We should be giving boys as much attention, not less

First Published on TimesLive | 13 June, 2012 11:19

http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2012/06/13/we-should-be-giving-boys-as-much-attention-not-less-ilive

What’s up with all this attention and resources given to boys and masculinities, an associate and the head of a non-governmental organisation said to me a few months ago after I informed her about a talk on boys I was preparing to give a few days afterwards?

The person who asked me this, it’s significant to note, is a sexuality and gender equality activist with a specific interest in children and youth rights, meaning a likely ally.

Complaints about the funding and space given to the “fashionable topic” of masculinities are nothing new to me. I still find them disquieting though.

There is little confusion in my mind, however, about the significance of gender and sexuality as analytical categories in studying boys’ and men’s lives, as well as of course in trying to understand the societal subordination of girls and women.

I am also clear that, as in the case of white representation of black bodies and lives, as a self-avowed scholar on boys and men within feminist spaces, mine is both an invited and privileged position. Since I depend on their camaraderie, but also their on-going critique of my thought, I remain indebted to many African women, feminists, women’s liberationists, and womanists for their philosophical hospitality.

Such solidarity is especially important as some students, activists like my associate and researchers on gender and women have, from the beginning, raised their eyebrows at my interest in the subject of gender. They see this as usurping the space carved out by women’s liberation movement and feminism. And thus, perhaps like all self-aware white teachers of black children, I have experienced myself as both a stranger and comrade at being invited to teach within women’s and gender studies.  

I do appreciate why there is some reservation against men and women studying and working with boys and men. Much in the history of disciplined enquiry has been studies of men’s knowledge, actually.  

However I am convinced that the general argument that tends to support sentiments against a focus on boys is misplaced.

There is cause to bemoan the dwindling resources for NGOs working on women’s and girls’ issues. But to blame those working on masculinities is not to see the forest for the trees.

It is also incorrect to think that there have been buckets of money specifically allocated to the quality education of impoverished black boys for a productive, creative and meaningful life. Where money has been thrown at black boys from deprived homes, there still isn’t the kind of close and attentiveness that is required to radically change the world around them.

I was reminded of my associate’s displeasure about the attention given to boys when I read the Department of Basic Education’s report on the ‘2009-2010 Annual Surveys for Ordinary Schools’ released last month.

Two numbers that generated several media stories are 109 and 45 276. The first is the number of Grade 3 learners who fell pregnant in 2009 in South Africa, a dramatic increase from 17 in 2008. The second is the number of learners who fell pregnant, which was down from 49 599 in 2008.

These are unbelievable numbers. What they are suggestive of is that, in spite of the rhetoric about women and children, post-apartheid South Africa continues to desperately fail its girl-children. And it’s about much more than schooling.

None but a miracle girl begets herself pregnant while still in Grade 3 or at any other time. There is a boy somewhere in the background. More often it is a boy in the body of a grown man. And there’s the rub.

In turn, sex in Grade 3 suggests rape.

No girl wants to be sexually violated, however economically desperate, skimpily dressed or drunk she may be. The main cause of all sexual violence is a gender traditionalism that underpins men’s social psychologies of sexual entitlement over female bodies.

It is true that in many countries girls and women continue to confront violence and unjust discrimination on daily basis on the basis of age and gender.

It is true too that in many societies, China being the prime but not only example, there is still a preference for sons over daughters.

Furthermore, in many families and societies around the world girls and women still tend to enjoy less self-determination than the other sex. Unlike the latter, they can’t play as freely, get coerced into sex, may be forcibly married at an early age, are unable to take a walk without being harassed, are prohibited from leaving their homes unaccompanied by males, and can’t dream too big.

It is out of such conditions which characterise girlhood and women’s existence that schoolgirls get left with the baby.

Unless there is an empowering feminist sexuality and gender education for girls, their sisters and mothers, together with appropriate laws and their enforcement, they will continue to be preyed upon by males.

Yet, it is ludicrous to believe that male-children are in the same boat as older males. Boys are not men. They are developing beings. Rather than be punished for the sins of their fathers or unfairly advantaged, they ought to be educated for an egalitarian and compassionate society.

Failure to mould boys into fans of equality falls on the shoulders of adults.

Very few boys are born dictators, and none runs the world. Usually it is patriarchal traditionalism, with the complicit support of the majority of men and women, which creates the rules and norms that allow heterosexual men as a group to dominate the gender and sexual order.

While they may get some benefit from men’s gendered sexual power, boys also suffer great consequences from the social order. Like girls, boys in many countries face the ravages of social and economic inequalities.

The gender order is not geared to make boys live happier, healthier, and longer lives. In fact, being a boy, especially a black boy from a poor neighbourhood, puts one at heightened risk of premature death from accidents and violence.

By educating a girl for a feminist, educated, confident, happier and healthier life, without empowering a boy with progressive education to make them egalitarian, democratic, non-violent and healthier life does not just mean we will be faced with the problem of pregnant children for the foreseeable future. It retards the general quality of life in our society.

