So what is love? Or rather a more useful question would be, “What good is love, anyway?” A question made ever more relevant by just having one look at the way our people behave today; young and sadly old too, particularly men.
For the most part men are trapped in a permanent state of juvenility; to the extent that too many of us cannot relate to women without first reducing them to mindless automatons whose sole purpose is to give sex in exchange for fun, alcohol and in some instances other drugs too (even though to a much lesser extent).
So entrenched is this manner that when one among a group of men shows just a sign of treating a woman with some decency, they become so offended that they, like little children resorting to peer pressure, gang up on that person, reprimanding him for such unsightly behaviour and call him names in the process only to express their disapproval. Thereafter one watches with sadness when a grown man succumbs to such pressure and defends himself by claiming not to care about the woman and denying having treated her with decency thus asserting his manhood to his peers.
This is the sad state of us men; juvenile grown-ups who mislead and condition each other. So that to be initiated into this peculiar definition of manhood a man has to brandish the names of women he mistreats, brag about the number he slept or sleeps with and to be placed on an elevated pedestal he has to make a whore of her and show no signs of genuine affection lest he be ridiculed. This is the group dynamic that maintains and regulates this standard of behaviour; the need to belong and once belonging, the desire for recognition and applause.
To succeed in this a man has to escape reality somewhat and in his mind create an imaginary woman who just wants to sleep with him at his whim, especially after drinking and dancing. This imagined woman must also not mind him sleeping around and in fact, encourages and accepts it. He then superimposes this imaginary woman on every woman who cares to lend him company and model his relationship with her on his fantasy. His expectations become his entitlements and when a woman, after a binge and a ball on his account, shows no interest in sleeping with him he concludes something is wrong with her and begins to resent her, even getting violent sometimes.
This has become the life of us. A life devoid of any meaningful purpose, a life that revolves around weekends which incidentally have been expanded to begin on a Thursday evening and end during early morning hours of Monday. This is a life of excess alcohol, sex, cheating, partying, and other drugs as a standard of behaviour.
So what is it that drives man into this pattern of behaviour? At first I used to think it was greed; not being content with what one has and therefore wanting more thus cheating. But I later came to realise that greed has very little to do with it. That greed does not explain the mistreatment of women and also does not explain the need to brag to one’s peers in search of applause or to applaud and elevate peer for such exploits. Greed does not explain why virtually in every case, old man chase after girls much younger. I came to realise therefore that this behaviour comes from a much deeper place and this is where love comes in.
The more I ventured into understanding this, the more it became apparent that this pattern of behaviour is a manifestation of insecurity, a deep sense of inadequacy and to some degree self-loathing in us men. To some extent even my own behaviour served as a guide to a better understanding. Since this behaviour is so juvenescent, I took a trip back to my juvenile years and looked at how as young boys, we related with girls. The parallels are remarkable.
As young boys, fear and intimidation characterised our feeling towards girls. This fear of rejection was informed by a feeling of inadequacy. As society would have it, to deal with the fear many would begin to reduce women into objects. The language evidently evolved together with the attitude and we began to refer to girls not by their names, but as things in their stead. Phrases such as, “La weyi” (that thing), “mntana ndini” (you, child), “itsheri” (which I admit I still do not know what it signifies exactly but I assume it’s probably related to the cherry fruit), and many others became the order of the day.
It became worse when one’s advances were rejected. That boy would be the laughing stock and a butt among his peers in the group and then he would direct his hurt and anger not at the group that ridicules him but at the girl that rejected him or towards girls in general, and in an attempt to avoid hurt, he becomes more intense in his objectification and colder in his interactions with girls.
I sometimes laugh when I think about this. An old friend once said to me, “…kodwa ingathi uyamkhalala kuba ekwalile…” (…but it appears you’re just bitter because she rejected you). This was after I told him the girl was not even that beautiful anyway. I had to at least acknowledge the truth in his words. I mean not too long before then, when it seemed my courting her was bearing fruit, I couldn’t stop raving about her beauty and all of a sudden she no longer was.
What I found more profound than anything else though, was that I was not merely saying it, I actually perceived her as not being beautiful or at least not as beautiful as I first perceived her to be. We conceal our fears behind these defence mechanisms and rationalise our thoughts and behaviours.
Through these rationalisations and objectification, our fear of rejection does not disappear but transforms into a fear of hurt. So we jump from bed to bed evading intimacy at all costs. Even in relationships we cheat just in case she does it first (sometimes rationalise that she’s probably doing it anyway) and that way it won’t hurt as much if she does; self-fulfilling and self-destructive patterns of behaviour. All in an attempt to avoid hurt and pain but sadly, it hurts anyway.
