By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

DECEMBER 10 was the last day in the programme called ‘Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence’. 

It is difficult for progressive intellectuals, both men and women, to critique the concept, the programme and the way it is carried out because to do so would come across as criticising something perceived to be as good as mother’s milk.

But there are serious problems having to do with the concepts involved and their history. Some of them seem easy to itemise.

λ The first is the popular media reduction of gender to women or the equating of gender with women;

λ The second is the meaning and history of ‘activism’. Activism is a method of struggle chosen by a small and privileged group of activists, usually clustered around privileged NGOs and excluding the majority. It is unusual to see peasants being defined as activists or identifying themselves as such.

λ The third and key problem is the definition of ‘gender-based violence’ (GBV) and the choice of causes which can be blamed as the reasons for the worsening of GBV without upsetting the fundamental ideology of neo-liberal capitalist society, a society which radical women who have studied the history of the problem would prefer to call a sadosociety employing sadosublimination in order to avoid dealing with real causes of violence against women.

One Professor Mary Daly had this to say in her 1984 book called Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy: “The Christian dogma of ‘The Incarnation’ is not only sublime; it is a paradigm of male sublimation. Indeed it is the supremely sublimated male sexual fantasy, assuming fantastic proportions. It is mythic Super-Rape.

Since the Virgin Mother mythically represents all matter to the sublimers/sublimators, the myth of ‘The Incarnation’ symbolically legitimates the rape of all matter as well as all women a project which has been a goal of patriarchal civilization for millennia, but which has been speeded up immeasurably in the age of computerized technology. Nuclearism, chemical contamination of the earth, planned famine, torture of political prisoners, torture of laboratory animals, obscene medical experimentation all are discharges of male instinctual energy through activities that are socially approved by males.”

Professor Daly, therefore, alleged at least three things.First, that the Christian evangelising mission, by exploiting and exporting the myth of Mary the Virgin Mother, in fact exported the acceptable male sublimation of rape on a grand scale. Subliminally, the Church is saying Mary either raped herself to become pregnant or that a male God had to rape Mary in order to give the world its Saviour.

Second, the professor implies that Western civilisation specialises in the promotion of images and rituals which express and celebrate rape in everyday ways that have been made ‘acceptable’. 

Likewise, protests or activist projects serve the same purpose of sublimation.  

They help to restrict definitions of what can be condemned as violence and as gender-based violence, so that only a limited number of causes and culprits are pointed out while the rest of capitalist civilisation and neo-liberal capitalism thrive and spread.  

Sublimation is defined as “…discharge of instinctual energy …through socially approved activities.”  

And activists pursue socially approved activities, thereby helping society to sublimate continuing violence while claiming to be ending it.

The third point Professor Dally makes is that under neo-liberal capitalism, violence and violence against women became worse with the male deployment of advanced weaponry and advanced information and communication technologies in the on-going rape of matter, of the earth and of women.  

Pornography in social media and on tv are classic examples. So has been the media coverage of the destruction, on TV, of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. This is the context within which ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence’ can be critiqued and understood as a single-issue project.

In 2004 the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the University of Zimbabwe published a booklet called The Zimbabwe Male Psyche with Respect to Reproductive Health, HIV, AIDS and Gender Issues.

The publication signaled three significant developments:

λ The neo-liberal conversion of UN agencies into mere conduits for Northern donor funds and donor policies;

λ The donor-funded prostitution of academic work, whereby it became difficult to separate academic research from donor propaganda; and

λ The donor manipulation and interpretation of the real existing suffering and oppression of women in pursuit of what the US Government and USAID call ‘transformational diplomacy goals’.

Indeed, although both men and women, boys and girls were experiencing similar oppression and suffering horrendous violence as a result of the same macro-economic and social and political factors including sanctions, the booklet focused on women against men.

In that 2004 UNFPA booklet, the authors: P. Chiroro, A. Mashu and W. Muhwava, wrote as follows:

“It was hypothesized that the Zimbabwean male psyche is characterized by an internalised, insatiable and self-centered desire for sex with multiple partners, coupled with an intolerant attitude towards women who are perceived to be, primarily, objects of sexual gratification and child bearing.”