It would make girls’ present and future lives better if we also gave boys the kind of education that makes them more caring about girls’ needs and aspirations. 

Naturally, to work with boys and men only without due regard to the negative effects of the gender order on girls and women is to tacitly support the status quo. 

Instead of asking “what’s up with all this attention given to boys”, we ought to be asking, what kind of attention shall we give to boys to make their own lives and as well as girls’ full of worth?  

The kind of attention we need to give boys, especially black boys, is one that turns them, in their hearts and brains, into true believers of women’s and girls’ rights to their bodies and ambitions. If we don’t, we will continue to fail many girls, but also persists in underachieving as a culture.

Loving disability



Walking to work this morning, I saw a young man with an older woman, running across the street hand in hand. There was a sense of urgency in crossing a busy, major road and a sense of joy too at their bodies, joined together to accomplish the task of getting from one place to another safely. It was one of those the biggest pleasures in life are contained in the small things or in this case, the little dangers safely traversed.

They walked in front of me. I watched them, the young man, his feet splayed as he walked unawaredly inelegantly enfolded  into the older woman: his mother, aunt, or caregiver perhaps. They were completely focused on each other, tender, present, joyful, and easy in their intimacy, easy in the closeness and the small (or large if a good life is a sequence of enough little pleasures) talk of the morning. It was beautiful to witness, the give and take, the mutual and reciprocal pleasure. It looked like a dance of intimacy and care so well-practiced that the steps are less important than the pleasures of dancing together.

So, why would I notice this, you may well ask. I was surprised by the mutuality, the reciprocity, not the intimacy in the encounter. I was surprised by how present the older woman was, her palpable pleasure in the young man. You may be raising your eyebrows here or should be. I've left out a salient point, the young man looked to be developmentally disabled; child-like in a body of a twenty-something year old.

I've been reading a fair amount of disability literature and the models of disability rarely mention this. The pleasure that is received by the caregivers. The focus, or at least the literature I have been reading, is usually focused on models of care, models of righting ruinous and stigmatising perception, models of integration, models that provide support and education for the families of the disabled. If parents write to capture the reality of parenting a disabled child, it is usually in fighting terms, no matter how dry or tender the discourse: my child is worth loving, why does society not see. If disabled people write their reality, there is this showing normalcy within abnormal conditions too. When parents or caregivers talk anecdotaly about someone who is disabled, they usually make explicit that the person is loving, as if this were in doubt. Something profound slips in these accounts.



The capacity to love, the what is received from the person who is deemed incapacitated. The need to defend or disavow what is already and unconsciously accorded to those we consider able-bodied. A similar kind of operation pertains for identity politics on race, gender, class. The imaginary where somehow reciprocity and mutuality become contained in stereotype, stigma and prejudice. The reduction of those intangible things that make life worth living, love flourish and bring all parties in intersubjective exchanges to a fullness of the human condition.



Undoubtedly there are stresses in caring for someone who is subjected to structural violences, requires more care in a world that splits our attentions and demands commodified responses, where value is accorded on unequal scales according to who is most human. In a world or societies rather that discipline us into regimes of value, what I witnessed this morning might have been a moment of mutual tender and intangible exchange that is not always constant for a  life enfolded by capitalism brings with it multiple pressures, and varying emotional, structural and psychological resources at any given time.



Pic sourced at http://www.idrs.org.au/



However, it made me pause and wonder, in which ways those who do not traverse life in ordinary, unmarked ways enable new capacities of caring, different modalities of attention, alternate requirements of engaing with the world. The older woman was fully present, and there was something joyous about it, something immediate about her attention and focus on the young man that made them both appear full. I wonder if this was a result of his 'disability', that its conditions generate presence and full engagement, a celebration of little victories like crossing a road successfully that might be all too fleeting, an acceptance of what is and a letting go of expectation, a mode of attention that is open and engaged, a tenderness and joy in the now.

I have heard people remark that their disabled child was a gift, and wondered at it, the need to say it. In a romantic view all children are gifts, that is if society were equal. Usually theses parents will say s/he is loving. I wonder now after this encounter if it is less about the child's very human capacity to love (although we know this is not always channelled well or reciprocated) or whether it is the disabled child teaching adults how to love in an unmediated way, beyond expectation, pausing after a harrowing day to bring their full attention home, bringing their capacity to care to the fore, opening them up to the moment; for there is no protection from the disabled child's need, no good reason to warrant the withdrawal of love, no good reason for distracted attention and probably bad interactional consequences too. In other words, does loving the disabled child give the adult a gift of the self, as most good loves do that, bring our highest self or most whole self into the world whereas anaemic loves tend to bring a defensive and thus fragmented self to the fore. I wonder how difficult it is to sustain or whether like toxic or resentful parental care it becomes a habit? I wonder why it's possible for some people or in some moments, like this morning and not others?

I have many, many questions and much food for thought. I'm just grateful to have witnessed this encounter today. Social scientists like to talk about the importance of contingency, this contingent moment's synchronicty is uncanny and necessary.