Our phallocratic shame

Mmegi Editor | Wednesday May 24, 2017 11:06

The video, which naturally has gone viral across the various social media platforms, comes shortly after the one-year anniversary of the ‘I Shall Not Forget Movement’, a noble initiative established to protect young women from older, male predators.

In the video, dozens of delirious louts can be seen pursuing, taunting and heckling the young woman, grabbing at her and at some point stripping her, while a particularly vociferous cameraman eggs them on.  What the frenzied louts fail to understand the entire time is that their behaviour is criminal and not the young woman’s choice of dress.

This is the Botswana we have become. A society so phallocratic that the open abuse of a young woman in public is taken as not only a sport, but something to share on social media and to gain ‘fame’ from. A sign of this decay in our society is the fact that a number of men on social media are defending the crazed mob and suggesting the young woman deserved it for wearing a short skirt! One particularly persistent commentator even suggested that the woman was ‘guilty’ of tempting perfectly innocent louts into an act of rape!

This is unfortunately the calibre of thinking many young and old men have become comfortable with, a view that reinforces their supposed sexual dominance and entitlement to the women of this country and their bodies.

Where historically men were the prime protectors of and providers for their families, many have devolved into entitled, egomaniacs bent on the use of their supposed superior social positions to demean women and in some cases, abuse them.

This state of affairs has been captured and normalised in social structures and constructs such as language, where hundreds of words exist for demeaning and disempowering young women in daily conversation and generally lowering their worth in society. In the workplace, retail shops, malls and other public places, it is commonplace to see a young man casually abuse a young woman through unwanted attention, uninvited physical attention and name-calling designed to establish a power relationship.

Behind closed doors in many homes, men are running riot on their partners, engaging in various forms of abuse such as spoken, physical, denial of affection, denial of financial support and alienation.

Elders, who are the cultural pillars of our society, often reinforce the abuse by advising young women to stick it out with their partners, while law enforcement only intervenes at the extreme end of the problem, often when abuse has gone on for too long or has gone too far.

We call upon the moral and cultural leaders amongst us to raise a national dialogue on this crisis and begin the healing and change needed for women to once more feel a part of this society.

 

Today’s thought 

“But think about how evil that is for one man to think that he’s actually more valuable than a woman, because as a human being your worth is immeasurable.” 

 — Terry Crews