Without any reference to control studies based on other societies elsewhere in the world, the authors concluded thus:

“The results of the study provide strong support for the research hypothesis in that the Zimbabwean male psyche appears to be characterized by an internalized, insatiable, self-centered desire for sex with multiple partners, coupled with an intolerant attitude towards women who are perceived to be, primarily, objects for sexual gratification and child bearing. In addition, the results of this study showed the following:

λ Most Zimbabwean men and male youths hold very poor sexuality standards which are characterised by a strong reluctance to engage in safe sex practices during high risk sexual encounters.

λ The study reveals that the majority of Zimbabwean men and male youths view women as inferior to men.  Adversarial sexual beliefs and gender role stereotypes are used to justify violence against women and to deny their sexual and reproductive health rights.

λ The culture and legal system in Zimbabwe provide a fertile ground for the propagation and perpetuation of adversarial sexual behaviour among men and male youths. This exposes them and their partners to the risk of contracting the HIV virus as well as compromising women’s human and reproductive health rights.”

In simple language, what was this UN agency and the three university researchers trying to say? The English dictionary meaning of psyche is ‘the human soul, mind or spirit’.  

So, in what way could the UNFPA claim to have pin-pointed and isolated a definite factor called the soul of the Zimbabwean male or the spirit of the Zimbabwean male, which could then be made responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS and sexual violence in this country?

Indeed, the UNFPA and its consultants attempted to tell the whole world not only that there was a definite, separable power called the Zimbabwean male psyche, but also that they had demonstrated that this definite force or power was responsible for promiscuous sexual behaviour, lust, discrimination against women, abuse of women and girls and the spread of HIV/AIDS. They also meant that the Zimbabwean male psyche was so different from the psyches of other societies that it could be identified as typically and uniquely Zimbabwean.

Since that time, the defamation of the African in HIV/AIDS campaigns and adverts here has followed that highly questionable theory of African tradition and the presumed inherent nature of the African male psyche and male sexuality as responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Although it does not require a great scientist to prove that the allegedly inherent African male psyche is neither typically African nor typically male and Zimbabwean, too many African scholars have complained privately and never dared to challenge this racist re-invention of the 400-year-old myth of African sexuality for fear of losing donor support and fear of being labelled male chauvinist pigs.

Yet, one simple way to demonstrate that this thesis of an inherent Zimbabwean African male psyche is a fraud would be to look at scholarly studies of sex and sexuality in non-African societies in other countries. 

Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex is a book published as far back as 1986 by North American white female researchers and dealing primarily with what can be called the response of the white middle class woman to the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Chapter six of that book is called The Politics of Promiscuity: The Rise of the Sexual Counterrevolution; and it documents cases of sexual promiscuity and sexual aggressiveness among white North American women.  

The promiscuity and aggressiveness are almost identical to the sexual promiscuity, aggressiveness and casualness which UNFPA and the UZ writers chose to present as caused by a typical Zimbabwean male psyche.

In the North American book, the chapter on ‘The Politics of Promiscuity’ opens by introducing Ellen, 34, who thinks she has made “…a nice little life for herself,” because she has earned enough to buy a small house and because she has “…what used to be called All-American  good looks straight, gleaming hair, and clear blue eyes” which enable her to attract the lovers she wants.  

“Her present relationship is just one more phase in her continuing sexual exploration.”  

She was “…randy as a teenager” and it “…was a relief to let my sexual needs explode… I made a lot of demands on men too. I chose them for their sexiness and sensuality.”

But readers may say that is just one woman; what about collective surveys?  

Redbook magazine sent out a sex questionnaire to which 100 000 women happily responded in 1975.  

And “…a considerable number were having affairs while happily married to men they loved and nine out of ten of the young women … were engaging in intercourse before they married.”

Five years later in 1980, Cosmopolitan magazine also sent out a sex questionnaire to which 106 000 women responded, reporting that “…on average, they had had nine lovers.”  

One of them was quoted saying: “I have lovers because what else is there in life that’s so much fun as turning on a new man, interesting him, conquering him?”

By 1983, three magazines Playboy, Family Circle and Ladies Home Journal decided to survey married women whom they described as “…sexually enthusiastic, confident, romantic and satisfied.” 

Whereas in 1958 Alfred C. Kinsey had reported that six to 26 percent of married women were engaging in extramarital affairs, the 1983 surveys showed that the percentage had jumped to between 21 and 43 percent, depending on the type of magazine doing the survey and the type of readers.  

