Sexually active virgins:
Negotiating femininity, colour and safety in Cape Town
Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard and Ann-Karina Henriksen
In South Africa, adolescent girls are subject to stringent social and moral controls over the management of their sexuality and sexual practices (Salo 2004, see also Mørck 1998; Gammeltoft 2002). In the poor, coloured townships of Cape Town, discourses of respectability and virginity render adolescent femininity safe. As adolescent girls become sexually mature, they enter a morally contested space in which they must deny their emerging sexuality by demonstrating sexual restraint. Such restraint secures their ‘social safety’ by ensuring that they are accepted into the wider networks of kin and neighbours that underwrite daily life in the townships. Although respectability is a signifier for women of all ages, this chapter will focus primarily on how respectability informs the everyday dispositions of adolescent girls.
In the moral landscape in which these girls live, every adolescent sexual act is transgressive, because it subverts the notion of respectability that underpins local networks of economic and social support. We examine this contested space by looking at the moral discourses about young girls’ behaviour in public, and about their involvement in sexual activity. We argue that the maintenance of ‘respectability’ and ‘virginity’ are crucial to the social safety of adolescent girls, whose sexual welfare may be compromised if they do not behave according to these moral precepts. Yet at the same time, the need to be seen as ‘respectable’ and sexually innocent can lead to ignorance, the outcome of which is a failure to practise safe sex, and this eventually puts girls at risk of HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy.
Respectability is analysed as a discourse of asexual femininity, which can be traced back to the historical and political construction of the local coloured population. Respectability informs the lived experiences of South African women partly as something they are, i.e. as embodied knowledge (cf. Bourdieu 1990), and partly as something created through bodily discourse (cf. Butler 1993). We show how girls negotiate others’ perceptions of the tension between their asexual and sexual subjectivities and how they express their sexual awareness in sexual practices. Finally, we discuss how wider cultural notions of respectability in South Africa become a form of symbolic violence, that jeopardises adolescent girls' ability to negotiate safe sex.
Being or becoming respectable
Like gender and race, respectability is not a fixed category or something you are, but is something you do. However, this approach to respectability cannot always account for how young coloured women in Cape Town themselves see respectability, for they do sometimes experience it as a ‘fixed’ condition that they can do nothing about. Some young Cape Town women, for example, complain that they are regarded as disreputable whatever they do, so that an absence of respectability is experienced by them as part of their very being. Drawing on Butler (1993) and Bourdieu (2001), we try to incorporate into our analysis both these aspects of respectability, combining a consideration of respectability as something enacted with local South African perceptions of it as something you are. Butler and Bourdieu represent two different approaches to gender and thus different views on how to approach respectability. Their varying perceptions of gender are distinguishable in their writings on the body.
Butler (1993:16) argues that the body is a blank surface, which is only ascribed meaning through discourse. Outside of discourse, the body is seen as an object but it gains subjectivity within discourse, i.e. a girl is not a girl, but gendered discourses invite her to become a girl. The body is thus understood as regulated and subjectivised through discourse, and the meaning attached to the body changes according to discursive constructions. Analysing respectability as articulated through discourse opens up a dynamic perspective on gender as contextual, negotiable and as a process of becoming rather than being. Bourdieu (2000) provides a different perspective by drawing attention to the inertness of subject positions. His approach to gender is preoccupied with power and reproduction. Many contemporary feminist scholars have characterised his approach as simplistic and objectivist due to its lack of any interpretative element (Järvinen 1999:31; McNay 2004:183). Bourdieu (2000) on the other hand has criticised the constructivist feminists, such as Butler, for their ‘linguistic universalism’, where gender is perceived as a discursive construction with no social or historical specificity:
It is naïve, even dangerous to suppose and suggest that one only has to ‘deconstruct’ these social artefacts in a purely performative celebration of ‘resistance’ in order to destroy them (Bourdieu 2000: 108).
Bourdieu (2001) approaches gender as a material relationship between dominant (men) and dominated (women) and not as a symbolic construction, where the relationship is one of recognition and misrecognition. This approach is related to his understanding of the body as a path of access, loaded with meaning, which is deeply inherent in the body. Bourdieu (2001) refers to the embodied version of accumulated experiences (habitus) as ‘hexis’:
Bodily hexis … is assumed to express the ‘deep being’, the true ‘nature’ of the ‘person’, in accordance with the postulate of the correspondence between the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral’ which gives rise to the practical or rationalized knowledge whereby ‘psychological’ or ‘moral’ properties are associated with bodily or physiognomic indices (Bourdieu 2001: 64).
