The Human Race

According to Dr. Bowen-Simpkins, one in 3000 are born with an intersex disorder. I read an article once that claimed the number was much higher than this.

What is happening to Caster Semenya – the scrutiny, the violence of the exposé, the brutality of the jokes, the outrage on all sides – is what happens when society is forced to confront a truth its entire construction is based upon denying: that there are more than two genders, that humanity cannot be so simply divided, severed, in half.

Gender division gives power structures something to stand over. When someone tries to run headlong into it, or run across its tightly regulated boundaries, and then dare to celebrate their victory in doing so, they must be mercilessly exposed, revealed to the masses, denounced as an anomaly, a deviance from the norm: unverified and illegitimate. Would anyone have asked any questions, or cast any doubt over her identity, if Caster Semenya had not been winning her races?



She can run, but she mustn’t win, because the winner must be the Human and everyone knows that humans are only male or female. In the human race as we understand it, Semenya can only lose.

(All credit to South Africa for rallying to her side).

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Corsets and Cleavage Vs Shoulderpads and Power-suits


While in South Africa I bought a couple of women’s magazines; something I haven’t even done in Britain for about two years, and I was kind of impressed with what I found.




Firstly, both the South African Elle and Marie Claire included fashion photo shots using black models – nowhere near enough to be representative of the black and coloured demographics of South Africa (although maybe representative of who is the target consumer… which tells another story of culture and class…) and the models were still way too skinny, but nevertheless, an improvement on the last British versions of the same magazines I looked through.

And secondly, the articles were much more socially analytical – engaging with theory and psychology – than I remember their British counterparts being: they did not skirt around issues concerned with what may or may not be ‘women’s culture’ in the way that most, in my experience, hypocritically do. (Hypocritical in that the magazines themselves are frequently posited as the voices of this ‘culture’; maybe even the epitome of it – its foundation and base of replenishment).

The South African Marie Claire and Elle showed themselves, in their March issues alone, not to be afraid to use the ‘f-word’, or to analyses and criticise it. But still, it never fails to amaze me how many, often completely contradictory, forms of so-called feminisms there are. It’s hard to keep up:

One article in March’s South African Elle, and one article in March’s South African Marie Claire, engage with the term, but it’s difficult to see if there would be any place in each article where the two women featured would recognise each other as feminists. On a personal level, I had a hard time finding any place in which my own feminisms might complement either of theirs. Neither of their versions bears any resemblance to mine.

Marie Claire’s is an interview with world famous stripper, Dita Von Teese. When asked if she’d call herself a feminist, Von Teese replies: “…Being a feminist is just embracing your femininity and not trying to get rid of it”. Even though she doesn’t extrapolate, her profession and attitude suggest that she’s coming from the more liberal and/or ‘post-feminist’ end of the feminist spectrum, that tout female sexual assertion and promotion as a way towards empowerment and greater self-confidence.


This deliberate thrust of visibility, of shows of sexual assertiveness, is all-too-regularly conflated with “embracing femininity”. By this, its apparently most popular equation, femininity = (female) sexuality.

Linda Hirshman of the Elle article, on how women must get a share in men's success, on the other hand, explains how her method depends entirely upon “getting rid of” ‘femininity’. As the article’s author, Sheelagh Kolhathar recognises, Hirshman’s brand of feminism, which positively demands that women relinquish - indeed actively reject - child-care and false and contrived domestic-callings in order to belligerently and blinkardly pursue power and money by being driven and deliberately deaf to sexual temptations and (as this leads to…) lures of motherhood, basically requires that we “become men”.

Hirshman might possibly commend the drive and ambition of Von Teese, who is top of a very lucrative field with a lot of the stuff (money, power, success) that Hirshman values above anything else. But Von Teese’s product – her business – is the commodification of (and perpetuation of) much of the aspects of ‘womanhood’ that have kept women in the secondary and objectified positions that Hirshman wants to see obliterated; in order that ‘feminine’ clutter is cleared to reveal the path that will enable them to take their place alongside men in boardrooms and executives' offices. Men are not fluttering their feathers and heels upon bird-swings and parrot perches! So the pursuit of the kind of feminist power Von Teese parades can make no impact upon the world Hirshman wants to see ‘penetrated’ by women.



