Hello and welcome to my blog for this week you filthy humans.
I’m about to embark on a bit of a journey that might take me away from my writing for about six weeks, as Capitalism and the Private Sector is a cunt and I have chosen to take a more Public Sector approach to making money.
The writing thing is fun and I enjoy doing it, but the money is nowhere close to being able to survive in a Modern Western Democracy. Maybe one day I will be fortunate enough to sit out in the sun on some tropical island, doing lines of cocaine with dwarfs while we drink Tiki cocktails from overly dramatised glasses.
I have however done next week’s blog before I started doing this one. It is a short story. The reason why I’m holding onto it, is because this week in light of Women’s Day, which is gone now, I want to talk a little about women abuse and sexual assault. I don’t want to miss the boat completely and not take advantage of this aura of occasion.
If this is a sensitive subject for you, and you don’t want to read it, I’ll have something else next week.
For those who want to stick around.
I’m not a woman, and I’m not qualified to do talk about violence and sexual assault from the point of view of a female. I am a man though, so I will talk about it from our point of view.
Facebook is inundated with anti-woman abuse posts, especially being someone who has loads of South African and Kiwis on their Friend List. Abuse of women is massive in both these countries, and I’ve wanted to touch on this topic for a long time. However, my views around it are as regular as the comments that I found on the threads.
Now I have developed a more Freudian take on it.
For those who don’t know about the works of Sigmund Freud, he was a Psychologist who invented the field of Psychoanalysis. This is the study of how things we are taught as children, surface when we become adults as life scripts. I speak about life scripts in a previous blog, go find it you lazy prick.
“How did these thoughts come about? You pretentious twat,” I hear you ask
I’ll tell you.
So I picked up my baby girl from school at midday last week.
She enjoys swimming, and always wanted to be the only kid in the massive swimming pool at Albany Leisure Centre. So I made this dream come true for her.
After about an hour some toddlers came in with a kindergarten of some sort and they occupied the warm kiddy pool that has a built in slide and playground in it.
As an African man, I get cold easily, so I left my girl in the pool while I got a gorgeous cup of Chai from the on site Cafe and sat close to the playground where I placed my bag initially.
I was watching the kids play on the slide.
They were about 3 or 4 years of age and that slide must’ve been pretty scary for them.
One of the boys at the top of the slide was taking ages to go down because he was really scared. He kept stepping onto it, then stepping back, then stepping on again.
The girl behind him was getting really impatient and pushed him down, she went down after him almost immediately.
At the bottom of the slide they had a scuffle, initiated by the boy. The girl was definitely stronger, but he did manage to land a few blows.
The teacher stormed over and broke up the scuffle. She was an older lady who clearly also may have kids of her own.
She pulled the girl aside first. I’m not sure what she said but the girl was left crying and the teacher gave her a big hug. A bit strange as the girl was definitely stronger than the boy.
The boy on the other hand was getting lectured within the vicinity of where I was sitting, and I heard the discussion.
The teacher told him that boys should not fight with girls. She said that one day he will be big and strong and bigger than girls. His job is to protect them and make sure that they are safe. She basically praised him for being a strong boy, very contradictory to what she told the girl I presume.
He was well happy with this new found information and he went on to play with the girl, almost being extra nice and accommodating.
The teacher knew I was listening and we smiled at each other. I proceeded to tell her that what she just said was fantastic and I was told the same thing as a kid.
Then I got caught in that horrible Bush Road traffic as my kid wanted some sushi on the way home.
That’s when it struck me.
I don’t have any boys in my immediate family. I have a wife and two daughters and I can honestly say that I have never physically abused a woman in my life, and like most men, I detest those men who do.
The advice of being the great protector of weak women definitely worked for me, and it will work for the young fella at the pools as well.
But is it good advice?
That boy was rewarded for being a little cunt, and the girl was chastised for it. This didn’t sit right with me as I watched my little girl eat her sashimi in the passenger seat.