Bodily hexis is the way people ‘carry’ their body, they way they walk, talk, eat or run, and it is through hexis, Bourdieu argues, that social categories such as class, sexuality, gender, race and age are expressed. Respectability and the maintenance of racialised bodies is an example of such embodied knowledge and practice. Bodily hexis is not written on the surface of the body, but is deeply grounded in its very being, expressed in every move and part of the corporeal disposition. Class, gender and race are embedded in the body and provide analytical possibilities for understanding social categories ascribed through discourse, including the potential to misrecognise the power and impact these categories have in people’s lived existence (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). However, in Bourdieu’s approach to gender there is limited space for interpretation and negotiation, that is, for people to carry their bodies in different ways depending on shifting contexts. In most of Bourdieu's other writing this would be accounted for through his concept of field; the body engages in different fields and is thereby articulated in different ways. In regard to gender the dynamic of the field is left out in his writing (Lovell 2000: 18).
Søndergaard’s (1996: 89) concept of ‘bodily signs’, which is inspired by semiotics, emphasises the importance of recognising the shifting meanings of the material body and thus acknowledges both Butler's and Bourdieu's approaches to gender. When colour is ascribed to a body, it has material consequences for how this body can interact in particular situations. Søndergaard (1996) perceives the body as marked by signs, although these signs are not visible in all contexts. Studying ‘bodily signs’ instead of ‘bodies’ emphasises that having a biologically female body marked by female signs is not necessarily the same as always being perceived as feminine. Adolescent girls are marked by signs of sexual maturity, which can be manipulated, altered, made highly visible or invisible depending on the context of their engagement. Bodily signs, such as breasts, hips, buttocks, lips, long hair, maturity, colour of skin, ways of walking and sitting and ways of looking at other people provide different possibilities for expressing sexualised or asexualised femininity.
Cape Flats: The dark side of Cape Town
This chapter is based on five months’ fieldwork carried out in the first half of 2003 in Heideveld, a predominantly coloured residential area on the outskirts of Cape Town. During apartheid, coloured and black people were forced to live outside the city centre, and the sandy, barren land surrounding Cape Town was designated as a non-white residential area. During the 1950s, the area known as Cape Flats was populated through forced removals and rural-urban migration, and developed into racially segregated black and coloured residential zones. Today a lack of economic resources, rather than a discriminating political system, prevents residents from moving elsewhere. In the public imagination, Cape Flats is known mostly for its gang wars and high rates of domestic and sexual violence (Jensen 2000; Salo 2000; Gibson 2003). However, Cape Flats is highly heterogeneous in terms of income level, population density, forms of housing and levels of violence. Some residents have escaped apartheid-inflicted poverty and, by improving their level of education and income, have moved from shacks or communal housing to owner-occupied single-family dwellings in the same residential area.
The girls described in this chapter live in an area of Cape Flats characterised by poverty and high rates of violence. During fieldwork, gang warfare claimed the life of at least one gang member a week. The area houses about 20,000 people, most of whom live in two-room flats shared with ten to fifteen other family members. The research was carried out at a high school using semi-structured interviews, workshops, focus groups, questionnaires and photography. The most intensive study was undertaken among girls in the 15 to 19 age group. We also visited students in their homes and accompanied girls and their friends to the local shopping malls and clubs.
Constructions of Cape coloureds
The racial constructions of the apartheid regime are still significant in Cape Town. The political construction of the category ‘coloured’ is central to understanding the dispositions of the young girls. During apartheid, coloureds were constructed as being in between whites and blacks, as both a metaphorical and a spatial buffer zone. This was evident in the workplace and in residential areas, where coloured neighbourhoods separated blacks from whites. Being coloured implied striving to ‘become’ white through a range of practices that created proximity to whiteness rather than blackness (Wicomb 2000: 4). Coloured bodies could signal being more or less civilised by a light tone of skin, straight rather than curly hair and choosing clothes, food and drinks preferred by whites. Coloured women were perceived as responsible and as having the capacity to save the group as a whole from becoming like the local black population (Jensen 2001; Salo 2003). In contrast, the stereotype of coloured men, in black, white and coloured imagination, was characterised by lazy, drunken and criminal behaviour (Jensen 2001: 63). As a result, it was coloured women rather than coloured men who were entrusted with the health and well-being of their home and family and who received the welfare support from the state (Steinberg 2004: 113; Salo 2003: 349). Responsibility became a core attribute of acceptable femininity among coloured women.
The process of ‘becoming’ white through the ways in which the body is presented in public is still evident amongst the coloured residents today. However, it is a highly embodied practice of adhering to ‘good’ taste (see Bourdieu 1984), rather than a conscious attempt to deny one’s racial background. For example, many coloured people now regard it simply as fashionable to straighten one’s hair, rather than as an effort to be seen as white (Erasmus 2001: 17). Many coloured boys still struggle to overcome the stereotypical image of the lazy and criminal coloured man, and girls struggle to uphold ideals of respectability (Henriksen and Lindegaard 2004).
