Thought Leader

By Rebecca Helman I remember the first time I gave a talk to a group of strangers about that fact that I had been raped. The shame of it felt like a weight, trying to crush me into the floor as I attempted to stand up tall and look unblinkingly out into the room. In…

Dr Shahieda Jansen and Neziswa Titi Women are patriarchal. We know this from various sources and interpersonal engagements where we had been corrected by women to “remember our place” or understand that when a man violates a woman she should accept that is how men are. But what about women who work against other women’s…

After seeing the film based on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and not having read the novel, I was somewhat prejudiced against his work as being just another kind of thriller, spruced up with a high-art context in which the action unfolds. Until I read his novel, Inferno, named after the first part of…

Last week, the latest incidence of parliamentary sexism occurred in the Mpumalanga Provincial Legislature. Reports noted that the DA’s deputy provincial leader, Jane Moloisi-Sithole, was called out by an ANC MP for allegedly dressing like a prostitute. The DA walked out when its leader, Anthony Benadie, was ordered from the Chamber by the Speaker who…

As I hopped onto the taxi this morning, I spotted a man peeing on the side of the road. At that moment, as someone who is anti peeing on the side of anything, toilet seat included, I just swelled up with rage. I was also listening to a breakfast radio show as they spoke about…

Emma Watson invited men into “the movement” and the feminist world is in uproar — split into the yay and naysayers. It’s even gone to the extent of fractures along racial (according to one blogger it’s white feminists who support her), regional or even socio-economic background. But identity aside there is some good and bad…

Maleficent (Disney 2014; directed by Robert Stromberg) is a magnificent film, and it almost seems more than fortuitous that the eponymous, powerful faerie is not called Malevolent, but bears a name that rhymes with “magnificent”. Judging by this recent re-imagining of the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, which was rendered in its classic Disney animated movie…

By now, people are familiar with why men rape. Yes it is for power and control, it is a means of exercising masculine entitlement and privilege and it is a means of displacing vulnerability. For me, the more interesting question is: How do men rape? How is rape enabled within our homes, communities and societies?…

“Who’s your daddy?” This is the infamous slogan of commercialised intimacy. A masculine Mandingo demands an answer, while his submissive remnant of a woman is supposed to respond with “Yes, you are my daddy!” Eric Zorn deconstructed the phrase in a piece in the Chicago Tribune. He described it as “a boastful claim of dominance…

While the world is only just coming to terms with saying the word vagina out loud, cunt remains a term that takes people’s breath away as they cringe at the sheer power it contains. Pushed underground, banished from conventional language, cunt has long since been appropriated by patriarchs and misogynists and used as an utterance…