As the bodies of women kept turning up in and around Kempton Park, at least nine so far, Major General Fred Kekana, the acting Gauteng provincial police commissioner, went on camera and told women and girls to walk in groups, avoid isolated areas and stay aware of their surroundings.
Not a word to the men, no "talk to your buddies". The advice went to the women: be more careful, be more prepared. It's the miniskirt argument with a badge on it, and it tells you exactly where this country thinks the responsibility sits.
I've had a few conversations with men about this lately, and almost all of them end up in the same place, which is government. Policing must be better, courts must be faster, somebody must do something. I agree, and policing does need to be better. But government already knows exactly what is going on. You could sit in front of the president tomorrow and tell him everything you know, and it wouldn't change a single thing that gets said over a beer on Friday night.
That's where this lives, in the head of the man on the street, and no government can legislate its way in there.
So this is written to the guy sitting next to you on the train or the plane. Decent, well educated, "one of the good guys", would never lay a hand on a woman, and so soaked in the way men talk about women that he doesn't hear what comes out of his own mouth with his buddies. Every time that goes unchallenged we make it a little more normal to treat women as second-class citizens, one beer at a time.
The bar is on the floor
Somewhere along the way we set the bar for being a good man so low you could trip over it. You haven't raped anyone, hit your girlfriend or killed a woman? Congratulations, you've met the entry requirements for being a man.
You know the old line about evil winning when good men do nothing. I'd put it differently. When good men do nothing, they are not good, and they are not men.
"But will it change the rapist?"
A friend of mine, a man, pushed back on this, and it's a "fair" push. Picture ten guys at a bar having drinks, and one of them is a rapist (they don't know it; to them, he's just the guy with the... kind of "off" jokes). Someone makes a degrading comment about a woman, and my friend stands up and says that's not on, you should be ashamed of yourself. The rapist is going to do it anyway, he said. Is being told off going to rewire a man who is, as he put it, evil in his DNA?
Probably not, and I'm not naive about that. But why have we decided the rapist is the only person in that room who counts? And why is he still in the room?
If it's his regular bar, and seven or eight men tell him the same thing every time he opens his mouth, sooner or later he isn't welcome there. Maybe there's a woman at the next table who doesn't know him, and now she knows he isn't safe. Maybe there's a younger guy in the group finding out for the first time that talking about women like that buys you nothing from other men. You won't fix the man. You can take away his cover, and a bar that has stopped protecting him is a safer bar for every woman in it.
There's another part men don't think about. If I bring a guy into my circle who I know is a bit dodgy, maybe a big mouth, maybe just a bit vulgar, the one who tells the jokes that are, you know, almost acceptable, I'm telling every woman there that he's safe. They trust me, so by proxy they trust him. I've vouched for him without saying a word. So it's on us to show him the door and tell him he doesn't belong here.
Staying silent is a tacit agreement. It tells him what he said was fine and he can carry on.
Such a girl
A few months ago I found some of this in myself, and it wasn't comfortable.
I was training, my trainer did something, and I said, "Ha ha ha, you are such a girl." A few days later I was watching a movie and someone praised a woman by saying, "She's the man." That's when it clicked. When we want to say something is strong or good, it's a man. When we want to cut someone down, we call him a girl. Two words, and the whole hierarchy is sitting right there.
I was raised by an incredibly strong lesbian woman. She taught me how to treat women, and if I got it wrong she would, for lack of a better phrase, f%&k me up. I have never believed women are weaker than men, and yet that little piece of misogyny was still sitting in my vocabulary, dressed up as a joke, until I noticed it. I will never say it again. I don't want a medal for that. I'm telling you because if it got into me, it's in you too.
Now put that joke in a living room. Uncle Redface says the thing everyone has been politely laughing at for twenty years, and he thinks it's harmless. There's a boy on the carpet who hears that girls are weak and men are in charge. There's a girl on the couch who hears that she's weak and needs a man to protect her. Years later they meet, and he thinks he owns her and can do with her as he pleases. Nobody ever sat either of them down and put that stupid idea in their heads. They got it from Uncle Redface, and from every man in the room who let it slide.
I got lucky with my mother. A lot of boys were raised as little princes who could do no wrong, and they grow into men who think controlling a woman is simply how it's done.
Not all men
Yes, not all men, and we know that, so sit down.