Staging coloured femininity through photography
Halfway through the fieldwork we supplied a group of girls with disposable cameras. We asked them to take photographs of people and places in their everyday lives, which made them feel both comfortable and uncomfortable. The photographs focused on the negative aspects of their daily lives. They took photographs of gangs selling drugs on playgrounds, young boys flashing money and guns, women drinking and gambling accompanied by their children, girls hanging out on street corners and pregnant teenagers. Their comments on the pictures provided valuable insights into how negative representations of coloureds (Steinberg 2004: 113) continue to be reproduced and used to create social distinctions in their lives.
Many of the photographs are staged to represent the reality in which the girls live. Figure 1 shows a woman standing in her living room drinking beer. The photographer made her neighbour pose with the beer, because as she explained: ‘This is what she always does. Also there are always fights in her house. She is a sleg woman’. The participants distinguished between ordentlike women, which is Afrikaans for ‘respectable’ and sleg women, which means ‘bad’ women. The distinction is used to describe an array of female behaviours seen either as morally acceptable or reprehensible. Ordentlike women are essentially responsible housewives who take care of domestic chores, keep a clean and tidy house, take good care of the children, attend church and display bodily, emotional and social self-control. Ordentlike women are never drunk or loud in public; they are only present outside their homes during the day and are always accompanied by friends.
Gambling is another recurring theme in the photographs. Gambling has been connected to negative representations of coloureds as far back as the early twentieth century, along with dancing and singing in the street, drunkenness, violence and sexual promiscuity (Ross 1999: 55). Figure 2 shows four men and one woman sitting in a tin shack playing dominos with a child idly watching them. The photographer comments on the photo: ‘gambling is a big problem here. It usually happens at the shebeen [local bar]. The women are particularly drunk and that is what children get to see.’ The presence of the child makes the photograph significant, because it underlines the irresponsibility of the woman and exposes her as a sleg. The photographs thus reproduce the discourse of the sleg coloured women, while they also reflect the photographers’ attempts to distance themselves and communicate their adherence to a different femininity, as ordentlike women.
Among peers the undeniable marker of respectability is the management of sexuality and sexual bodies. Figure 3 shows two girls smoking on a balcony and one of the girls is allegedly a taxi queen. Taxi queens are girls who date taxi drivers and spend many hours driving with them in the taxi dressed up in fashionable clothes, SMS-ing on their new cell phones. The girls are provided for and bought expensive clothes in return for sexual favours. Among peers they are both admired for their clothes, money and mobility and looked down upon for their overt sexual activities. The photographer spoke at length and in great detail about the sexual history of the alleged taxi queen, exposing the level of gossip pertaining to the sexual lives of young girls. The significance of gossip was expressed in many other contexts too, and gossip mainly revolved around sexual partners and activities along with real or imagined pregnancies. Figure 4 is a staged picture of two pregnant girls. As the photographer said: ‘this represents one of the big problems in Heideveld. These two girls are only 15 and 16 years old and already pregnant. They are not even married and now their future is spoiled. They cannot continue with school.’ Placed in front of a plastic couch, the girls are made to testify to their sleg behaviour. Looking slightly guilty they become representations of teenage promiscuity as examples not to be followed. Their clothes are also at odds with respectable dress codes. Girls must wear dresses or skirts below the knees, loose fitting trousers and headscarves over straightened hair. Exposing bare skin, such as the girl with the short top, is shameful, and in conjunction with her pregnancy reveals her lack of respectability.
Respectability is a category of social control which serves partly to define the ideal and partly to define its opposite, which is the sleg woman, who does not take care of the household, spends money on herself instead of her children, and hangs out in the street and local bars. Skeggs (1997: 115) argues that in Britain respectability distinguishes middle class women from working class women who are seen as ‘sexual, vulgar, tarty, pathological, tasteless and without value’. In South Africa, respectability can be traced back to British colonialism, where respectable women were Christian whites (Ross 1999:34). During the apartheid regime, respectability was also associated with white women, while coloured women were constructed as lacking whiteness and, by implication, also lacking respectability, although they could become respectable through the proper management of their racially defined bodies (Salo 2004: 254). Whereas in Britain, respectability defines socio-economic class, in contemporary South Africa it has strong racial connotations, as coloured and black women lack respectability by default, and need to make themselves respectable by modifying their behaviour. In contrast, white women in South Africa can more readily behave like a sleg and still be considered ordentlike due to their status as whites. White women have historically accumulated more experiences of being respectable than coloured women, which offers them more space to negotiate varying ways of being feminine. The fact that South African women have different access to respectability depending on, among other things, class and race, shows that approaching gender as a singular relationship of suppression, as Bourdieu suggests, is not analytically constructive. Women do gender in various ways, as Butler suggests, but their doings depend on their accumulated experiences; on their access to power and thus on their historically developed position (cf. Bourdieu 2001).
