Sex, Zuma, intellectualism...who or which 'comes' naturally?

Source : Sapa /dbm/tk

An email joke doing the rounds at the moment is titled “An incredible story of luck and inspiration for us all!” It shows a picture of an extremely ugly, fat man with a gorgeous blonde clinging to him. Let’s call them Simon and Gwen. Simon is a cultural stereotype of ugliness. His face looks like a tub of lard into which piggish, widely set apart eyes have been pinpricked. Simon’s pimply jowls must quiver and shake when he talks or laughs and his lips look like a slash of garish lipstick. Most (all?) women, brought up with their cultural norms, would find him repulsive. The only thing the couple perhaps have in common are large breasts. In many cultures, large breasts … on women … are sexy, a huge turn on. But not on men. Gwen’s large, perky breasts are the kind most men immediately, instinctively look at (oh, yes, definitely including “sexist” me, my eyes helpless iron filings flung at two magnificently shaped magnets).

This behaviour will always be in spite of the judgement and baying of some feminists, be they ultra, radical or Marxist. Then we blokes, jaws hanging, look at Gwen’s succulent, smirking mouth and long, sensitive fingers. Her lips are surely smirking because she knows what she has, what power she has over “us”. And, if honesty “betrays” us*, we men immediately imagine various forms of sex with Gwen, the oral kind most certainly being one exercise that has us ashamed at our masculine reaction to her, to her body, the sweet torture of her breasts and mouth.

At least that is how some feminists would have us be; be ashamed of who you are. Cry along with Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, “Mama, how I wish I had never been born at all“. Weep, along with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, “Mother do you think she’s good enough — to me? Mother do you think she’s dangerous — to me?” Like Roger Waters, scream in shame and fear at the next line, “Mother will she tear your little boy apart?” Then sob the next ,”Mother will she break my heart?”

Gwen’s sensual, assured smile proleptically suggest a mouthful of ravaging teeth. Our Gwen (is she ours, or are we hers?) has chiseled cheekbones and her nail-bright eyes give her a slightly hawkish look. Which some men, or women for that matter, would have fantasies about because of bondage sex tendencies (in which I do not partake, but do not judge; though I do not mind my bare bottom being spanked just a little bit while I squeal in delight … but it ends there). It is clear — to me — the word “me” assumed by my cultural conditioning — that slinky Gwen has taken possession of our portly Simon. Enforcing this image of female power is her clawed hands draped around his passive body. She is leaning forward, the aggressor, gazing like a snake into the camera. He is leaning back, not resisting but — assisted by the caption which we will come to later — he is also hardly believing his luck. And hoo aah, the nails on her hands? They indeed are talons. And would rake, nay peel, through the skin of a man’s back like a scene from some “Courtney saga” schoolboy sex fantasy in a Wilbur Smith novel. (Well do I remember those teenage, furtive days with one of his books in the toilet.) Gwen’s nails look like the long, razored, plastic kind some girls favour (Dream Nails?). No doubt more for aesthetic than shredding reasons. No doubt.

The reader then turns to the caption beneath the unlikely picture. “This man won $180-million at the lottery and … two days later found the love of his life! What luck!” He found our Gwen. Fancy that. The hawk-like look on Gwen’s face is now so more foreboding.

I chuckled at the picture and the joke, as did many of the senders and receivers of the gag. Why? Because it has the human truth, bitter or sweet, about men, women, power and sexuality. It has an iron truth beyond the cold, intellectual, biased discourses of the likes of Christi van der Westhuizen in her recent blog. One part of the Gwen/Simon joke is that men think they are in power, but often they are not. The subversion of the slave/master dichotomy often happens in history. The master or mistress becomes reliant on the serf for existence.

Bottom line, and nothing much to do with intellectualism: we men often think with our little heads, and always have. It is built into the “pre-brain” or reptilian brain, in our heads. And it’s OK to laugh about it, celebrate our goofy, joyous desires through humour. Ask Bill Clinton about his Monica, Marc Anthony about his Cleopatra. Even though they were world-class leaders, they were just doing what comes (ahem) naturally. Though it has its place, I grow increasingly suspicious of overt intellectualism, at least the kind Christi van der Westhuizen tends to use. They just do not represent the million microsignals that flash between men and women as they decide what is a mutually satisfying relation, be it hetero- or homosexual, monogamist or polygamist. Sex comes naturally — though we should always have restraints such as ensuring it is consensual — unlike arduous intellectual thought. And who wishes to contemplate a passage from Das Kapital or Imagined Communities whilst assisting, on jostling bed, one’s partner to a back-arching climax? Quite simply, Christi just makes too much heavy weather of Zuma’s polygamy.