I definitely don’t support a feminism so dependent upon conventional notions of female sexuality: the suggestion that our physical ‘assets’, our size or our shape (and colour) – what makes our bodies different from men’s bodies – is the most we have to offer (that without them we would have nothing to offer) is abhorrent, especially when the prescriptions for these ‘assets’ – their size and their shape – have been largely defined by and through male objectification of the female body; for the purposes of visual consumption.

The woman may have freely chosen to strip, and for her own economic gain, but she still dances to a male tune, strips to his terms, and despite Pussycat-Doll-style claims to the contrary, is ultimately still giving him everything he wants. How has anything changed? How is this feminism?

On the other side of the spectrum; not only accepting but embracing, and training and conditioning ourselves to attain, the public world as shaped and organised by men for men – a world which never had women in mind – since it didn’t need to – is now desirable all of a sudden! Suddenly it’s fine for women to consider what other women have been doing since we dropped down from the trees as valueless, undesirable, dull, and unprogressive (in other words, everything that many men have deemed ‘women’s work’ since they dropped down beside us!).


And now that a number of radical feminists have decided that, yes, actually men have been right about us all along, and right about the shape of the world all this time, we have to just step down and take the ‘L’ – snap out of our denial – drop everything (including… especially… the babies!) – and run as fast as we can to catch up with the men who are steaming ahead!:- The ones who got it right, the ones who’ve got everything sussed, the ones who apparently deserve a pat on the back for manipulating us into staying at home and keeping a cosy house so that they might further themselves on their self-designed pathways to success… I don’t think so! How is this feminism? How are either of these career paths and ideologies feminist?

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Two Weeks in Cape Town

Two weeks in Cape Town: a holiday and a litmus test for whether we’d consider accepting jobs there. Eran was a bit more seduced by the space and the beauty and the food and the ocean than I was. Our first week in Cape Town itself was fun; it’s a nice city. We enjoyed Long Street especially, and Zula's was the best food we’ve eaten in years. I certainly didn’t eat anything close to that in London, and that includes Jamie Oliver’s place!



But it was our second week in Kommetjie, 50 minutes from Cape Town, that made my mind up. It was so incredibly beautiful – both location and the house itself – breathtaking – I can’t describe it…





But before the morning, the night must pass, and it was during the night’s creaking hours that I understood how it would be:- in the darkness the seductive beauty of South Africa is concealed, and only in that darkness can you finally see clearly. The house, with its light and space and wood and quirky décor, was unprotected:- no high walls, no security registration, just glass. After our robbery in Angola every South African we’ve had contact with here have said that if the same thing had happened in South Africa we would all be dead for sure. Apparently in South Africa robbers don’t leave survivors.



So our nights in Kommetjie were frightening at worst and tense at best. We had the phone with 10111 dialled up all ready to press ‘call’, and a knife under the bed. It took us a long time to go to sleep: afraid of an event that hadn’t happened.



Our final night we stayed with an Israeli friend’s mum in Johannesburg, before our return flight to Luanda. She lives in small luxury – a beautiful box within a cage, within a cage, within a cage, on a street with a security guard poised to drop an ever-ready road-block. We drove at night where we were warned to be careful about stopping at red lights. All over South Africa we drove with the locks down. In Johannesburg we went to Nelson Mandela Square; boxed and caged by opulence and decadence:- the wealthy may come inside the box to honour the giant monument erected there for the man who gave over his life for the breaking out of boxes and the tearing down of high walls.



It was a privilege to spend a fortnight in this incredible place, but I could not live like this. I’ve known too many cages to choose another, much bigger, much more powerful and insidious cage, than I have ever known. In South Africa there are only two ways to live: inside the cage, or outside looking in (or breaking in).



If you press your ear to the alcoholic soil, and dip beneath the hypnotic scent of wine and the heady scent of abundant blossoms, and ignore the expansive blues of sea and sky spilling out from the crevices of rugged crags and dramatic mountains, you can hear the violence, bitterness and hatred drumming away beneath the earth, shifting the land so slightly it’s almost imperceptible, waiting for a crack through which to erupt. One day the land might just do to its settlers, on all sides, what the ocean around Cape Point succeeded in doing for decades:- swallowing, churning, and spitting out its invaders. Land can sense origin, but not colour. This will not be a black and white selection process.