Look at it from the other side, with a picture I didn't come up with but haven't been able to shake. Put a hundred chocolate balls in a bowl and tell me one of them is a chocolate-covered turd. I'm not putting my hand in that bowl, and neither are you, and nobody would call you paranoid for it. And somewhere in the room there's another guy who knows exactly which chocolate has the turd inside, and he says nothing. It's going to be all men until it's no men, and the only way it gets to no men is if the good ones start dealing with the turd instead of complaining that nobody wants the chocolates.
So when a woman talks about being afraid of men, stop checking whether you personally are one of the dangerous ones, and ask yourself what you do when your mate is.
Friends of friends
Seven women have told me about being sexually assaulted. Three of them were complete strangers to me. Four are friends, from a circle of friends that is not very big.
None of those stories involved a stranger breaking in off the street, which is how most people picture it happening. These were young women at university, and the men were educated guys with good prospects who went to the same universities and simply didn't hear the word no. A friend of a friend. And don't tell me his friends had no idea. They knew how he spoke about women. They heard it and let it go.
Misogyny doesn't have a colour, a degree or a postcode. There's no school fee high enough and no suburb nice enough to keep it out.
Why do they tell me? Maybe because they feel safe with me. Maybe because I'm gay, so they know I'm not going to try anything, and I'm not going to answer with "not all men".
Why I'm not sitting this one out
I could tap out of this very easily. I don't even sleep with women. I could call it a problem for women and the straight men they date, say something sympathetic and get on with my life.
But I know what it means when someone who isn't affected by what you're going through stands next to you anyway. There's a rainbow crossing painted on the road in De Waterkant in Cape Town. I wrote an article about it and shared it on my social media, and I can count the number of non-queer people who shared it on one hand. I'm a grown man, I know who I am, and I'm big enough to look after myself, so that crossing isn't really for me. It's for the eight-year-old sitting in church being told they're going to hell, who sees it and thinks maybe it gets better. When somebody defaces it, which has happened twice this month, that same child gets the other message, that there is something wrong with them, and that's the message that ends in self-harm.
Words and signs make safe spaces, and they create hope. When a man speaks up in a group, the woman in that group sees that someone is looking out for her. She feels a little less alone, and a little more able to say something herself.
And it pisses me off that it's always the same people doing the fighting: women, people of colour, queer people. If you've never had to fight for your vote, your right to marry, your seat on the bus or your safety, you don't really know how to join someone else's fight. It's easy for a straight guy who has never raped or killed a woman to decide this isn't his problem. But your buddy probably did something, and you looked away when he joked about it.
Men listen to men
I sent a friend a video about men who follow men, the Andrew Tate cult. They call themselves "alphas", and when the first guy tells them to drop and give him ten, they drop and give him ten, because what they actually want is a leader.
So give them one, a better one. If you're a guy other guys look up to, the rugged, manly "ALPHA" type (I f%&king cringe at that word), at the gym, in the office, on the field or on Instagram, you have more pull on this than any politician. You don't even have to talk to a camera. Share the post. Your feed fills up with whatever you engage with, and the people who follow you see it too, and somewhere in there is one guy who has never thought about any of this. Change one dickhead's mind and maybe one woman doesn't get raped, one girl doesn't grow up believing she's less than, and one boy doesn't turn into Uncle Redface. I'll take that trade every time.
Say it at the braai, in the WhatsApp group, in the change room, and at the family lunch when Uncle Redface starts up. Say it where the men who need to hear it actually are, and say it before a woman has to.
Yes, it's uncomfortable. It might cost you a friend or two, who shouldn't have been your friends anyway, and that's a very small price next to another woman raped or killed. And whatever discomfort you feel is nothing next to what women live with every day: walking in groups, telling someone their plans, keeping their phone in their hand, and working out which man in the room is safe before they've even sat down. Maybe all of us need to get a lot more uncomfortable, because nothing else has worked.
I can't promise that calling out a comment will stop a rapist. I do know what silence does, which is f%&k all, except tell him to carry on.
When good men do nothing, they are not good, and they are not men. They're demons, and they braai with us, watch the game with us, and we tell our female friends they're lekker ouens.
SO GUYS, MEN...
I BEG you, especially if you have a following on social media: PLEASE share the posts that women, and other men, make about this problem, post about it yourself, and better still, put yourself on camera. We need more good men showing their faces, so the boys who watch the Andrew Tates of the world see yours too, and maybe next time they scroll straight past them, because now they've seen what a man actually looks like, how he behaves and who he protects.
If you feel this is an attack on men, it is, and then you're not just part of the problem, you are the problem.
