#TeamMafisi and the Male Gaze
January 14, 2013 § 3 Comments
Levi-Strauss writes of a Native American people for whom every dream has a hidden sexual meaning, except explicitly sexual dreams, for which it is imperative that non-sexual interpretations be found.
I am reaching for an Oscar Wilde aphorism here. Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power. The Freudian in me demurs against this pan-sexualization of everything, and even more against reducing sex to power. But the feminist in me tarries at this sex:power locus, because it is where patriarchy inheres, turning sex into a zero sum conquest with winners and losers. The sexual terrain becomes stark, arduous. One must guard against being had. Against becoming just another notch in another belt.
A friend recently alerted me to the #TeamMafisi hashtag on Twitter. Mafisi is Swahili for hyenas. Armed with the banality of twitter hashtagging, this “team” of mostly young Kenyan men directs its violent gaze on women’s bodies—their prey.
In her email, my friend wrote:
They disgust me. It’s one thing to objectify women. But that’s not enough for them; they go on to body shame, to call women ugly, to declare entitlement to a woman’s vagina (because a woman has nothing else to her name except a vagina). And of course, women are referred to, richly, as bitches.
Like most violence, misogyny deploys shock and awe to confound our responses beyond coherence. I felt like I did not know how to begin this post. I feel like I have very little to say. Mostly I feel angry.
Although the misogyny on #TeamMafisi might seem reflexive, it is not. Rather, it is so deliberate and organized that it has defenders within the Kenyan blogosphere who lay out its codes of conduct and memos. One could even say—to borrow from Keguro—that the misogyny here is banal. The banality, say, of tweeting and hashtagging, is part of the socio-historical through which misogyny becomes reflexive. Banality becomes the training we put ourselves through to make misogyny reflexive. What might it mean to understand misogyny through the kind of training that produces reflexes? Certainly the banality of tweeting and hashtagging labors to traffic the misogyny of #TeamMafisi and pass it off as ordinary, everyday, as part of the affects and intensities exchanged through the internet, and therefore something one must put up with. The fallacy is that misogyny is slightly inconveniencing.
As Western media deploys an Orientalist lens that locates rape and misogyny squarely in India—meaning, in the Global South, outside the West, and, yet again, as the need to save brown women from brown men—I would like us to think locally. Misogyny is not just a problem in India; in Kenya; or on Twitter. It is a problem everywhere, including here in the West from where I write.
*For image credit, see here.
I will not defend or accuse the #TeamMafisi, heaven knows we live in a free society. But getting angered by such hashtags is petty….. one can always unfollow those who anger you on twitter…it is much easier than unfriending friends on facebook. Either way, one needs to understand that socialmedia is more like marigiti the market. You will find all manner of people there including oglers….. You either get in, do your stuff and walk away of you will get angered by the things that happen therein.
To use a cliché, it is never that serious!!
iRest.
To say that misogyny, whether jocular or serious, is never grave, is to entertain the fantasy that humor as an intention is not, or cannot be, harmful. Humor is the ruse with which most misogyny is trafficked, clothed, masked. I would hazard that we would not entertain such humor if it was racist or ethno-nationalist. So why do we entertain misogynistic humor? Why do we call on people to “take it easy” when it obviously causes harm, especially to those who are subjected to insults and abuse and scrutiny by the likes of #TeamMafisi?
Additionally, there is the fantasy that misogyny is a slight inconvenience. That one can look away, unfollow an account or hashtag. That one can see no evil. This is what makes misogyny ordinary, everyday, something one is asked to contend and live with, to put up with. This is what I am against. It shouldn’t be this way.
i am glad you wrote this. i agree that hiding our heads in the sand and pretending that things aren’t happening doesn’t mean those things aren’t happening and it certainly doesn’t lessen their effects. i remember reading once that the literal translation of the title for the book the girl with the dragon tattoo came to men who hate women. i can’t remember why this was changed but i can imagine that a book with that title would not have sold nearly as many copies.
i lived in a place once where women were accosted on the street all the time, they were shouted at by groups of men as they walked past, men who could only do this through anonymity, in that place it meant even those not cocooned in crowds were ready to harass. what happens on the internet and on twitter can and does affect what happens in society, i am glad you wrote this because its not something people talk about enough, men who hate women.