Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 What Makes a Man a Man?
- 2 Reshaping Masculinities – Understanding the Lives of Adolescent Boys
- 3 Backdrop to Alex – South African Townships and Stories in Context
- 4 Absent Fathers, Present Mothers
- 5 Pressures to Perform – Tsotsi Boys vs Academic Achievement
- 6 Double Standards – Dating, Sex and Girls
- 7 Defying Homophobia: ‘This is Who I am, Finish and Klaar’
- 8 Young Fathers and the World of Work
- 9 ‘I’m Still Hopeful, Still Positive’ – Holding onto a Dream
- 10 Safe Spaces – Listening, Hearing, Action
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Double Standards – Dating, Sex and Girls
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 What Makes a Man a Man?
- 2 Reshaping Masculinities – Understanding the Lives of Adolescent Boys
- 3 Backdrop to Alex – South African Townships and Stories in Context
- 4 Absent Fathers, Present Mothers
- 5 Pressures to Perform – Tsotsi Boys vs Academic Achievement
- 6 Double Standards – Dating, Sex and Girls
- 7 Defying Homophobia: ‘This is Who I am, Finish and Klaar’
- 8 Young Fathers and the World of Work
- 9 ‘I’m Still Hopeful, Still Positive’ – Holding onto a Dream
- 10 Safe Spaces – Listening, Hearing, Action
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
With regard to sexual identity and heterosexual engagement, what became clear to me as our interviews progressed was that adolescent boys’ voices reflect conflicts and contradictions in their construction of masculinity.
All of the 32 boys who began this research project with me and went off for two weeks with their disposable cameras came back with photos of girls to put in their albums. In the individual as well as group interviews, they spent a lot of time talking about their relationships with girls. They said that it was important for a boy to have a girlfriend, but expectations in terms of these relationships differed from one boy to another. Many said they expected to have sex with multiple girlfriends as sexual relations were seen as a key marker of successful township masculinity. This prioritising of sex with multiple girlfriends was rejected by some boys, however, which indicated to me that not all boys are interested in having sex with (multiple) girls. An alternative masculinity, one that promotes ‘faithfulness’ in relationships with girls and challenges popular misogynistic views of girls as sex objects appears, as elsewhere, to be emerging in a township environment too. These boys said they believed that girls should be treated with respect and dignity. There is some way to go, but it is this view that we need to promote in the mainstream.
It has to be said that this view was not the popular consensus among the majority of the boys I interviewed, but what was indisputable was that girls were a central topic of discussion for all the boys. Having multiple sexual partners came up regularly. It was described as a key marker of being a sex-jaro (slang term for boys who like to have sex with many different girls).
Martin, who was one of the boys who most enjoyed the phototaking part of the project and took it very seriously, said the following about sex-jaro boys. ‘This guy,’ he said, pointing to a photo he had taken at school,
this guy is sex-jaro. A sex-jaro is a boy who likes girls. Like ‘jaro’; ‘jaro’ never fails in anything. There is no girl who can say no to him when he chats her up. He can get a girl any time whenever he wants. He can do anything he wants to do at that moment, and no one would tell him anything.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Becoming MenBlack Masculinities in a South African Township, pp. 75 - 94Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2020