Social media in Namibia has been buzzing with allegations from women talking about having been assaulted or raped by men. Reading these ordeals and alike had me cogitating about toxic masculinity.
The concept of toxic masculinity is a psychology and gender principle that refers particularly to norms of masculine conduct that have negative effects on men and how they are in society. There are many traditional stereotypes of men such as men are socially dominant, misogyny, etc. They are deemed toxic, this is due to the fact that they promote violence including assault of a sexual nature and domestic violence. According to many scholars the socialisation of boys often normalizes violence. They say things like "Man is man" or boys will be boys when it comes to aggression. As men, we are raised to be self-reliant and to suppress emotions which later leads to stress, depression and substance abuse. If one is to conduct a study or survey with regards to gender based violence it shall come to your attention that toxic masculinity is one of the biggest contributing factors. It has become clear to me that if we do not address this elephant in the room this cycle of "Passion Killings" will continue in our beautiful country. Life has this thing in which it repeats the same lesson until you learn it.
When are we as a nation going to wake up and fight this ill brought up by culture? In my culture a man is never wrong and even when he is wrong he is never held accountable for his wrongdoing. Fathers abuse mothers and children but this is allowed to continue even into adulthood because culturally that has been the norm. So, what in turn happens in the long run is that we end up with a society of people who are escapists and by all means avoid all forms of accountability. If you look closer at corruption and politics, you can attribute lack of accountability to a lot of these things. Our president declared this a year of accountability and I share his sentiments in this regard. It is time for us a nation to own up and that should start at home. The state of a nation depends on the state of the family but the state of the family depends on the state of its head which is the man.
As you all know I am a believer and I like to put some Biblical references in my work because I am merely a vessel that God uses to spread his message. In Genesis God created man first, and gave him purpose. Adam's purpose was to look after the Garden of Eden. After God saw that Adam could look after Eden (life purpose) he created for him a helper Eve. Our role as man is not to abuse the helper God created for us but it is work hand in hand to fulfil the purpose of God in our lives. When purpose is unknown abuse becomes the norm.