Staying safe by staying respectable
Among less affluent adolescent girls in Cape Flats, virginity is significant. Virginity is a signifier of a woman’s respectability and that of her family. Salo (2004: 175) writes about respectability as follows:
A woman’s ability to control her own as well as her daughter’s sexuality is the constitutive sign of respectability… A respectable mother would not allow her daughter to be sexually active, use birth control methods, or become pregnant out of wedlock.
If a girl sleeps around, her actions reflect on the family name and suggest that her parents have no control over her. Good girls stay at home. They are quiet, polite and sexually inexperienced. Shireen, a sixteen year old girl living in a poor part of Heideveld, commented:
My mum brags about me not having a boyfriend, always staying home, never having friends over and she buys stuff to keep me happy, like clothes and jewellery, like they are rewarding me for not having a boyfriend, but dressing me up for one [laughs].
Shireen used to spend a lot of time on the street ‘which made me bad in Heideveld’, as she puts it. Now she tries to communicate respectability and sexual unavailability by staying inside, and her mother has taken responsibility for her respectability in the eyes of their community.
If girls ‘misbehave’, i.e. if they cast doubt upon their respectability by dancing with men they meet at a night club, by being drunk or ‘performing’, flirting and eating too much, kissing their boyfriends in public, or walking in dangerous places at dangerous times, they will be strictly censured by their parents or boyfriends. Adolescent girls must demonstrate sexual abstinence in order to validate their social position in relation to their mothers and other powerful women in the community (Salo 2004: 177). Fulfilling ideals of respectability is a means of accessing support networks, which assist with food, money, services in times of hardship and most importantly, jobs which are provided through these networks. The social safety of girls and their families is strongly influenced by how they choose to manage their sexual bodies and sexual practices. Shireen referred to an incident which illustrates this. Her mother had taken her shopping, and later Shireen decided to parade through the neighbourhood to show off her new clothes. When her mother discovered this, she rushed to bring Shireen home. Her mother yelled at her in public, telling her to come inside and stop ‘modelling and showing off’. Shireen was very upset at her mother for making a public scene. However, her mother seemed to have chosen to reprimand her daughter publicly in order to communicate to other women that she did not condone Shireen’s behaviour. She demonstrated her own respectability through her attempts to manage the sexuality of her daughter.
Sexual closure through domestication
Shireen was forced to stay inside to communicate her sexual unavailability. Her power to negotiate personal space was severely inhibited, not only by her past actions in hanging out on street corners, but also by a range of other factors including the fact that her parents were divorced, and her father was an alcoholic who lived in another equally poor neighbourhood. Shireen’s mother is not widely perceived as respectable, but she tries to improve her reputation by managing the reputation of her daughter. Sixteen-year-old Shireen must struggle to demonstrate her respectability, but she feels unable to control her appearance:
They can see if you are a virgin - like if your bum is loose, then you are not a virgin. Tight bums and small breasts are virgins … they [the guys] will say you are not a virgin, even the girls say that. The girls will just watch you from behind, and say you are not a virgin anymore, but I don’t know how they know that.
A loose bum and big breasts, essentially a matured body, communicates that a girl is sexually active. Shireen has a feeling that her body is not respectable, and that it exposes her as immoral. Virginity is not only about behaviour but also about bodily expression. It does not matter how girls like Shireen behave, since their bodies tell their story. She feels that she lacks virginity and thus respectability but she can do nothing to change what other people see in her. Shireen’s body communicates openness, and she therefore has to stay at home to be respectable; she exposes her own vulnerability every time she leaves the house. Shireen is very aware of how her clothes and her body communicate respectability or the lack of it:
Sometimes I regret wearing tight jeans, but it’s all I have. I don’t like wearing long clothes and why should I wear certain clothes because of other people? Sometimes I wish I were living in Vanguard, that posh place, where people don’t have to look at you. So I walk with my hands on my back to hide my bum, or I will sneak out when there are not so many people there, like men hanging out at the shop yelling at you, ‘that bum is just right for me’ and touch you and stuff. And people walk past and just laugh, or they think I like it.
Shireen is struggling against being categorised as lacking respectability, but she refuses to wear ‘longer clothes’ such as dresses and loose shirts. She talks about Vanguard as a place where people ‘don’t have to look’ and she can walk undisturbed. Vanguard, a neighbouring residential area about 500 metres down the road, consists almost exclusively of owner-occupied housing. The more prosperous residents of Vanguard enjoy a higher standard of living than the inhabitants of Heideveld, and they do not have to legitimise their respectability to quite the same extent as their poorer neighbours (see also Bourdieu 1990; Skeggs 1997).
