Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa by Deevia Bhana

Author:Deevia Bhana [Bhana, Deevia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781315282992
Google: mFQ7DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34498586
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-25T02:16:18+00:00

Teenage boys thus accrue power from cultural norms that expect unmarried females to be virgins but regard male sexual activity as unproblematic. Teenage township girls were generally portrayed as lacking respectability, getting drunk and having no care for practising safe sex. They were seen as responsible for spreading HIV. In these boys’ eyes, they lacked hlonipha. In such a way, cultural boundaries for acceptable sexuality were reconfirmed.

Cultural boundaries, however, are shifting and fluid, not static. Nkosi talks about having sex without a condom, highlighting both female and male sexual agency. “She decided to have sex with you” is an indication that teenage girls do act on their desires. Sex is far from exclusively in the domain of sexual violence and coercion. Sex, as Nkosi indicates, is also spontaneous, with girls and boys acting on their desires together. However, according to these respondents, girls were often sexually irresponsible and they were blamed for the spread of HIV.

Teenage girls who went clubbing were also seen as doing damage to their reputations:

SIBONELO Those girls amaqola [gold diggers] … they like clubbing. Amagigi [virgins], they don’t … Boys want to have sex with a girl who’s a virgin because they say a virgin is very – [it] is very cool when they have sex with a virgin.

Differentiated forms of femininity were thus produced in which amaqola were vilified and amagigi honoured. Virgins, as I discussed in Chapter 3, were contrasted to gold diggers. As far as the teenage boys in the focus group discussions were concerned, a woman’s femininity became compromised when she was seen not only as having loose morals and sleeping around but also as being a ‘gold digger’ – which, as I argued in Chapter 3, was also a comment on teenage boys’ economic vulnerability. Teenage boys deploy cultural and gendered norms to inform their masculine sexual power:

NKOSI Let’s say he have sex with a girl who was – who was … don’t have any experience, amagigi. It’s where she will get an experience of how to have sex.

SIBONELO I think boys want girls to know how to have sex.

NKOSI But at the end of the day the boys want to marry virgins.

THABISO But what I think is that the boys want the girls to have only sex with him and not with many boys….

NKOSI But the fact is that at the end of the day if they decide to get married they want a fresh one [a virgin].

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