Brave recklessness will lead to our demise

The Disney franchise may seem like a weird place for an adult such as myself to look for life advice but what can I say? It seems to be working thus far and this past week no words rang truer than those of Disney’s Cruella de Vil in 101 dalmatians. “More good women have been lost to marriage than to war, famine, disease and disaster”. And while the fictional Ms De Vil may have been referring to something else entirely, today in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis having a husband or intimate partner may very well kill you. Now I hate to be the harbinger of doom but now more than ever having close relations with men is ill-advised. When Covid-19 first became a part of our reality the statistics showed that it affected and killed more men than women. Perhaps it is in their biological make up or perhaps it is because men have been lax in adhering to Covid-19 regulations, not just lax but downright foolish if I am to be honest. In the past week I have personally seen more groups of men than I care to count, well I was counting but I got tired, huddled together sharing a cigarette! Yes, from one mouth to the other in a time when just breathing someone else’s air is life-threatening. The habit of sharing is not limited to just cigarettes, it includes bottles of beers as well. At first, I thought, oh well if they want to kill themselves who am I to worry but unfortunately these men go home to their wives, children, parents and colleagues and pass the virus to them. One person’s stupidity can very well wipe off a whole family but in the street corners of our villages there they are. Nonchalantly sharing a smoke. Truly, it baffles the mind. Now you may wonder what this has to do with marriage and the fact is while other members of the household, co-workers and the general public may be able to avoid infection by masking and social distancing from Thabo and his cigarette sharing habits, the same cannot be said for his wife. No amount of Covid-19 fears will make a married couple wear masks to bed or cease to engage in sexual relations and so if your husband was at the street corner sharing cigarettes you too certainly have shared that cigarette as well. The phenomenon of husbands aiding, and abetting pandemics is not new. When the HIV pandemic first hit in villages those more affected were married women, and that is because while it is easy for singletons to negotiate condom use the same did not easily happen inside the sanctity of marriages. Husbands came from the mines of South Africa with the disease gotten from I dare not mention where and came home to infect their unsuspecting wives and the chain of infection grew from there. It appears we have learned nothing from history and are cursed to repeat it. The power dynamics that prevented women from insisting on protection then are the same that are preventing them from demanding compliance from their husbands today and so married women are once again bearing the brunt of their spouses’ carelessness. Stupidity aside, perhaps the high rate of infection amongst men also comes back to our socialisation as a people. We expect men to be brave and we encourage bravery that leads to recklessness. It is this culture of brave recklessness that is leading to men fast becoming an endangered species. Another factor is that we live in a society where men are expected to provide and even during a nation-wide lockdown when many are out of jobs the expectation is for the man of the house to go out and get an income by any means necessary, this of course means that men are at a greater risk of infection. The same is true for men who are still at work, a largely male workforce means that men are more likely to come across infected people and even the type of work that men traditionally perform especially across the lower end of the economic spectrum offers less chances of social distancing, that coupled with a history of smoking means men are easily infected and thus more likely to infect their families. Is the solution to banish all men to the outskirts of society like the lepers of old? Are wives to move from the marital bed and cease all conjugal relations till the end of the pandemic? Lol, No. Now while I like to blame men for societal ills as much as the next member of the “Men are trash” brigade, the truth is that women and society play a part in this matter. It is all very well and good to lay the blame at the next person’s feet but ultimately everyone is responsible for their health and women cannot meekly wait for death without taking up arms. The time has come for women to stop hiding behind a culture of silence and take to educating and communicating with their spouses and sons as to the severity of the consequences that can be brought about by something as seemingly inconsequential as sharing a smoke with friends. The same goes for the rest of society and for the men themselves, habits need to change, and we must all play a part in forming a culture of new habits. From women having more of a voice in the comings and goings of their households to the practice of sharing quarts and cigarettes being a thing of old and all the little gendered societal norms that are currently putting men at the top of the risk bracket. The truth is to fight this pandemic we do not only need to look at things from a health perspective but from a social one as well lest we look back years from now and count the corpses by the hundreds of thousands. Thakane Rethabile Shale