Generating personal space through respectability
Shireen’s friend Shamielah is 16 and also lives in Heideveld. In contrast to Shireen, she has been able to negotiate a lot of personal space, mobility and parental trust. As she put it, ‘my mother thinks I’m an angel’. Shamielah is often allowed to go out during weekends to her cousin’s house and to stay over. Her cousin has older friends and they have been clubbing in town a few times. Shamielah related this with excitement and fear, because the men who had taken them out were related to gangsters and the taxi driver who had carried them free of charge was a well known gang member in her neighbourhood. Shamielah was concerned that people had seen her in his taxi, and was anxious about what people might think and what they might say to her mother. As a result, she decided to refuse any more lifts to preclude any gossip:
It’s like you have to care about what your parents and people say. People will say, ‘I saw you with that girl and that boy’, but it was just this once, so it’s not a big thing, people know I am not in that category. The next few weekends, I will spend time with my family and then we will see what happens, maybe they will ask me again and I will say yes.
She knew that people perceived her as respectable, and that it would take more than a single instance of misconduct to jeopardise this status. Shamielah is perceived as being essentially more respectable than Shireen; and as a result has more licence in what she does; she has more space to be feminine in different ways and not solely in the strictly respectable manner which Shireen struggles to uphold. By staying at home with her family, she could ‘bank’ her good behaviour and use it sometime in the future to create space for going out again, having a boyfriend, or hanging out with those considered less respectable.
It is not only the distain of close kin which can influence youth perceptions of virtue and shame; gossip networks between families and across communities also serve to exercise social control and maintain social hierarchies. Strategies of social control resulting from gossip have been well documented in the anthropological literature (cf. Gluckman 1963; Hannerz 1967; Stadler 2003) and in the Cape Flats’ context, the girls’ fears of being ridiculed, criticised and subjected to public shame meant that they took account of the rumours circulating about them. Gossip circulated around ideas of promiscuity relating to potential boyfriends, sexual practices, suspected pregnancies or being caught at inappropriate times in certain locations. Despite the fear of gossip and ridicule that their actions could bring, the girls still held other girls who behaved properly in contempt. Gossip thus maintains the ideology of respectability and acts as a vehicle for defining the girls’ sexual transgressions.
Rape: sex or violence?
Lacking respectability can threaten survival (Salo 2004: 295), as it can invite physical and sexual violence, which is widespread in Cape Town’s townships. Cape Town is notorious for some of the highest crime rates in the world and without economic resources to invest in security measures such as private guards and alarm systems, social networks are central to safety (Henriksen and Lindegaard 2004). Most people living on the Cape Flats relay information about crimes via neighbours and friends. As already mentioned, respectability is the key to these networks and, therefore, the key to personal safety, since the support of family and neighbours is contingent on the reputation of the victim of violence. In rape cases, many girls struggle to convince their families that they were violated. If the girls have had boyfriends or have often been seen outside the house, then they are likely to be seen as sexually promiscuous rather than the victims of violence.
At the Rape Crisis Centre in Heideveld, we spoke to Janine, a woman in her late thirties who had been raped at the age of seventeen.1 She had been dating a man for several months, which was widely known and accepted by her parents: ‘They knew I had very high morals and would never do anything’, she told us. When she ended their relationship, however, he raped her. She never told anyone, because she was terrified of what people would think:
Because he was my boyfriend, people were going to say I allowed it, you know I can never tell people I was raped, they will never believe me, that’s how I was thinking. It’s not supposed to happen, like my father said, the first person you have sex with must be your husband, so he’s not my husband, and then I made up my mind - he’s going to be my husband, ‘cause he is the only man who knows I was a virgin when he met me, this is how I was indoctrinated - otherwise people can point a finger and say you’ve been with many men - he is the only one who knows.
(Janine (f), age 38, Heideveld)
Janine married her rapist because he was the only one who knew that she had been a virgin. She was acutely aware that there was no in-between. She was in no position to convince everyone that it had been a violent act; rather, having had a boyfriend exposed her as potentially disreputable. Rape could only be turned into a legitimate sexual act through marriage to avoid contamination and the loss of respectability. In Janine’s case, then, the violence associated with marrying the rapist was experienced as less painful than the violence associated with being socially stigmatised. Many girls would never report a rape case because the social stigma of being sexually active could be more detrimental to the girl’s social safety than the rape itself (see also Gibson 2005:54).
Many girls were similarly unable to make a case for having been raped. At the Rape Crisis centre they struggled with perceptions of rape as sex, expressed most acutely in situations where sexually active girls had been raped by a family member. One Rape Crisis counsellor commented, ‘See now the family doesn’t understand why she presses charges against her uncle, when she doesn’t press charges against her boyfriend who she also has sex with.’ Girls who lack the symbolic capital to legitimise their sexual status because they have a boyfriend risk being defined as disreputable if they are raped. Respectability is not only a strategy of safety protected by networks of mothers, but also a strategy that resists the social stigma of being defined as promiscuous if a woman is sexually harassed or raped.
