Prof. Gqola Said It Best: On Girlhood and Internalised Misogyny.
There’s nothing I do better than feminist witchcraft, which is why I had to return to discourse. My quest for love and community led me to radical feminism and the subsequent realisation that we cannot claim to be capable of love unless we robustly pursue justice and equality for everyone. Communities are built on love and compassion rather than falsehoods and oppression. Love is intentional, and usually comes with the responsibility to protect others. You cannot love a person and endanger them. Second to that comes compassion, you cannot exist comfortably in a world where people are treated unjustly. That is not how a healthy community works.
Oppression seeks the opposite. It is driven by hate and selfishness, it thrives on dominance and bloodlust. A clear example of how oppression and falsehoods are detrimental to a just community is post-apartheid South Africa. In our country, even the most vibrant of white politicians work to keep their proximity to racist power, their activism short circuits immediately when it is time to centre the black community. They try to create a false equivalence between their post-apartheid experiences and the lived experiences of black people. The falsehood that we are all being subjected to the same violence whereas we aren’t, the injustices of the current government add onto an existing weight on black people while the white population retains access to the best parts and resources of the country. Even the way we complain about corruption isn’t the same, when there’s Loadshedding in a black community, our first fear is crime while white communities worry about the cost of petrol for their generators. This is why these two communities can never be united because one thrives off of the brutality faced by the other. A similar comparison can be made about how men cannot seamlessly coexist with women, children and queer people. While the former is protected by patriarchy, the latter suffers the consequences of its violence. Understanding how unjust the world was for people like me; fat, black and queer is what called me to feminism. Back in 2019, I was introduced to one of the best essays I’ve ever come across, Dr Pumla Dineo Gqola’s “How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender-based violence in contemporary South Africa.” Until then, the only real enemy of women’s liberation in my eyes was men. Realising that women could be foot soldiers for patriarchy was a rude awakening for me.
I centre black people’s experiences in my writing because I am black, when I speak on how unjust the world is in the context of the community within which I exist, it is not in comparison with non-black communities. My sole purpose for being a feminist scholar and writer is to better understand the black community and find ways to rehabilitate our communities and our culture. In the essay, Dr Gqola highlights the country’s history to emphasise the high level of gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa. She points to various factors that negatively impact contemporary public discourse on gender, violence and sexuality.
To understand misogyny and misogynoir, you must first understand patriarchy. To understand patriarchy, you must understand colonisation. All forms of systemic oppression were created by white men for white men, however, throughout the course of time, the black man has inherited them. The creation of beauty standards, the nuclear family and the hierarchy of identities and others like them was initially for the benefit of the white man. All oppressors are aware of their inadequacies, it is through this awareness that oppression came to be: a certain group of people wanted a world they were incapable of building, so violence became the necessary evil to lay claim to the resources belonging to other countries. In my previous post, I briefly touched on how young girls are groomed to not only endure patriarchal violence but to also embrace it as a rite of passage. While the boy child is being taught to be violent on the one hand, you have the girl child being taught to shrink herself to fit into the cracks of masculinity on the other. It is the same with adult black people and other minority groups. The main weapon in every form of oppression is self-image. How one party views themselves in comparison to the other – how superior or inferior they feel next to the other party. Power is impossible without fear and fear cannot exist without violence or its threat. This is why centuries later, we are still fighting against colonial power and its impact on our livelihoods.
Patriarchy affects the way women experience relationships with one another, how they experience their bodies and their overall self-image. This is because like every form of warfare, patriarchy is a psychological condition as much as it is a social and physical condition. The first breakdown is seen in the maternal wound. The way the girl child is in a relationship with her mother. A myth that we’re all fed is that sons are more likely to have a better relationship with their mothers as opposed to mother-and-daughter relationships and vice versa with daughters and their fathers. The issue with this narrative in our country specifically, is that we’re a fatherless nation, a lot of children are without present or active fathers with whom they share healthy relationships. “In 2016, most children aged 0 – 6 (47,6%) lived in single-parent families of which 45,6% lived with their mothers only and 2% lived with their fathers only. The highest percentage of children who lived with their mothers only were children under the age of one (52,3%) and children aged one (49,7%)”- Mbalo Brief, 2018. Most of us are left with no choice but to watch our mothers pour into our brothers while we painfully toil for their affection. Some of us never get that affection, no matter how much we burn ourselves to keep our mothers warm. I used to think that the strained relationships between mothers and their daughters were a result of one mirroring the other a lot more than they’d like to admit, this was until I realised that we aren’t raised to be in relationship with one another with the same effort we are groomed to be compatible with men. Our relationships with each other require a lot more honesty and respect than the facade we all know too well to put up for men. This is why I don’t take kindly to men joking about women hating one another because their existence is the reason we can’t be in community. Women are taught to have more grace for men than other women, you see it in the way women’s platonic relationships are fashioned as opposed to how they act around their male friends. There’s an ongoing TikTok trend where girls post voice notes from their guy best friends responding to them being mistreated by their boyfriends. There’s a harsh tone used by these men that all the girls giggle at upon hearing said voice messages because “guy friends are so strict” yet when their women friends speak assertively to them regarding the subpar behaviour their partners subject them to, it is more likely to be received as judgement and not constructive criticism. Women are so used to men mistreating them, even in friendship, that they are not only willing to accept that behaviour but they embrace it as affection.
