NAKED HYPOCRISY AT THE 'TIMES'

Was the Reed Dance really a porn show? This was the question posed by the Times of Swaziland yesterday (18 September 2007) as it commented on the latest round of the annual Reed Dance.

Thousands of young ‘maidens’ had taken part at the weekend in the Shiselweni dance, which is a follow up to the main Reed Dance that took place earlier this month, but, according to a Times comment piece, young women were ‘forced to strip naked while men watch gleefully pretending to be judges of a beauty contest if not playing pimps over the girls they have been entrusted to protect’.

Boy Scouts also walked in and out of the girls’ domain while the girls got dressed, the comment piece said.

All this prompted the Times to pose its ‘porn’ question.

In breathless tones the comment piece invited us to turn to pages 13 – 18 for highlights of how the girls were subjected to ‘humiliating’ experiences. So I did.

On page 13 there was this headline, INSIDE How men help themselves to naked girls…

I turned inside but couldn't find the story. On page 14 I did find the headline, Do something about the perverts! This was an eyewitness ‘I was there’ account of being one of the girls at the dance. The writer Shamiso Dlamini told how she had to bath with other ‘girls’, while men watched on.

It was, for her, an unpleasant experience, but she said the other girls in the group didn’t seem to mind. After she had finished, a man made a crude remark at her, which upset her.

Later, she reported that a lot of men seemed to be hanging around the girls and some Boy Scouts went into a room when girls were dressing.

This was, for Dlamini, a deeply unpleasant experience. We should respect her feelings on the matter, but her story didn’t deserve the headline ‘perverts’. Neither did the facts in her story justify the description of being ‘forced to strip naked while men watch gleefully pretending to be judges of a beauty contest if not playing pimps over the girls’.

I’m still looking for the report on How men help themselves to naked girls…

The truth is that the Times was leading us all on. It was doing exactly the kind of thing it said it was against. It was sexually exploiting the girls. It was also exploiting its readers. The headline How men help themselves to naked girls… could have come straight out of a porn magazine and it was meant to titillate male readers. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine what kind of story and pictures might have gone alongside such a headline.

The Times went on to further expose its own hypocrisy by publishing on the front page a photograph of women in various stages of undress (including a couple who appear to be totally naked) at a river washing. In case we didn’t get the point, the Times published the same picture, only bigger, on page 14.

But there was more to come. A Times’ reporter went to a group of girls and demanded of them, ‘Are You A Virgin?’ The reporter wrote, ‘The moment I asked the question the girls’ eyes popped out.’ By the end of the day the reporter had asked 51 girls.

If the editor of the Times thought that the men watching the girls washing were ‘perverts’, what does he call his own reporter? He gave a whole page of the Times to the responses his reporter got to the virginity question, so what does that make him?

So was the Reed Dance a porn show? Not really, but the Times reporting certainly was.