LET’S TALK ABOUT IGNORANCE

I was at a workshop in Mbabane the other week when one of the organisers – a man from England – told us about the time he was present at the birth of his son. The audience (entirely Swazi) lapsed into embarrassed silence, before a couple of Swazi men broke into uncontrollable giggles. The absurdity of a man being with his wife while his son was being born was just too wacky an idea for them to take.

I was reminded of this recently as I was looking through past editions of a relatively new column that has been appearing in the Times of Swaziland each Friday.

It’s called let’s Talk About Sex and on a casual glance it appears to be a column of unbiased information and advice about matters of sexual health. However, if you look a bit closer they turn out to be columns of ignorance, bias and hatred.

Here’s a sample from a column about men being present when their wives give birth.

‘Men are attracted to most women by sight and in the same way will be generally repulsed by sight. When they see the actual birth of the child, some men feel that his girlfriend or wife’s private parts have been “stretched” and therefore the sexual appetite becomes low’ (17 August 2007).

Vusi Dlamini, the sales and marketing manager, of an organisation called the Family Life Association of Swaziland (FLAS), wrote the above nonsense. It turns out that Let’s Talk About Sex, isn’t really about giving Swazis unbiased, factual information about sexual health, it’s actually thinly disguised propaganda for FLAS, an organisation with fundamentalist Christian overtones.

Here’s another one. This time it’s FLAS on why women shouldn’t use sex aids.

‘.. it is dangerous in the sense that some people tend to prefer it even when they are married and feel no satisfaction with their partners. It is said to be a thing for whores, yet a lot of people do it ….’ (10 August 2007).

In the FLAS universe a women without a man isn’t whole and they can’t (aren’t allowed) to exist in their own right. Also, FLAS has a thing about ‘whores’. Here’s FLAS on women who carry condoms.

‘The greater section of the public thinks it is promiscuous and you will readily be labelled a whore’ (3 August 2007).

Swaziland is a closed society and it can be very difficult to get good, unbiased information about any subject. It is that much harder when the subject under question is sex. Cultural taboos make it almost impossible for people to talk openly about sex and to share information and feelings on the subject. There is also a lot of hypocrisy on the subject, especially from the Christian Church. (We all know of pastors who rape children in their congregation, but preach that masturbation is sinful.)

An ordinary person in Swaziland has next to no opportunity to get information (about anything) other than through the media. All forms of modern communications are weak in Swaziland and people in the kingdom rely heavily on word-of-mouth. Culturally, people are likely to defer to people who are considered to be knowledgeable. Simply by allowing a person space in their newspaper, editors give that person the status of ‘knowledgeable person’. This is even if the person doesn’t know what they are talking about and do not deserve such a status.

That means the media have to be especially careful about the qualifications of the people who write for them and the quality of the information that they provide. Let’s Talk About Sex fails badly: it pretends to be unbiased information, but instead offers a very narrow prejudiced view of the world.

This worldview is not only misinformed, it can be incredibly dangerous.

I’ll leave you to think about the most recent column (7 September 2007). Here we are told that you can’t leave your children with homosexuals because ‘a great number of them’ are child abusers. Also, homosexual men are not born ‘gay’; they become gay because they have themselves been abused as children.

The person telling us this is Thuli Rudd, the president of the Gays and Lesbians Against HIV and AIDS Swaziland (GLAHAS). GLAHAS is in turn affiliated to the Swaziland National Network of People Living With HIV and AIDS (SWANNEPHA).

Every thing Rudd says is simply not true. There is no scientific evidence anywhere in the world to support what she says. What is very disturbing is that Rudd is a leader of an organisation that is meant to support homosexuals. Her organisation is in turn affiliated to a second organisation that should be welcoming to all people with HIV AIDS (including homosexuals). Rudd is peddling hatred against homosexuals, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe she doesn’t realise it. After all the kind of blind prejudice she sprouts is quite commonly heard in Swaziland.

But the Times of Swaziland doesn’t get let of so easily. It should cancel the column forthwith. Let’s Talk About Sex is not journalism, it is the worse kind of ignorance: the ignorance that spreads hatred.

SISTERS DO IT ON THEIR OWN

Recently I commented about how the Times Sunday denigrated women and encouraged sexual harassment in the workplace.

A reader has pointed out that this kind of attitude to women is nothing new in the Swazi press. Each week there are ‘pin up’ photographs of women wearing next to no clothes (The Weekend Observer and Swazi News are the main offenders here).

Then there are the items in the Times Sunday ‘Style’ section which report on dance clubs and such like which make young women look like empty heads who have nothing on their minds but sex.

There was a particularly nasty example of this a few months ago. The Times Sunday (31 December 2006) had a front page picture of two young women with their arms around each others neck and appearing to kiss one another with the headline ‘It’s not in our constitution, but … Sisters do it on their own’. There was then a ‘taster’ headline directing readers to a further four pictures on page 3, which included the two women on a crowded dance floor of a nightclub in Pigg’s Peak.

The four pictures were similar to one another and they show the women engaged in what the newspaper terms ‘French kissing’.

One picture caption sums up the paper’s mood, ‘They just could not resist each other and revellers did not bother them while at it.’

Not only were the pictures unethical because they treated the women as sex objects to titillate men, but they also invaded the privacy of two totally innocent young women who were in a public place enjoying themselves. The newspapers, against the Swaziland National Association of Journalists’ own Code of Ethics, violated their privacy. Article five states quite clearly that journalists should respect the right of the individual’s privacy and human dignity.

A report that accompanies the pictures further intrudes into the women’s privacy. We are told the women were seemingly together with a couple of boyfriends whom they were regularly seen dancing with and even had a meal together. The report then recounts that the two women got on the dance floor and started and continued kissing ‘with French kissing that could easily make it into the Guinness World Book of Records as the longest same sex kiss inside a packed club.’

Revellers went on to enjoy the show while the two remained stuck on each others’ lips.

No attempt was made by the photographer to talk to the women and there is no obvious reason why this is a news story worthy of the front page except that it is titillating to male readers.

This is nothing new in the media where women's bodies are used to attract the attention of men and to sell products. The pictures and accompanying story in the Times Sunday show two women being offered to the reader as objects to be leered over.

The problem is that we have become so used to seeing women treated in this way that it is considered ‘normal’. How can we be surprised by this in a kingdom in which the Miss Swaziland beauty contest is seen as an important cultural event?

Generally, the media use women’s bodies to try to make profit. The assumption is that having pictures of sexually attractive women sells newspapers. Advertisers also use images of ‘attractive’ women to sell their products.

They may be on the wrong track, however. The Gender and Media Audience Study, published by Gender Links, which surveyed people in Swaziland about what they liked in the news, found that the vast majority of both men and women interviewed said they find sexual images of women in the news either ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘insulting’. Only a tiny proportion of women and men said they are encouraged to buy the newspaper or watch the news as a result of such images.

As the study states, ‘The gap between media decision makers and consumers should be pause for thought.’