#AmINext?: In solidarity with the women of South Africa.
We’ve reached a fork in the road about how we, as men, respond to gender based violence.
ENOUGH.
Two mornings ago, I woke up at 4:30, boiling angry over what men are doing to women in this country. I sat down at 05:00 and tried gathering my thoughts, trying to put down something on the page that would, in some small way, help. That could serve as a start, to influence or change the mind of only one man, if that’s what I could do.
Megan Cremer didn’t get her own standalone Medium obituary post, for if I had to write something every time a young woman in this country got raped and killed by a man these days, that is all I would be doing, all day, every day.
In his mind-bending novel, The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs discusses addiction. He makes the argument that supply and demand principles mean that you’ll never be able to get rid of drug dealers. The only way to eradicate addiction is to remove junkies from the equation. This struck me, intellectually, as a highly compelling thought when I read it back in the day.
So I thought to myself, we need a new angle on this, because whatever we were doing as a society, no matter how many qualified people were working on the challenge — the situation has become diabolical.
So I sat for 2 hours, trying to make a contrarian logical argument under the title: “How to stop men raping and killing women in broad daylight: A manifesto for collective action.”
I tried making a case that if women were to become unkillable, both by means of being able to avoid being killed through self defense, and through us collectively creating an environment that made it very difficult to kill them, we should be able to turn this around.
I thought of employers paying for self defense for female employees. I thought about beefing up law enforcement and judicial tools. Of men acknowledging the problem rather than protesting their virtue and innocence.
I thought of lobbying public officials and keeping them accountable.
I even considered technology and apps and social networks and peer-to-peer tools…
Up until I reread all 4 pages and realised… while most of these things were good and worth exploring, they didn’t speak to the root of the problem:
Men.
Men are the problem; not women.
Men are the ones who need to try harder and be more careful and learn difficult new ways while unlearning old ways, not women.
Men are the ones who kill a woman every 4 hours; it is not women who need to be more careful or dress differently or act more deferentially.
It is men who rape, abduct and kill women and children. To get accepted into gangs, which is the only place they in turn feel respected, and where they feel they belong.
But it is also the men who don’t rape and kill, yet who are infected with the toxic masculinity virus, rendering them unwilling or incapable of calling their peers to heel for unacceptable behaviour.
Because of some sort of a twisted, gender based loyalty that somehow overrides our basic principles of justice, respect and common decency.
What then, is to be done?
Missing from my list were interventions aimed at preventing young boys from becoming misogynist assholes. Parenting. Education. Leading by example as a man. Peer-to-peer accountability enforcement among male friends. Choosing which memes you respond to with a laughter emoji. Standing up for women being bullied in the workplace. Not turning a blind eye to little sexist micro-aggressions. Not committing them.
I personally know men who verbally abuse their spouses in front of other people, and who would sooner deal with a divorce than change their ways, even though this outcome becomes imminent.
And I’ve called men like that on it on many an occasion. But on many more occasions, I’ve not.
I considered that I am a member of an X-rated meme group, where there are absolutely zero holy cows, but where I know that if I were to open that conversation tab right now, there would be jokes and images I couldn’t share with my mother.
In Cormac McCarthy’s desolate post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, food runs out and people become cannibals. That means that every other human being the protagonist and his son encounter poses a potential existential threat to them.
In this country, I imagine that this is how women must feel about each and every man they don’t know, and even about some that they do know.
The socio-economic roots of toxic masculinity and violence against women are deep, old and complex, but doing nothing because the challenge seems too big is a fucking cop-out. We need to start by doing something, testing what works, and then doing more of that.
But first, we need to get men to care about this problem. And we need to realise that we men, collectively, ARE the fucking problem.
The language we use matters.
Both the Koran (to my knowledge) and the Bible contain passages calling for the sinful to be killed. Moderate Christians and Muslims don’t act on those passages, yet the extremist fringe subscribers of those faiths do.
What we consider to be braai-side jokes or “locker room talk” is often like those scriptural passages.
No one you and I know takes it seriously, but if the coordinates we pin down on the “acceptable” side of the spectrum make it okay to objectify and sexualise women, or joke about rape, the result, on the opposite side of the spectrum, is men who feel entitled to rape and kill women with no fear of the consequences.
Men, and white men, in particular, are not a popular grouping against the backdrop of identity politics. We feel a loss of privilege. Our little braai joke enclaves and off-piste conversations about women when there are no women around have become a kind of final outpost for the privileges we enjoyed in the days of yore.
The reason so many men protest that #NotAllMen is at least partially due to the fact that they want to create clear blue water between Those Atrocious Actions and What They Are Doing.
Because they don’t want to change. Because preferably, WE don’t want to change. Because It’s nice being one of “Die Manne.”
Strong social ills call for strong social medicine.
As of this month, the “joke” defense is fucking dead and over.
Uyinene Mrwetyana was brutally raped and bludgeoned to death with a government issue scale, walking distance from my girlfriend’s house, in broad fucking daylight, in a motherfucking post office, for Christ’s fucking sake.
Tonight, I memorised her name, I practiced saying her surname out loud, even though it’s a tricky tongue-twister, for we cannot afford to forget her.
It could have been my girlfriend. It could have been your wife.
But It wasn’t our fault, all the boytjies protest. But it also wasn’t NOT our fault.
This Thing. This insane, vile, evil that makes some men believe women’s lives and vaginas are theirs to rule over — it’s connected with our jokes at the braai.
And we better start fucking believing it.
Men need to stand up and call their friends and colleagues on their bullshit. When alone, when at a braai, when on social media, when in a bar. And not every fifth time when things get a lil too heavy, EVERY damn time.
No more boys will be boys.
No more locker room talk.
Yeah, it sucks that no one these days can take a joke any more, but it also sucks that some men think that raping and killing women is justifiable under certain circumstances.
If we’re going to end this war on women, we are going to have to realise as men that we carry the seeds of destruction within.
We as men are going to need to set the bar as to what constitutes acceptable, what constitutes enshrining and protecting women’s dignity and safety, RADICALLY higher.
Especially when we’re not among women.
When we’re drinking at braais.
When we’re forwarding memes and jokes in closed whatsapp groups to all the other regular guys with wives and mothers and children.
Today, I stand with women; I seethe and grieve with all of you.
And every day, I shall seek to do and be better.
