Life in Grahamstown East has never been easy but, despite this harshness and the prevailing lovelessness that tends to accompany living conditions that strongly militate against human flourishing, I was loved by my parents. I am deeply thankful to them for this gift.
Life in Grahamstown East has never been easy but, despite this harshness and the prevailing lovelessness that tends to accompany living conditions that strongly militate against human flourishing, I was loved by my parents. I am deeply thankful to them for this gift.
Today I am a mother of two, a boy and a girl, whom I love dearly. I always make sure that they feel protected by a mantle of love. I am deliberate in my displays of affection towards them, continually reminding them of my feelings towards them.
This helps them build a trusting and caring attitude towards others, a sense that the world is a place where genuine communion is possible.
By overtly expressing my love I am teaching my children to become emotionally functional human beings. My husband is also deeply affectionate towards our children, and we both make sure that they have complete confidence in the fact that we are there for them no matter what.
But sadly, I fear, we, and particularly my husband, are an anomaly in the township.
Many people in the township think that if you are an affectionate man, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. Perhaps even that you are a “moffie”.
The use of this expression to refer to affectionate men is terrible in more than one way. It is homophobic and it expresses a deep discomfort towards men who are allegedly not “real men”.
A “real man” is a sexual predator. Someone who thinks that much of his value as a human being resides in the fact that he is irresistible to women, that his penis is God’s gift to women.
This is, of course, sheer male fantasy, and it is dangerous precisely because it encourages predation rather than a sexuality expressive of genuine, hence respectful, love.
Women are a means through which men express themselves as “real men”. It follows that to “real men” women are “things” at their disposal.
There is a well-known serial rapist in town — a man who “rapes a lot” in the words of one of his acquaintances — who thinks of himself as a “real man”.
This means that he is convinced that he can help himself to women who in his eyes find him irresistible, irrespective of their protestations. Women are mere things to him, tools to be used to assert his “manhood”.
So he, like all “real men”, is quite incapable of understanding the intimate relationship between sexuality and love. What remains, when loving respect is removed from the sexual act, is a vehicle for personal power (rape being one of the expressions of this thirst to assert one's presence in the world).
I hope my son is never a “real man” and that my daughter is never attracted to predators.
A “real man” is also able to defend himself with his fists, to moer other males at the slightest provocation. This shows, in the act of moering, that he is no moffie.
He desperately — for there is desperation in the way “real men” behave, which is a sign that deep inside they feel emasculated — needs to be seen as physically strong. And to show that he does not take nonsense from anyone and will show this, not with David’s ingenuity when confronting Goliath, but with brute force.
A “real man” needs to believe that he is powerful. He feeds on the beliefs of his community that he has power, that he is strong, that nobody should mess with him.
Power here must be understood as the power to subjugate others. So it is not surprising that “real men” tend to subjugate women.
This in addition to showing other men who is the boss, who is allegedly most deserving of sexual favours or, more cruelly but along the same continuum, who is most deserving of female bodies.
One mustn’t fail to note that “real men” do not really know how to love. They haven’t been taught that sexuality reaches its highest expression when it is an act of love. That is why they are predators.
But one only wants to show excessive might if one has something to prove and one only has something to prove if deep inside one feels deficient in some way.
My son is very affectionate towards me and I was recently accused by a neighbour of slowly turning him into a moffie. I was shocked at this accusation.
Speaking to a group of learners about affection from their parents or caregivers I was struck that most learners expressed dissatisfaction regarding the levels of affection they were getting from them. This saddened me.
Those children seem to me to be hardened by solitude. They may have parents or caretakers — providers — but genuine communion with others requires the gift of affection.
Love is the bridge that unites us as human beings in all our vulnerability. Wedepend on and lovingly stretch out to others largely because we are vulnerable.
And there is so little love in our townships, so little ubuntu.
Learners I have spoken to told me that they prized ubuntu very highly, but they also thought that in the township there was none or very little.
Today our streets are filled with young girls who desperately feel the need to be loved, for they’ve had so little of it in their lives and, consequently, have little sense of what it actually is.
It should also be noted that girls are rarely informed about sex at home or in school. That is in part why one often hears the expression that “if he does not moer you, he does not love you”.
Women who know little about love are falling victim to “real men”. These predators — men who have never learned properly to love, but who have unambiguously been taught that their value as human beings requires that they park their “Mercedes [penis]in a garage” — whisper something into the ears of girls — girls who have only the vaguest idea of what love is.
The consequence is often an unwanted pregnancy and the humiliation of being treated merely as an instrument of power, a vehicle through which the emasculated show that they are “real men”.
This is a collaborative project between Ntuthu Blow and Pedro Tabensky. Both authors would like to thank Julie Nxadi for her many insights.
