Vanessa Farr : CROSSFIRE
I was perplexed and frustrated, not to mention angered, by Cameron Duodu’s ”Viagra’s here, so let the clit be” (March 12 to 18). What a contradictory article this is: ostensibly, Duodu is attempting to express his support for International Women’s Day, an event which, he grudgingly admits, ”does have its serious aspects”. However, he surrounds his support of the causes this day commemorates with so much misogynistic claptrap that his point is utterly lost.
What Duodu really wants to talk about is how to get women into bed. Why doesn’t he just say this, instead of making shallow attempts to shroud his intentions in political correctness?
That this article appeared in this country at this time is particularly worrying. The political insights that feminist theory has offered are by no means central to South African thinking, despite what our Constitution may say about the equal rights of women and men.
Feminism is not a decadent Western invention that ”sprung from the United States”. Indeed, the movement has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt itself to reflect the concerns of those who embrace it, wherever they may be.
Duodu’s dismissal of feminism as un-African is, however, one of the most disturbing symptoms of the anti-feminist backlash as it is manifest in African. The endless diatribes against a movement that challenges the status quo are strongest where feminism has the most work to do.
Duodu’s assertion that ”the feminists [have taken] over” is laughable. One can only wish that the work by feminist activists over the decades had infiltrated every avenue of our lives and succeeded in making the world a better place.
One of the most significant reasons for the controversy that surrounds the word ”feminism” is that popular notions of what it means to be a feminist have been determined, and distorted, by male writers like Duodu.
It is stunning to think that he saw International Women’s Day as a peg on which to hang his hostility towards self- possessed women. And why does he add insult to injury by presuming that a recounting of stereotypes about feminists constitutes an interesting piece of writing?
Duodu is unoriginal. He presses the red- alert buttons that haunt feminists everywhere: either we are anti-male because we are ”unattractive” to men and therefore resort to feminism to fill our meaningless lives, or we are lesbians and espouse feminism only because it might get us laid.
Either way, by employing these tired old caricatures, Duodo refuses to recognise that feminism is a sophisticated political and philosophical system that speaks to women and men who oppose the suffering that has been inflicted on women for centuries.
Duodu treads the weary line of asserting that feminists are rude ”ladies” incapable of appreciating the niceties of social intercourse. We have, in his view, deformed the gentle flirtation that ought to take place at work by renaming it sexual harassment. This is such an obvious distortion of the power politics at play in offices that it would be laughable were it not so frightening.
His failure to understand that calling your boss ”sweetheart” is hardly comparable to being addressed as ”darling” by the ”shop assistant or tea lady” reflects his refusal to think carefully about the power of language to revitalise and maintain centuries-old states of inequality.
That the ”lady sub-editor” to whom he addressed his remark was resisting his attempts to reduce her to a sex object is almost lost within Duodu’s long-winded asides about the traditions of courtship in the village of his youth.
He further distorts the woman’s response to his remarks by asserting that he comes from a matrilineal culture and therefore should be exonerated from accusations that he is patronising and chauvinistic. He has been taught to worship women, he claims, and expects to be adored by them in return: what his sub-editor requires, however, is that he respect her and the bounds of their professional relationship.
Duodu’s article purports to have been written in response to the celebration of International Women’s Week. Feminists see this week as vital to the ongoing battle to ameliorate the lives of women everywhere. We do not need the struggle against women abuse to be diluted by asides that imply women’s violence against men is just as widespread a problem. Nor do we need to have female genital mutilation opposed only because it can be dismissed as an old- fashioned practice now that ”Viagra is here” to restore old men to full sexual vigour.
What we need is responsible journalism that brings to the world’s attention the fact that women suffer poverty, violence and degradation in numbers incomparably higher than men.
We need men in powerful positions to seize International Women’s Day as an opportunity to confront their own prejudices, question their own sexist practices, and, in reflecting on the ways in which they contribute to and benefit from gendered injustice, to offer meaningful insights into the power imbalances that exist between men and women.
Such an exercise would be true to the revolutionary spirit of International Women’s Day and to the feminist movement which has empowered us to think and act as human beings who have the strength of will to confront traditions of inequality and contribute, through our everyday actions, to their demise.
Vanessa Farr is a doctoral fellow in the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town