Charlene Smith
CROSSFIRE
After writing about a woman gang-raped in front of her children who now has HIV (October 15 to 21), a number of male callers to the Mail & Guardian suggested that my writings about rape suggested I have a boring life and “just need a good fuck”.
Amazing how often it comes down to that. The bedrock holler of the male moron. My response when told of the calls was that those men who say “all a woman needs is a good fuck” are those most incapable of delivering “a good fuck”.
They are the sort who use sex as an ancillary to masturbation, they believe all they need to do is roll over and put it into a woman, ejaculate and all is well with the world. Shame. They have never had, and never will have, good sex as long as they live.
They privately wonder why all the women they sleep with are so “lousy” in bed – to them the phrase “sexual technique” is a foreign concept, they guess it may be a fancy way of saying condoms, which they also don’t use.
After the Charlize Theron ad was banned I was phoned by Cape Talk, which had been deluged by calls about the ban, including one from a man who was outraged by the ad because he had “never raped a woman”. After skilled interviewing by broadcaster Vernon Adams, the caller admitted that he had been in situations where things “had gone a bit far, and the woman said no, but a man is a man, there comes a time when you can’t stop, women must realise this”.
I said to Adams, if he and I sat down with that guy right now and had coffee, he would seem like a nice enough person, who would say, “if anyone raped my wife/sister/child/ girlfriend, I’d kill him”.
But he fails to see the wrong in his own actions. He and those of the “all a woman needs” school are men who have never had a real conversation with a woman. They have never sat down with a woman as a friend, they have never heard her needs. They have no realisation that if they help fulfil her needs, she will reward them by helping to fulfil theirs. Love is a tender exploration of the other, a process where we learn tolerance and forgiveness, of the other and ourselves, where we learn how to make each other happy, how to heal hurts and build trust. It is that process of building trust and confidence that allows us to talk and listen during sex and about sex, that helps us to give and share pleasure. It is an evolution of the self.
But the “all that a woman needs” club only see women as potential sexual conquests – and so they will never give, or receive, really good sex.
They think sex is about their penis – and not the celebration of a good relationship.
That’s part of what makes rape so extraordinarily repulsive to the woman being raped – not only because it’s a violent attack, but its static coldness. Rape is programmed and empty, mechanical and devoid of humanity. Dogs copulate with greater sensitivity. Rape is not sex. Perhaps that’s why so many rapists have such profound erectile dysfunction – or as I explain when I give talks, “they can’t get it up” and if they do, they can’t keep it up.
Those who say “what a woman needs” imply they know what she wants – why consult, they know what is best. (That is why the term “pin prick” has come to denote a term of irritation.) The “I know what you need” fraternity don’t realise that sex is about what is going on in the head, it is about the information that partners share.
The guy who phoned Cape Talk and said, “there comes a time when a man can’t hold back” illustrates the most profound problem of the sexually incompetent, and therefore the eternally frustrated male. A lack of control. Because good sex is all about self control.
In my comment on Cape Talk I asked: “Is he suggesting that if he was in a public place and felt a need to urinate he would simply wet his pants? Is he a hamster?” I subsequently have to apologise to hamsters because it has been drawn to my attention that they will hold it in and go to a specific place in their cage to urinate, they don’t spray their load over whatever, whenever.
Sex is about self control. It is about finding the little keys that turn a partner on, it is about creating desire, it is about holding back one’s own desires to please a partner, confident in the belief that he or she will do the same for you, until both achieve mutual satisfaction – and desires.
One of my favourite men on the planet is called Geoff. Just more than two years ago he was tied up by intruders who raped his wife next to him. Eighty per cent of relationships break up after a rape because of the mood swings of the woman raped, and because her fears become impossible for the pseudo-male to bear. But Geoff and his wife are happy and expect their first baby soon.
They went into intensive counselling after the rape and he says: “It put a huge strain on our relationship. We had to start some things anew; we had to completely redevelop, slowly over time, our sexual relationship. We had to go step by step; we had to relearn sex with our partner as an intimate act. Communication was critical: if the one partner withdrew we had to acknowledge that was fine and we should not take it personally.”
Now that is a man. For in the end sex is about mutual respect.