Having sex without being there
Many of the girls tried to mediate between being both respectable and sexually active. According to our survey of 500 high school pupils in the 16-19 age group, 18 per cent of the girls and 28 per cent of the boys had had sexual intercourse. One must be careful when evaluating whether these numbers reflect actual behaviour. The survey was completed during class, and the answers may reflect how respondents wished to represent themselves. It is likely that girls hid their sexual experiences due to ideals of respectability, while local constructions of masculinity might encourage the boys to exaggerate their sexual exploits (Jewkes et al 2001; Swart et al 2002). A study conducted by LoveLife among adolescents all over South Africa, suggests that 48 per cent of a sample of 4,731 adolescents aged 15 to 19 have had sexual intercourse (LoveLife 2004: 13). In Cape Town, the average age of sexual initiation (without gender specification) is 16.4 (Jewkes et al. 2001: 734).
Women in their late twenties use the expression ‘sexually active virgins’ to refer to adolescent girls who pretend to be virgins even though they are sexually active. They claimed that within small groups of friends, girls would admit to being sexually active, but outside these circles they pretended to be virgins. Jewkes et al. (2001: 733) note that one third of all pregnancies in South Africa are teenage pregnancies, which not only suggests that premarital sex is common but also that sexual practices among adolescents are connected to unsafe sexual habits.
Irrespective of whether girls claimed to be sexually active or not, some expressed the view that sexual intercourse was mostly the result of being manipulated by boys, rather than choosing to have sex:
It’s like when you are in the mood - you flirt now, and now you are in the mood and your hormones are going, so he asks you at that moment [when they are about to have sex], but he didn’t ask you before you were going into the mood - some girls say when you are in the mood, you can’t say no. Just go with the flow ... But I don’t go with that.
(Shamielah (f), age 17, Heideveld)
Girls are softer than guys... it’s different; I don’t actually know how a boy is... Here in Heideveld we say that girls have a weak spot, like the boys know where that weak spot is, and the guys just make the girls more... and then the girls cannot control it and go with the flow. And regret it afterwards.
(Shireen (f), age 16, Heideveld)
The girls speak about the sexual act as a black hole, an act that happens without their complete knowledge and participation. The boys just touched their ‘weak spot’, which resulted in a temporary loss of control. Abdicating responsibility and knowledge of the act becomes a strategy to regain respectability. The girls did not take part actively; they were tricked, which makes it less a choice and therefore more respectable. In other words, the girls try to fulfil ideals about respectability, which means sexual abstinence, at the same time as they engage in sexual relations. They regain a sense of respectability by participating as little as possible, by letting the man decide how and when sex takes place. However, by abdicating responsibility for the act, they also abdicate the power to negotiate safe sex.
Pretending not to be present in the sexual act and believing that it did not actually happen might be seen as psychological denial. When girls say they are not sexually active, this is not necessarily due to an unwillingness to reveal their deepest secrets to a researcher, but rather reflects their experience of not really being present in the act itself (Kirmayer 1994; Cohen 2001). This could stem from a fear of being regarded as disreputable, but it could also relate to different perceptions of sex. In the workshops we held among the school pupils, the boys accused the girls of having overly romantic expectations of relationships: as one boy put it, ‘they think it’s like those soaps they watch after school’.
The girls explained sexual abstinence as a moral issue. Abstinence was related to the threat of HIV/AIDS and pregnancy, both of which appeared to be out of their control. As expressed by a 17-year old girl from Heideveld, ‘My opinion is not to have sex because of the AIDS virus... its loose here in South Africa, I don’t know with who did he sleep before.’ Both boys and girls seemed to be well informed about various methods of birth control, but expressed a lack of confidence in these preventive measures. Several girls said that condoms were unsafe, ‘they always break, so rather not have sex’. The myth of ‘condoms always breaking’ seemed to express a general fear about their lack of control over the sexual act. This is supported by other studies in South Africa, which suggest that the power to negotiate sexual relations is held by men rather than women (Wood and Jewkes 1997; Gibson 2003). The consequence is that while respectability and a reluctance to talk about sex may operate as a survival strategy at one level, at another level they become a ‘death strategy’ as Farmer (1992:79) suggests, since young women’s lack of sexual knowledge increases the likelihood of them being exposed to HIV/AIDS. For girls like Shireen in particular, practising respectability means being unable to negotiate safe sex. The respectability that offers social safety to young women in one context might thereby jeopardise their health in another.
