
Best believe, you will see the word ‘sex’ many more times. Because this is about sex, and how political it is.

Sex and politics are intertwined, see. You cannot have one without the other. I have even heard the saying that sex is micro-politics and that politics is macro-sex. Either way, somebody is getting fucked.

In You Have To Be Gay To Know God, author Siya Khumalo brilliantly explores the parallels between Jacob Zuma as a rape accused, and Jacob Zuma as a former president of South Africa. In both scenarios, his power was what enabled his actions, alleged or otherwise. Without it, he would have been another washed-up comrade who spent his twilight years reliving a bygone past…. or would he?

Patriarchy (you know, the system that kinda controls us all) honours men by handing them “presidency” over the household. Whether a man lives in a mansion or a shack, whether he is a CEO or a cleaner, he is a man who holds dominion over his household. In that area, at least, he is God. By virtue of his manhood, he decides everything. He decides how much is spent where, he decides what the kids watch.. and he decides when sex happens. A penis is seen as a birthright given to men by biology – or God/the ancestors, depending on their worldview.

Because of this, sex becomes less an act between two lovers, but a one-sided wrestling match where one person displays power, and the other submits to it. This is why rape is such a common South African occurrence. The thought goes: “I am a man. I want sex. Therefore, I will have sex.” Consent and agency fall away into a black hole of ‘feministspeak’ and other so-called un-African tendencies. This is why power is the link that will forever bond sex and politics, until and unless we decide otherwise.

How does this play out, particularly in the realm of sexual consent? How do the values and norms of an entire country influence what goes on between two people in a bedroom [to be sure, rape and/or sexual abuse does not only occur in bedrooms]? In many ways, evidently.

Take a man in a bar. He chats up an attractive woman and buys her drinks. They have a good old time, and soon, the woman is in the man’s bedroom as they are on the brink of sex. As clothes fly haywire, so too does the agency of the woman.

Patriarchy dictates that as soon as she enters the room, she is no longer her own person. She is his property, for as long as she is there. She is his possession; his “child”. Hence the existence of the term “ngibambe enye ingane” whenever a guy got laid and is bragging to his friends.

He caught a child – he performed his social obligations (provide), and got rewarded with a possession he could use and discard at will. Whether she later revoked consent or not is unimportant. He paid for her drinks, he provided. And so he must be rewarded.

Personally, I have a number of stories I can tell about my experiences with this power. I will only tell two. On social media, I once befriended a middle-aged man who would eventually make sexual overtones towards me. I refused the offer. He then threatened to rape me as he apparently knew where I lived. I mentioned the police in my response. Undeterred, he said we would ‘sort it out’ afterwards. But, he said, he would get what he wanted.And he was positive I would enjoy it so sorting it out would be unnecessary. Before blocking him, I was filled with a deep sense of fear. Thankfully, I have not heard from him since.

The assumption that his penis would be so arousing so as to turn my lack of consent on its head, bolstered by his faith that he could entice or convince me not to ruin his life if the first plan was foiled, is the main reason why men with power are often the most dangerous ones of them all.

The former assumption is grotesque enough. Thinking that the harder he penetrates, the more my discomfort would dissolve and I would magically begin ‘wanting it’ is not only delusional. It also is the embodiment of male entitlement, which would be hilarious if it was not killing scores of people all over the world.

Combined with the second idea – nobody is safe. It states that money, power, and influence matter more than humanity. If you are rich, powerful, and influental, you can get away with anything. This is at the root of why most people, myself included, loathe Donald Trump, and why the #MeToo movement spawned a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ reaction among those who are not within the Boys’ Club. I may be male. I may possess a penis. But young black gay men do not exactly have history on their side, generally.

The person who threatened to rape me is not a mayor, nor a minister. He is not even a politician. You would probably pass him in the street without a second thought. But he was so sure, so certain in his ability to walk off scot-free from a would-be rape that he implicitly gloated it to me. Now imagine a famous beloved actor in a room with a woman who then says ‘no’. To me, it is simply elementary. Dangerously elementary.

This leads me into my second story. In this one, I did not avoid danger. I was a victim of it. A few years prior to the aforementioned incident, I was sexually abused. And from the second I got away from the situation, I knew I would not report it. The power dynamics were overwhelmingly skewed in his direction that I had more to lose than he did. I knew that. He knew that. And so, he had his way with me, knowing that when that door opened, it would not be revealing a perpetrator and a victim. It would be opening the door to a role model in the community and a timid little boy. It might as well have been imaginary; a few people tried to lead me in this direction.

This makes the work of the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (UKZN) all the more remarkable. There have been a series of workshops on gender-based violence, defining it and its effects, while also listing out resources one can go to for help. Knowledge is, indeed, power.

But during the workshop I attended yesterday, I saw two young men walking out of the seminar soon after it began. I wondered whether this hit too close to home. Did they ever experience the second kind of power – the brutal, base, barbaric kind? Have they ever been alone in a room with a woman (or man), them wanting to have sex but the other party refusing? If so, what did they do? If not, do they truly understand their power?

Probably in their early 20s, they presumably know quite a bit about sex, masculinity, and how the two intersect. But how much do they really know about consent? Workshop aside, how much do any of us know about true, unqualified sexual consent?

That can be answered by only one scenario – where you can choose either to exert power over somebody, or enjoy a shared power with them. That is purely a question of power. It is a question of humanity.