Notice I said it’s OK to laugh about our sex, and that aspect of our sexuality, not rape. Rape is never a laughing matter.

I don’t particularly care for Jacob Zuma. He is not a world-class leader. I cannot take him seriously, including his statements about sexual hygiene, but I do not have not an issue with his polygamy. That is a cultural paradigm which the likes of Christi van der Westhuizen are using to condemn him and his ilk, without making it clear how men and women should behave or what marital customs they should adopt. Polygamy has been accepted in societies for millennia and I don’t think it is for others to judge.

Christi says, Why “should” some practices continue because they are “cultural” while other cultural practices and attitudes (such as putting the welfare of the group before that of the individual) can be chucked in the pursuit of personal enrichment, as we have seen in this country since 1994?

One thing I dislike about this kind of argumentation is that the question posed is not answered, and thus becomes rhetorical, self-enclosed, the “answer” inarguable. The implicit answer is that the valorisation of some cultural practices over others is incorrect, and serves some, not others. But that is just a natural, historical evolution from certain ethnic practices to others. Various black cultures have evolved from preserving one particular set of customs to appropriating others, maintaining some customs and throwing away others. Notice there is no agency in the previous sentence. Zuma is caught up in an evolution he has no control over. The fact is that there will always be a hegemony in any state system; we all surely know this.

But Christi does put it well when she says: “The ironic consequence, says Mamdani, is that democratic South Africa remains saddled with a dualistic legal system — just like apartheid South Africa. Civil law and rights have been deracialised but exist side by side with an ethnicised customary law applied by ethnicised authorities. HF Verwoerd would have smiled.” Very well put by a very good writer and sharp thinker whom I admire, as do I admire her stance for women. Hence I engage a bit with her article. I respectfully do not agree with all the entailments and context of this statement against the background of other statements in her article.

For a start, would the real Verwoerd smile? I do not think so. He helped design apartheid and would stare in horror at the goings-on in South Africa since the arrival of FW de Klerk. He would not have found Zuma funny at all. The facts are Verwoerd was a full-blooded racist who justified his racial position through the Bible and his party’s ideology. This suggests that Christi has created a fictional Verwoerd, as the real Verwoerd would never smile at a black man in power. Might I suggest in what I have argued above and in what follows she therefore has fictionalised Zuma.

Christi writes: “True to the symbolism of the collection of women as a sign of masculine potency, Zuma has since his acquittal in his rape trial in 2006 married two young women (33- and 37-years old) and got engaged to another. If he marries her, she will be his fourth current wife and it will be his sixth wedding. The recent revelation of his sexual interaction with another friend’s daughter confirms the pattern.” What pattern? Is it a bad pattern? A good one? Christi does not make this clear. I don’t mind her deciding the pattern is good or bad, so long as she explains the template, the model, she is using to judge the pattern.

In a sense she makes it clear in the next paragraph when she dubiously links the “pattern” to Zuma’s “patriachial chauvinism”, but I am not clear as to how she makes the link. It seems partly based on an unexamined dislike for polygamy.

My rhetorical question. Has Christi asked all the president’s wives if they are happy with their married status to Zuma? Well, I will answer my simple question: she has not asked them. But a subtext of Christi’s reasoning is that the wives are enslaved to Zuma, products of his “patriarchal chauvinism” and that they are not his spouses or lovers by choice. Now I know I am now putting words into Christi’s mouth. But it is part of her undeclared subtext and is all over her blog, that these wives had no choice: “The effect [of Zuma’s behaviour] can partly be seen in the form of setbacks to women’s human rights.” Christi has avoided the issue of whether or not those Gwens are happy with their jovial Simon, our president. Though I could be proven wrong, I think they are all pretty much happy and want to be with him and love their lifestyle. How many Sandton housewives or Shanghai house-husbands like this state of affairs as well? Plenty.

Polygamy or polyandry from my point of view? Not for me at all. I am happy with my Chook in China and do not wish to share her. But it is also not for me to judge other people’s marital practices and this still needs to be built into Christi’s overall discourse.

My compelling question to Christi is to define, in simple terms, how partners should behave towards each other instead of just dismissing certain sexual and marital customs, evolved or not evolved. She has not offered us any clear template on relational and marital behaviour at all.

Observing South Africa from China? Hilarious! It is a different perspective. Crucial values and norms to do with sex and marriage in SA are being judged, while others are not.

*Betrays us of what? That we don’t fit into some neat intellectual discourse of how men should behave?