wiseMusings

The global furore amongst (some, but definitely not all) men over the newest Gillette commercial, which centered around the #MeToo movement in the USA, and how men need to re-educate the men around them on their use of toxic masculinity, was very interesting to see.
I’ve been very vocal about toxic masculinity and its damning effects on us all. Seeing an ad like that – especially from a company which has previously geared most of its advertisements towards the hypermasculine ideal – warmed my heart. That sentiment obviously did not extend to (some of, not all of.. god, keep the narrative) my fellow men.

The Gillette commercial made me think of matters close to home.

South Africa, to be exact.

Two years ago, the #MenAreTrash hashtag took centre stage after the gruesome murder of a young woman by her male lover. The hashtag was used as a way to speak out against gender-based violence in all its forms, and, like the Gillette ad aims to do, serve as a call to action for men.

It didn’t quite go that way.

(Some, not all) men took exception to this by saying that femicide was not inherent in all men, and so #NotAllMen should be smeared with such a term for actions they did not personally commit. Men who rape, beat up, and kill women should be targeted. Not us innocent “good men”.

Sounds cogent, right?

Except it isn’t just a small minority of men in South Africa who commit atrocities, both large and small but all impactful, towards others. We can’t just confine them all into a closed space and consider the problem solved.
What is missing from this grand attempt to individualise a systemic problem is that we all know the conversations. You know them, I know them. Some of us have even started them.
Not just in the privacy of our homes, natch. Our fast-food chains, our shisa-nyamas, our taxi ranks, our taverns are where we have these conversations. Not to mention the comments our teachers say ‘in passing’. Not to mention the ‘holy doctrines’ our pastors preach. Not to mention the ‘traditions’ our elders uphold.
These conversations are traditions, alright. They’re how we celebrate our socially acceptable trashiness.

Let me share just three out of an infinite number of conversations I’ve heard, and have yet to hear.

(1) A date told me a story about his friend, and how his friend’s life was almost ‘ruined’ by accusations of rape. According to the potential partner, his friend was in a secret gay relationship with another man. One drunken night, his friend raped his partner. In the days following the evil, the scared and terrified partner threatened to go to the police and open a rape case against my date’s friend. My date then went to a traumatised rape survivor and pleaded with him not to ruin his friend’s life by outing him.
The ironic twist is – my date narrated this story to me as assurance that he would never rape me.

(2) My father – a person whose misogynoir and homophobia I could dedicate a 300-page book to – once threatened to pay a big burly woman to outpower and rape me just so I could feel the goodness of a vagina and not be gay anymore. Because that’s how it works.

(3) While I was in high school, I overheard a conversation between a guy I found very attractive and some of his friends. In this conversation, he freely admitted to beating up his girlfriends if they ever ‘pissed him off’. He expressed pride at this, and said he would only need to apologize once and they would forgive him.

I know, for a fact, you have heard stories just like these. Perhaps even today, even.

And of course, these conversations aren’t limited to men. Women also participate in them. But what links them to men is this theme: the image of the male as a strong, fearless, dominant warrior is kept in pristine condition, while everything else (the weak, the vulnerable, the terrified) is deemed less important than this image.

But heaven forbid we say all men need to call each other out, right?
That would be pretending that these kinds of things don’t happen… but we all know that they happen more often than they don’t happen.

A Facebook friend attempted to give me an explanation for the gender-based violence that sweeps South Africa. He (and he, he was) began by claiming that “toxic masculinity does not exist.” Despite my better judgement, I continued to engage with him until he revealed his rationale – apparently, violence against women is a small part of a larger race dynamic. Poor black men are dejected over their inability to provide. Their anger is then taken out on the women in their lives. So, according to my Facebook friend, if we will eradicate gender-based violence, we must focus on dismantling capitalism and making sure wealth is shared between us black people.

This explanation infuriated me. It was, to me, worse than the #NotAllMen-ers. At least, they acknowledged that there were men at fault (just not all of them). This guy did another thing altogether – he was, in one fell swoop, absolving all men of their sins and casting them upon the white man and his capitalism.
To be sure, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the role that poverty and the frustrations that result from it would have on a person’s psyche. Poverty does contribute to gender-based violence in South Africa. But to attach all the rapes, the murders and the violence to race politics is, quite frankly, bullshit. It is the same barely-disguised bullshit that black men, ironically enough, are experts at detecting when racists want to pull one over on them. Yet it is the same barely-disguised bullshit they try to throw our way when their names are in the dock.

White men commit gender-based violence. So too do rich black men. Who do they shift the blame to? Nobody.
Because all men (#YesAllMen) have something called personal and moral responsibility. When a man is raping a woman – or a man, for that matter – there is no white man with a stick ordering him to do so. The man does so, out of his own volition. There may be a psycho-social basis for his behaviour but that does not make him innocent. At best, it provides explanation to his mindset.
But excuse it? Fuck no.

Unfortunately, hoteps (following a bastardization of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness) are forever silent on matters of gender equality and prefer to be overly substantive on the race question rather than to confront the sexism in the country, and their role in perpetuating it.

What happens when all these toxic elements come together? What happens when we live in a country where misogyny is casually announced and those who seek power, only entrench it further?

We get our lowest point as South Africans. We get the smoking gun that proves, without a doubt, what trash we are.

We get the Khwezi tragedy.

I was nine years old in 2006. I have little to no memory of the court case, as it happened.
Thirteen years later, I see the toxicity. I hear the vitriol coming out of people’s mouths.
Vilifying her. Reducing her to a political prop, to a slut, to her vagina.

Many would have (and still do) argued that Zuma was innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and that he was not proven guilty hence he was innocent, and the speech acts towards Fezekile Kuzwayo were ‘justified’.

Really? Really?

The legal system, as impeccable and detail-oriented as it is, has its limits. There are specific guidelines that a court of law must follow in order to reach a guilty/not guilty verdict. Those guidelines do not always do justice to rape survivors. In fact, they never have.
Even in 2006, South Africa had an epidemic of rape. That, combined with the instinctual urge to protect the man and lambast the woman regardless of the context, did not allow us to be merely agnostic about the case. A stand needed to be taken. We will forever have to live with the terror of knowing we made the wrong one.

What many people said (and continue to say, even as we reflect on the case) reverberates through time. They are the words we remember when we are sexually assaulted and we wonder whether to tell our families. They are the words that freeze us into silence and despair, as we navigate the cocktail of shame, bitterness and pain that is all too common after any trauma. They are the words that so many of our now-‘woke’ spokespeople uttered, but now qualify and excuse because they placed a man and his political ambitions over a woman and her right to tell her story.

That is toxic masculinity at its worst, and we are all still feeling the effects of it.

The lesson of the Gillette advertisement is anything but localised to the USA: as South African men, we should be taking notes as well. #NotAllMen is a distraction. It allows us to walk past a man beating up a woman in a club and say, “It’s none of my business” then speak about how we have never laid our hands on a woman.
It allows us (as my date did) to value rapists and their future over their victims and their dignity, and still be “good guys.”
It allows us to excuse the murder of women as byproducts of a race war, as if female bodies can only be free to exist when the closest men in their lives are free to exist – and then gladly speak about the good we do in our communities.

Our work is simple: if you see it, call it out. Let’s demand better behaviour from ourselves and our fellow men.

#NotAllMen destroy our society with sick and twisted acts. But #YesAllMen are responsible for bringing about a society that would never allow another Khwezi in our country ever again.