“Among Playboy’s readers, young married wives were ‘fooling around’ more often than their husbands.” 

If promiscuity is considered evil as the 2004 booklet on Zimbabwe concluded, the problem is now much worse both in the US and Zimbabwe because of new media.

The attack on the Zimbabwean male by UNFPA and its sponsored authors can be explained by quoting a passage from Re-Making Love:

“These experts all assumed that women hated casual sex and (were mere victims of male lust and aggression), but they offered no explanation for why so many women were engaged in it.”

One woman tried to correct the misperception about men saying:

“If you (as a woman) go ahead and give in to your desires (not his desires) … and you do go to bed with him, then lots of times you really will lose the man because they (the men), without even realising it, feel like you’ve been too quick and too easy.”

It is also implied in the foreign-modelled HIV/AIDS campaigns that the societies whose donors fund our pseudofeminists here have solved the problems of gender violence.  

In fact they are very sick violent societies. Here is a description of US society borrowed from a male scholar by feminist Professor Mary Daly in the book already cited.

“Culturally, the emergence of male homosexual sadomasochism from underground has coincided with a burgeoning of overt sadism against women in all the communications media. This coincidence has not been by chance. While gay activists were campaigning against stereotypical images of ‘gay people’ in the media, male homosexuals who have direct access to media have been promoting with a vengeance all stereotypes of female masochism. We are witnessing (throughout Western society) the convergence (coming together) of what was once deemed a gay sensibility with what was once deemed a ‘heterosexual sensibility’. That convergence… now reveals itself as fully thriving on female degradation.”

It therefore means that the UNFPA and its UZ consultants put forward a generalisation which can be dismissed objectively as a fraud.  

They failed to separate and define such concepts as culture, instinct, drives, habits and needs.  

They presented an ideological assault on the African male as if it were a new scientific discovery. 

In doing this, they adopted a racist strategy and technique established way back in the days of slavery.

When it ceased to be feasible to justify slavery on the basis of religion, white society invented anthropology as a pseudoscience to do the job, because a ‘scientific’ justification would appear to be unquestionable. This is indeed the subject of Professor Bernard Magubane’s book Race and the Construction of the Disposable Other.  

‘The disposable other’ in the UNFPA study is the resurgent African male whose energies need to be separated from the energies of the resurgent African woman in order to keep Anglo-Saxon imperialism in power for a bit longer.

There is therefore a need for a different approach to Zimbabwe’s struggle against gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. 

This broader history of capitalism and imperialism is important. Europe and North America are known sponsors of the politics pushed by UN agencies and other donors in the South.  

But Europe and North America also created NATO which in 2011 destroyed Libyan society when Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State.  

NATO superintended over massacres of African and Arab men, women and children.  

Results of that global aggression are still evident in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Of all the three NATO leaders celebrating the massacre, Mrs Clinton stood out in 2011 when she said to the TV camera, with an obscene orgasmic grin, and in reference to the open murder of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, and he (Colonel Gaddafi) is dead.”

Mrs Clinton’s obscene display of pleasure in the murder of President Gaddafi stood out for the following reason:

λ Hillary Clinton is a known mother and a supposed champion of gay and lesbian rights, women’s rights and women’s equality who stood out at the 1995 Beijing Conference on Gender as the First Lady of a supposed democratic North America where racism was shunned and all racial and ethnic groups enjoyed equality which was now to be extended to the rest of the world and to include the abolition of all forms of discrimination against women. Yet the Clinton we saw in Libya was a million moral years away from the mother and feminist who appealed to women of the world in Beijing in 1995. NATO-sponsored massacres in Libya did not distinguish whether the killed men, women and children were gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight. NATO did not care.

The display of vampire-like excitement by NATO leaders (both male and female) at the sight of Arab or Moslem blood raised serious questions about the imperialist-sponsored gender equality and feminism which Hillary Clinton represents and which we see donor-sponsored NGOs peddling here. And what Professor Mary Daly said in her 1984 book was that as long as we participate in the sado-sublimation of violence by engaging in nicely packaged activist projects, the violence will not end. In fact, she said by the mid-1980s, the violence was escalating. It is still escalating.