Symbolic violence with real consequences
Engaging in unsafe sexual relationships has become life threatening in South Africa, where it is estimated that, at the current rate of infection, 50 per cent of South Africans under the age of 15 will die of AIDS-related causes (LoveLife 2001). The message communicated by governmental as well as non-governmental campaigns is that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease which kills.2 The million-dollar LoveLife campaign was launched in 1999 using large billboards, national radio and TV broadcasting, monthly magazines and the establishment of youth centres. The aim was to reach South African youth with a clear message concerning the urgency of accepting sexual responsibility, preferably by abstinence or by using condoms. The LoveLife campaign also tapped into the notion of female respectability by presenting girls as responsible for saying no to sex and rejecting boyfriends who have had multiple sexual partners. The campaign reproduced the cultural discourse of uncontrollable male sexuality and controllable female sexuality (Stadler and Hlongwa 2002: 374). However, the message seemed to ignore the extensive research that stresses the limited negotiating power of women in sexual relations (Wood and Jewkes 1997; Gibson 2003, 2005; Henriksen and Lindegaard 2004). It fails to address the fact that a majority of adolescent relationships are characterised by male dominance and that the use of physical and sexual violence is common. About two per cent of South African women aged between 17 and 48 are raped every year (Jewkes and Abrahams 2002:1235); five women are killed every week by an intimate partner (Mathews et al 2004: 1); about 30 per cent of girls between 15 and 19 years old have been forcibly introduced to sex (Jewkes and Abrahams 2002: 1237); and about 50 per cent of teenagers’ dating relationships include physically violent interaction (Swart et al. 2002:389).
The construction of masculinity in the campaign not only jeopardises the safety of girls, it also puts boys at risk. In an anthropological study conducted by Lindegaard in 2005, boys described their sexuality as far from uncontrollable; they expressed feeling under pressure in terms of taking the initiative and being in charge in relation to girls (Gibson and Lindegaard forthcoming). Unlike girls, boys nevertheless said they were aware of their power to negotiate safe sex. They are in control in the sexual act, as the girls suggested, and control gives them the potential to insist on safe sex. Whether they are able to make use of that potential depends on their social position. If boys think about condoms 'when things are getting hot', they are regarded as weak men, not sexually expressive when they are supposed to be. For boys, sexual abstinence opposes dominant perceptions of masculinity. Boys who practise sexual abstinence are regarded as churchgoers and ‘mummy’s boys’; they are not real men. Suggesting safe sex in the ‘heat of the moment’ implies negotiating dominant perceptions of masculinity and it is only some boys, who are able to do so without being regarded weak men.
It is difficult to criticise a politics of abstinence considering the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. However, our research suggests that girls have various reasons for not taking responsibility in sexual matters. They attempt to negotiate the tensions between being respectable and sexually active by abstaining from any responsibility. Further, the social stigma attached to adolescent sexuality makes it stigmatising to seek information on safe sex, and adolescent girls are consequently ill-informed about the possibility of assuming responsibility. As Gammeltoft (2002: 493) concludes on sexual risk-taking among adolescents in Vietnam:
The societal negation of young people’s sexual activity thus produces a violence, which is both symbolic and real. It is symbolic in its power to define youth as sexually innocent, and real in its negative implications for the reproductive health and well being of young people who are brought to expose themselves to sexual risks that could have been averted.
The outcome of the discourse of respectability outlined here is a symbolic violence that has real consequences in the everyday lives of adolescent girls. Teenage pregnancy is common and sexual violence on the Cape Flats is more frequent than virtually anywhere else in the world. Bourdieu (2001) argues that just like physical violence, symbolic violence is the effect of a relationship of domination. The two differ only in that with symbolic violence there is rarely a clear violator and victim. Symbolic violence is embodied, and becomes powerful through misrecognition precisely because it is not recognised as violence (Bourdieu 2001). Girls are not equipped with the necessary knowledge or social power to negotiate safe sex, as any interest in sexual matters is perceived as a sign of sexual activity and, by implication, promiscuity (Gibson 2005). Respectability guarantees safety in one sense because it gives access to social networks, yet in another sense this very notion of respectable, asexual femininity clashes with everyday experiences, and places girls at risk of HIV/AIDS and teenage pregnancy.
Notes
1. During fieldwork we spent two weeks at the Rape Crisis Centre in Heideveld interviewing counsellors and activists.
2. An example of a government-sponsored campaign is LoveLife (www.lovelife.org.za). An example of a non-governmental campaign is the Treatment Action Campaign (www.tac.org.za).
References
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Mediations, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. 2001. Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.
Cohen, S. 2001. States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Erasmus, Z.E. 2001. ‘Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Z.E. Erasmus, ed. Coloured by History Shaped by Place: New perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Farmer, P. 1999. Invisible women: class, gender, and HIV. In: Infections and Inequalities. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 59-93.
