New blessings, old patriarchy

For as long as women have been regarded as objects for men's pleasure, we have been implicated in relationships that aren't sufficiently equal, says the writer. Picture: Christian Hartmann

For as long as women have been regarded as objects for men's pleasure, we have been implicated in relationships that aren't sufficiently equal, says the writer. Picture: Christian Hartmann

Published Jun 20, 2016

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Many harmful relationships are sanctioned by society, writes Eusebius McKaiser.

The first time I blessed a woman, I think, it was as an undergraduate student using some scholarship money to take her and her best friend for the most delicious ice-cream combinations on offer at Dulcé Café in High Street, Grahamstown.

Sadly, despite a massive crush on her, I got no romantic returns on the investment in that ice cream. Perhaps her gaydar was working very well and she could tell I was imminently going to burst out of the closet, or perhaps she simply liked, uhm, free ice cream.

We became friends instead, and I started redirecting my pocket money.

I cannot remember the first time I was blessed, but I must confess to having many blessings to count.

A retired American IT professional who was much older than my postgraduate self was madly in love with me, and was practically an ATM I could rely on for entertainment and other needs.

But, as some fellow blessees could no doubt testify to as well, you get more than you bargain for sometimes, like when the blesser is prepared to come out into the open and marry you and to even leave their life in the Global North to return to South Africa with you.

At that point, you panic a little. Your game of temporary blessings turns out to be some older man’s earnest reality. You realise, too, you have power nyana despite being a blessee.

Fortunately, this particular blesser had many blessees, some younger, and hotter than I will ever be, so he recognised that I was, at any rate, an inherently temporary sojourn.

We are now reduced to quiet Facebook friendship.

The language of “blessers” and “blessees” is, of course, deceptive. It implies that we are dealing with a new social phenomenon. We are not.

Transactional relationships have been part of society for as long as societies have existed. Transactional relationships of the unhealthy, abusive kind will persist for as long as unequal distributions of power remain.

Let’s keep it real and talk about marriage between men and women, for example.

In our deeply patriarchal world, a slim minority of women in marriages have the same or more social, economic and other sources of power as the men they have shacked up with.

Married men, inside their marriages, really are the most legitimised blessers who get the least scrutiny for their positioning within those economically lopsided relationships.

And yet we think there is something uniquely socially problematic about men who abuse their male privileges in blesser-blessee relationships that aren’t recognised in law.

But, frankly, they are all the same, and women are vulnerable across these various relationship forms, whether they are sanctioned by the law or not.

Just as a poor student might end up, against her better judgment, hanging out with an older guy preying on the outskirts of campuses in Johannesburg, so too a Sandton housewife, seemingly from a different universe, can be trapped in an abusive transactional marriage.

If your choices are severely reduced because of a skewed distribution of power, then you are always capable of being exploited by he who has more resources and power than you have.

But not only are we inconsistent in our silence about skewed power distributions inside marriage, compared to transactional relationships falling outside the law, our worst hypocrisy is, of course, reserved for sex work.

It seems that if you take your secretary to the Jazz festival in Cape Town for the weekend, and leave your wife with a credit card in Joburg to shop till she drops, you’re less objectionable than someone who pays a woman cash for transactional sex just off Oxford Street in Johannesburg.

But what moral difference does cash make? How is cash-in-hand critically different to the soccer wife-cum-mom who stoically puts up with hubby’s essentially transactional behaviour inside their marriage? For as long as we have had a social history of women being regarded as objects for men’s pleasure, we have been implicated in relationships that aren’t sufficiently equal.

Marriage itself has its basis in a historical conviction that women are the property of men.

If we add the modern realities of gender inequality in the workplace, the church, the academy, at home, in sport, in entertainment, and almost every other nook and cranny in society, then we should recognise that women remain, for the most part, survivors of patriarchy rather than equal persons in mutually respectful relationships with men.

So, if we’re serious about eliminating harmful relationships, a good start should be to own up to just how many different harmful relationship types are sanctioned by society without critical examination.

The intrinsic connections with patriarchy and economic inequalities cannot be escaped.

We should also, by the way, reject the word “blesser”, which itself has connotations of holy intentions. Blessers are just ordinary men bathing in patriarchy.

* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma. His new book - Run, Racist, Run: Journeys Into The Heart Of Racism - is now available nationwide, and online through Amazon.

* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.

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