/ 11 February 2009

Pressure to be promiscuous

In frustration we often ask: how can HIV/Aids infections continue to rise at such levels given the many efforts to educate people on how to protect themselves? Who has not heard that HIV causes Aids? How many times should we be invited to ”condomise”, practise the ABCs, ”choose life”, stay away from sugar daddies or ”turn HIV into HIVictory” before we take the message to heart? How can people choose to have multiple sex partners in such risky times?

It all sounds simple. But Nthabiseng Motsemme’s work, Loving in a Time of Hopelessness: On Township Women’s Subjectivities in a Time of HIV/Aids, reminds us that love in the time of Aids is complicated. So, although people know how they are exposed to HIV/Aids, something about the way we live prevents us from being able to translate this. When I hear that 40% of all infected people live in Southern Africa, I want to know what makes us more susceptible to this disease.

My former partner, then in a much-loved career that exposed him to sensitive information daily, once remarked: ”People say knowledge is power. What they don’t want to understand is that too much information is oppressive.” Although we were not discussing HIV/Aids at the time, his comment often pops into my head when colleagues, friends and public figures strut out ”awareness raising” or ”public education” as the sole ways to intervene and turn the tide against HIV. Equally important is understanding how information works or fails in our lives.

Sex with multiple partners is so entrenched in Southern Africa that it is a religion, a basic moral philosophy for most people here. It is often simply called culture or, specifically, African culture. Political leaders who marry an increasing number of wives and royalty that flaunts an equal number of wives and concubines are highly visible.

Often such men conflate their multiple partners with culture, making it harder for us to confront them without being seen as uncultured or, worse, unAfrican. Consequently, even those who do not have multiple partners overlook this practice as part of our collective psychological DNA. Like the genetic DNA we carry in our cells, we pass it on.

We raise children who want to fit in rather than people who espouse principle, even when in the minority. Young men in Southern African countries live under enormous pressure to be promiscuous, young women are raised to make themselves available to men with few questions as a way to keep them away from others, albeit temporarily. This is couched in the language of being ”real” African men who show that they pursue and are attractive to women.

When I was a teenager, ”playboy” was just another way of saying ”isoka”, a compliment to those who were demonstrably promiscuous straight African men. This pressure to be promiscuous to prove manhood is quite pervasive. Consider the myth that newly initiated men, amakrwala, need to have sexual intercourse with a woman other than their regular sexual partners upon exit from initiation school. This is ostensibly to avoid passing on misfortune to the valued girlfriend, even though the source of such misfortune is unidentified. In other words both men and women are coerced into condoning multiple sexual partnerships in the name of culture.

Those who defend virginity testing insist that this is a sanctified cultural practice. But such uses of culture make young women’s bodies safer to monitor, while at the same time leaving men’s libidos unchecked. There is no similar examination process or pressure applied to men to remain virgins — women are not taught they are also entitled to virgin partners.

Indeed, in many contexts, women may not ask questions about their partners’ sexual histories and concurrent sexual activities. In such situations, then, asking the man to use a condom is not viable.

We spread the message that men are entitled to sex and that men’s sexual desire for women is uncontrollable. Although we are willing to live with having multiple partners among us, few of us want to own up to it and its consequences. Negotiating condom use often becomes as unwise, difficult and dangerous as engaging in unsafe sex.

To accuse an African of attacking or being disloyal to her/his culture is an effective silencing weapon because it reminds Africans of prior wounding by a series of violent systems that started with slavery and ended with apartheid. It is the ultimate weapon. Yet, as Dr Mamisa Chabula constantly reminds us, customs are meant to heal, not to kill. Opportunistic use of culture against one another lies at the heart of what is killing us in the region.

Pumla Dineo Gqola is a feminist writer and associate professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She writes in all her capacities