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Masculinity and Prevention

Submitted by jeffrey on Fri, 12/09/2008 - 14:08
Until recently South Africa has been a male dominated country lead by a patriarchal system.This system has been catapulted through masculinity, using masculinty as a tool to acquire dominanace an inequality in South Africa. The plartfoem used to enforce this masculine behaviours has been thorugh societal conditions thata become gender norms that set standards or expectations for how people should behave and interact. This challenging because this masculinity says condom usage is asign of weakness and that women have no say when it comes to condom usage. On the other hand their man who still feel a women has no right when it comes to sex and can neither suggest nor innitiate sex. The same man feels he cannot be refused sex by his girlfriend or wife. This is challenging looking at the current statistics when it comes to HIV prevalence it leaves me to ask what can we do to change the status quo because if not we will be a dying country.

Comments

Culture is sometimes to blame

Submitted by Eva.Ramokobala on Tue, 16/09/2008 - 16:53.

We will become a "dying country" if men don't stop using culture as a means to justify foolish actions.  

Stupidity, not masculinity says "condom usage is a sign of weakness".

transformation

Submitted by sally_jean.shac... on Mon, 15/09/2008 - 18:16.

Hi Jeffrey

Good to see your blog :-) - and you ask a hard question! I agree with you, we must transform gender relationships  - and make such deep transformation that we reach people's homes - and beds!

For me, transformation is a difficult thing, and needs a huge amount of investment and lots of evaluation, reflection and effort.  We dont invest enough in deep, long term change work, and we dont look back enough to check what progress we are making... and we only have access to short term funding (1-3 years) - not enough to really make change.

What do you think?

 

Hi Sally and Eva

Submitted by jeffrey on Tue, 23/09/2008 - 16:59.
@Eva unfortunately the stupidity you are speaking about is jusitfied in many ways to the point that people start to believe this to be some form of intelligence...where by some believe just by admiting that HIV exist its draw it towards you, sounds strange but this is wat i meet as i work with men in different provinces. @Sally the other thing this funding looks at creating programs give them to grass roots organisations to apply then after that 1-3 years term you talkin about above is over they then set their sights to other programs leaving the grass roots organisation with no means to push the activities further..Another thing there is no capacity building happening interms of helping organisations to sustain programs on their own instead some funders just want to see the work done whether the individuals doing have the capacity or not.