Thus as boys in a wilderness, growing up under the guidance not of model elders but television and peers who know no better, stripped of our culture and fathers, do not develop the healthy psychological tools necessary to deal with our fears and life in general. We carry with us layers upon layers of defence mechanisms that hinder our growth. So with these tendencies we grow older in age but remain children in maturity.
But what about women though? Well women are not just innocent victims in the madness. Victims yes but so too are men. However women are not innocent. They are in fact active participants; after all men do not act alone. Women cheat! I’m even tempted to say to the same extent as men but if I said so I’d be expressing a suspicion but not what I honestly believe. So I’ll leave it at, “almost to the same extent as men.”
From what I’ve gathered, women cheat like there’s no tomorrow. They get involved in love affairs with men they are fully aware are cheating while they themselves are cheating on their partners. Worst still, there is no longer any sense of shame in doing it even among friends. Promiscuity is rampant and gets worse by the day, even worse with every passing generation. It reminds me of a joke by one of my favourite comedians, Dave Chapel, who sums up this situation by saying, “if pussy was a stock, its value would plummet because women have flooded the market with it.”
Even their dress sense reflects the new way they carry themselves; the way some women dress it make prostitutes look conservative. This behaviour does not go alone. It has attached to it the motive for material gain. At the sight of a man that appears made, women are prepared to forget a relationship of years, sleep with the man on the very same night and not be ashamed to ask for money to do her hair the following morning. I suppose one can say women are the new men.
What is it then that drives women in to this pattern of behaviour? I suppose this is where my bias betrays me; after all throughout my upbringing I was surrounded by women and despite everything in the very depths of my heart, I hold an image of women completely untainted. There you have it, a declaration if you may.
This transformation, it appears, is driven by women having been hurt so much for so long by men. Men who’d become so accustomed to forgiveness that we began feeling entitled to it. Not only that, feeling inadequate ourselves we project and impose that inadequacy on women. For so long the man cheated on her and blamed her for the cheating, the batterer blamed her for the beating and then he left her feeling rejected and neglected. She then began to mistrust the man, to resent and to hate him.
Like the abused son who hates his father, yet becomes the image of his father in the hope that the father will love and not abuse him, she began to assume the projection imposed on her by the man on whom she depends for her bread. Feeling ugly, she exposes her body hoping to please him at least that way he pays some attention to her, but all he sees is sex. Better to be objectified than be neglected right? So she assumes the image but nothing of substance emerges. Feeling used and lied to, she then conceals her own hurt in using and lying too. She hates herself, she devalues her body, and in attempting to escape the pain, she became the man she hates.
Such is what defines the interactions between our men and women, at least to a significant degree; that even when we supposedly love, it is sometimes a love born out of self-hate. With these interactions, the relations between men and women become more and more strenuous. We have toxic relationships with each other, toxic relationships with our peers and then we bring children and have toxic relationships with them and to a greater extent with fathers those relationships are non-existent; so repeats the cycle, with the new one worse than the last.
But is it really that surprising? I mean, after all we come from the same broken home, both men and women. Each broken home maintained by this rot we call a society. This behaviour is neither surprising nor is it an accident. It was designed by people whose purpose it was to dominate Black people and so our home had to be destroyed and with it the relationship between man and woman.
We are both victims of a system and in the end perhaps us both, men and women, are just kids longing for a father’s love. We need to meet each other somewhere; there is no survival without the other, no reaching your full potential. Our ancients taught us that we are not rivals but cosmic complements and that love between a man and a woman, far from just elation, is an expression of love for one’s community.
As they continue to teach us, such was love between Ausar and Aset, the first King and Queen of Kemet (ancient Egypt). Their love was so deep it was a brotherly/sisterly love. They bore a child, Heru, as a gift to the community. Heru would later be the hero that would rescue Kemet from ruin; a true gift indeed.
So what good is love anyway? Love nurtures, it supports, it allows for growth and development; love is a means by which a community thrives and survives to posterity.
To perhaps better explain it, let me leave you with an image which I believe so poetically describes love and love’s relationship to sex (pro-creation). This is the image of the Black Widow spider, particularly that of Australia (Latrodectus hasseltii). The male spider aware that by mating with his female complement, runs the risk of being killed and eaten by her, still mates with her; in some instances giving his own life in exchange for the continued survival of his community. What love!
At least for us, we don’t have to deal with being eaten during sex; let’s work this thing!
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This is the Journal of a Broken Spirit #JOABS, let’s talk about this!