Dr Gqola talks about a cult of femininities, she highlights the kinds of femininities that are favoured and which of them are empowered.
“It is important that we continue to ask questions about how this is translated, who is locked out, and how ideas about societal transformation are being narrowed down. The gender discourse in the South African public sphere is extremely conservative in the main: women’s empowerment discussions are rarely held in transformative ways, and as a consequence, they comfortably exist alongside overwhelming evidence that South African women are not empowered: the rape and other gender-based violence statistics, the rampant sexual harassment in work and public spaces, the siege on black lesbians and raging homophobia, the very public and relentless circulation of misogynist imagery, metaphors and language. I wonder what Ruth First, communist, anti-racist, journalist, and historian, among many other accolades, would make of the South Africa she fought for. What kind of critique might she have come up with? We know that she did not shy away from difficult questions, even within the left. I think she would have found the contemporary South African ‘gender talk’ in need of much critique. This talk of ‘the empowerment of women’, as currently employed and aired in South Africa, rests on the assumption that ensuring that some women have access to wealth and positions in government and corporate office is enough gender-progressive work for our society. This assumption is flawed on various levels, even if the increased representation of women across all sectors of our society is a worthwhile and necessary project”.
To simplify what’s being said and to reel it back to a narrative we can all identify with, every month we’re subjected to the ick lists or some other form of folly from misogynistic men. We see straight women’s reactions, the hyena cackles and the othering amongst themselves. There’s a specific type of woman that the girls aspire to be, on some days she’s light-skinned with soft features and as a result, is in proximity to male validation. We see her being put on a pedestal by misogynists, which gets the girls going. They resent her and want to be her, so they go out of their way to find flaws in her character to get a good “gotcha moment”. ‘Linda Mtoba is hiding her husband? Let’s go out of our way to find him and expose the lie she has sold us.’ My favourite is the anger aroused by women who decide to leave their partners. The questioning of women who use their agency to remove themselves from a life that other women deem desirable. It’s almost as if it’s unfathomable to the watchers that being mistreated by men warrants leaving as an appropriate response. Better yet, that there could have been irreconcilable differences between the two parties that led to the decision to leave. It comes so naturally to us to poke holes at each other’s characters because there must be something wrong with the woman for a union to come to an end. The most recent one, which baffled me, was seeing a tweet where a woman said something along the lines of ‘The problem is that you guys KNOW Lee Khuzwayo and these men EXPERIENCE Philisiwe’. I must say, I was taken aback by that. The notion that because she’s a pretty ‘thing’, then there must be nothing more to her, and that is why she can’t keep a man. I’ve highlighted two very attractive women’s experiences because they should be the epitome of the false idea created by patriarchy that all it takes to be good enough for men is desirability. It isn’t, men are human beings, and to live a happy and fulfilled life with them you must build proper relationships with them. In most instances, men do not know how to nurture honest relationships and the facade women are conditioned to put up cracks. Sometimes it’s just two ordinary people at odds. The point here is that women are quick to come up with misogynistic assumptions at the breakdown of what they deem as lies being sold to them because they fail to realise how centred their lives are to male validation. So when they realise that the trophy girl can get mistreated it leaves a shock in their system. Ideally, this realisation that patriarchy spits out even the best of women should radicalise women to de-platform men, instead, it creates a further rift between women. The most annoying case I’ve seen is when men play in women’s faces and we all flock in numbers to insult the women in their lives. Men call us fat and ugly and we eagerly hurl insults at women we don’t know. “She’s with him so she deserves the smoke”, why’s it so easy for us to protect men from the consequences of their stupidity?
Patriarchy and misogyny have caused significant damage to women’s relations with each other. Over the years, feminists have worked tirelessly to fight back, not without any pushback, of course, this is evident in the general fatigue we’re seeing online that often manifests itself as either jabs or mockery rather than the robust discourse we were accustomed to getting on the timeline. Unfortunately, similarly to men, some women have a haven in patriarchy and proximity to men. They’d rather be chosen by men than be in community with other women. However, we cannot tire of the work that is required to rehabilitate the black community. We must continue to have these conversations despite the pushback we receive. The idea is that black women will be empowered enough to envision a world where they can coexist with one another without competing with each other. When we reach that place, we will work to build a world where we have a unanimous voice and eventually, we will be liberated from the constraints of internalised misogyny, only then will we be able to dismantle patriarchy.
