By Bernedette Muthien
Like some people’s Facebook relationship status, the question of men as allies to women’s liberation is complicated.
All identities are artificial, social constructs. They serve particular interests, notably maintaining physical, structural and/or cultural domination of the privileged over the dominated. Identities are formed and maintained in the mind, in the consciousness, and it is there that the chains of subjugation and control must be broken.
To understand men as potential allies, and to understand GBV, we need to understand sex and gender.
Women are conceived as the opposite of man, but a lesser version, like Eve in the Christian Bible, formed from Adam’s rib, man always on top, with women, children, and in the Bible, slaves and animals on the pyramid towards the base.
Sex is understood as nature, as science, as hormones and chromosomes, set in concrete. But we know that nature is not a line, but the interdependence of far more complex equations, like a piece of string thrown in the air, taking many shapes over time, no end or beginning.
So, too, we have different articulations of femininity and masculinity in nature, with no human on either extreme.
Caster Semenya, who is intersex, personifies the complexities of a narrow definition of sex.
The South African Constitution’s Bill of Rights contains 16 categories of non-discrimination. Women who do not conform to a narrow definition of society’s understanding of feminine are brutally attacked and sometimes murdered.
So too are male persons who do not conform to rigid definitions of masculinity, masculinity which is often violent. To end GBV, we need to promote gender equality. All identities including masculinity are formed through Othering. I am because I am not. Boys become men through asserting anti-feminine, anti-homosexual identities, identities that are impossible to maintain, that require constant group and individual policing.
Girls too are painfully and often violently socialised. For men to contribute to ending GBV they need to break from within themselves the shackles of masculinity through which their privilege can routinely be asserted with violence.
This takes enormous courage, to assert an alternative identity. When violence is perpetrated, not only the victim of violence suffers. Witnesses to the violence also suffer from vicarious trauma. So all of society suffers when violence is perpetrated. No one is immune to violence. Yet everyone benefits from peace, as everyone, even racists, have benefited from the end of apartheid.
To be true allies, men may need to not only share power but relinquish power to women. Women should lead the struggles for gender equality and ending GBV, with men and other allies to support us.
President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso once said: “We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold up half the sky."
Muthien has held senior positions in academia, civil society, government and constitutional rights. She is a researcher, facilitator, poet and social justice advocate.
The Star