Gammeltoft, T. 2002. 'Seeking Trust and Transcendence: Sexual Risk-taking among Vietnamese Youth', Social Science and Medicine, vol. 55: 483-496.
Gibson, D. 2003. 'Rape, Vulnerability and Doubt', Medische Antropologie vol. 15, no. 1:43-64.
Gibson, D. 2005. 'Of Victims and Survivors. Health Care, Legal Intervention and Women’s Responses to Rape', Medische Antropologie vol. 17, no 1: 23-40.
Gibson, D. and M. R. Lindegaard. 2007. 'South African Boys with Plans for the Future, and
Why a Focus on Dominant Discourses Only Tells Us a Part of the Story', T. Schefer & K. Ratele, eds. Boys at Risk, Cape Town: Juta Press/University of Cape Town Press, pp. 128-144.
Gluckman, M. 1963. ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology vol. 4: 307-316.
Hannerz, U. 1967. ‘Gossip, Networks and Culture in a Black American Ghetto’, Ethnos vol. 32: 35-60.
Henriksen, A. and M.R. Lindegaard, 2004. Vulnerable Women and Men at Risk: Safety and Gendered Experiences of Violence among Adolescents in Cape Town, published MA thesis, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press.
Järvinen, M. 1999. 'Pierre Bourdieu on Gender and Power', Sociologisk Rapportserie 7,
Copenhagen.
Jensen, S. 2000. 'Of Drug Dealers and Street Gangs: Power, Mobility, and Violence on the Cape Flats', Focaal, vol. 36: 105-116.
Jensen, S. 2001. Claiming Community – Negotiating Crime: State Formation, Neighbourhood and Gangs in a Capetonian Township, published PhD dissertation, Roskilde: University of Roskilde Press.
Jewkes, R., Vundule, C., Maforah, F. and Jordaan, E. 2001. ‘Relationship Dynamics and Teenage Pregnancy in South Africa’, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 52: 733-744.
Jewkes, R. and N. Abrahams 2002. ‘The Epidemiology of Rape and Sexual Coercion in South Africa: An Overview’, Social Science & Medicine vol. 55: 1231-44.
Kirmayer, L.J. 1994. ‘Pacing the Void: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Dissociation’, D. Spiegel, ed. Dissociation, Culture, Mind and Body, Washington: American Psychiatry Press, pp. 91-122.
LoveLife, 2001. Hot Prospects – Cold Facts: Portrait of Young South Africa, Program for Health and Development in South Africa.
LoveLife 2004. Report on Activities and Progress 2004, http://www.lovelife.org.za/corporate/research/AnnualReport_2004.pdf
Lovell, T. 2000. ‘Thinking Feminism With and Against Bourdieu’, Feminist Theory vol. 1 no. 1: 11-32.
Mathews, S, N. Abrahams, L. Martin, L. Vetten, L. van der Merwe and R. Jewkes, 2004. ‘Every Six Hours a Woman is Killed by Her Intimate Partner’, MRC Policy Brief, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Cape Town, South Africa.
McNay, L. 2004. ‘Agency and Experience: Gender as Lived Relation’, L. Adkins & B. Skeggs, eds. Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Mørck, Y. 1998. Bindestregsdanskere: Fortællinger om Køn, Generationer og Etnicitet, Frederiksberg: Sociologi.
Ross, R. 1999. Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salo, E. 2000. ‘Gangs and Sexuality on the Cape Flats’, African Gender Institute Newsletter vol. 7: 8-9.
Salo, E. 2003. ‘Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats’, European Journal of Cultural Studies vol. 6 no. 3: 345-365.
Salo, Elaine. 2004. Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters: Producing Persons in
Manenberg Township, South Africa, PhD dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Emory University.
Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: Sage.
Søndergaard, D.M.1996. Tegnet på Kroppen: Køn, Koder og Konstruktioner blandt Unge voksne i Academia, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.
Stadler, J. 2003. Rumor, Gossip, and Blame: Implications for HIV/AIDS Prevention in the South African Lowveld. AIDS Education and Prevention vol. 15 no.4: 357-68.
Stadler, J. and Hlongwa, L. 2002. ‘Monitoring and Evaluation of LoveLife’s AIDS Prevention and Advocacy Activities in South Africa 1999-2001’, Evaluation and Programme Planning, vol. 25: 365-376.
Steinberg, J. 2004. The Number. One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Swart, L., M. Stevens and I. Ricardo, 2002. ‘Violence in Adolescents’ Romantic Relationships: Findings from a Survey amongst School-going Youth in a South African Community’, Journal of Adolescents, vol. 25: 385-395.
Wicomb, Z. 2000. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
Wood, C. and Jewkes, R. 1997. ‘Violence, Rape and Sexual Coercion: Everyday Love in a South African Township’, Gender and Development, vol. 5, no. 2: 41-46.
PAGE 1