I realised that this advice had sweet fuckall to do with the rights of women. That boy will grow up with that same Excalibur sword that we were handed as young ones.
We are not the protector of women, women are more than capable of protecting themselves. This has been proven over and over in areas like the workplace or politics.
Before I continue this whinge, I’ve lost all my advertising and the Patreon is my only source of income. Please support it if you can afford to.
https://www.patreon.com/Blacksheepwriting?fan_landing=true
For those who can’t afford it, that’s fine. But leave a like or a positive or pleasurable comment.
No negative comments please, because that would make you a wanker.
Ok where was I?
I notice this privilege when I do my midnight beach walks. I enjoy going out in the dead of night and spend a few moments in the cold blackness of Takapuna Beach.
I never feel like I’m going to be sexauly assaulted by anyone. Now wait, I do know that male sexual assault is thing, and I’m not making light of it. But it is something that does not sit in my consciousness. It is not something that I worry about.
Sure, when I was living in South Africa, I could never go out on my own in the dead of night like this. My fear while living there, would be that someone may come over and try to rob me for my phone. But here in New Zealand, I don’t have that fear. Like I’ve said before, I’m a big black lad on a motorcycle, if anyone is robbing phones, it will be me.
You’d be hard pressed to find a woman doing these midnight walks, unless of course she is accompanied by an Excalibur carrying male.
Fucking hell lads, you see it on Social Media every day, especially that hot bed of reality we call Facebook.
Whenever you see a post about women abuse or sexual assault, the men on there unsheath their swords of masculinity and come out looking for scalps.
With stories of rape however I notice that we, and I say we because I’m included, we always need to know if there was violence involved. If there is not, we open up a new line of questioning.
“Well, what was she wearing?’
“Why did she go home with him?”
“Why did she get into his bed in the first place?”
I have an analogy to counter these arguments.
Let’s say you are out on the sauce with your friends, and you decide to catch an Uber. You give the driver your address via the App and he decides to take you all the way to Hamilton and just drop you off there, plus he charges you for the whole trip. Would you like that?
We can only react to sexual assault if we know there is violence involved. For us, a rapist is an ogre like creature that forces sex on women by means of violence. We are not geared up nor do we understand that there are also non violent types of abuse.
Most women abuse incidents are not the violent type.
I have checked myself many times with the women in my life as I often slip into psychological abuse. I’m a self-centered prick, and on many occasions, my overbearing nihilism becomes stressful for them. I never knew I was like this until I was sat down and spoken to about it. It is tough confronting your own fallibility, but it is a necessary evil. I use CBT to manage this part of my personality.
Back to the Facebook thing.
We have fucking grown men, Dad’s and all, doing their best to show that they are the most ruthless and their swords are the biggest.
At face value, this looks like a good thing. But now that I have broken it down for myself and looked at the trends around women abuse, the lessons we learned as kids were just another form of toxic masculinity. It’s not about us cutting off penises lads.
We need to educate our boys about this.
That magical sword of chivalry does not exist, it is a band aid solution that is constructed by a patriarchal society that believes that men are somehow superior to women.
You can tell me to fuck off you want, but I think this is a human rights problem. We need to tell little boys that women have boundaries and we are not stronger than them.
They don’t need our Excalibur swords to protect them, we need to build a generation of men that women feel they don’t need protecting from.
I’m not saying let’s nurture weak men, as the abusers are weak men. I’m saying that we need to stop telling boys that they are stronger than girls and instead tell them that girls are equal in strength to them and they should be respected as such.
I could be wrong, I don’t have any boys that I’m raising, but the bravado system is clearly failing.
Apologies for the rant, I was just riffing. And happy belated Women’s Day to you gorgeous ladies. I could say that corny shit about Women’s Day should be every day, but that would just make it lose its value.
Have a pleasant week.
Do something fun and exciting.
Be kind to each other.
