The bells can ring

By Bukka Rennie
August 06, 2003

Is it that men are driven to madness by their own sense of insecurity in light of the tremendous power of female sexuality?

I always recall the incident related to me by an officer of the OWTU many years ago. He said he came to develop an amorous relationship with a certain woman who, whenever they engaged in sexual intercourse, would figuratively "ring a bell" at the point of her orgasm.

On many an occasion, he said he visited the woman and met her conversing on the porch with a frail, little, old man who normally came with an old bicycle that he parked downstairs against the wall. He never thought much of the old man who usually left whenever he arrived, until that eventful day when he visited much earlier than his normal time.

The bicycle was in its usual place but he saw no one on the porch. Still not sensing anything awry, he began to mount the steps when suddenly "the bell began to ring". He went berserk, broke down the door to her bedroom and may have committed murder but for the fact that at that very moment he froze, then turned around calmly and went away.

He said he learned on that day that he had been deluding himself into acting as if she were his personal property and, by extension of this logic, that he and only he could engender the ringing of the bell. At last he came to understand that it was in the nature of bells to ring.

People are not property. Emancipation was supposed to have settled all that over 150 years ago. Yet there are fundamental issues that are still to be broached.

The major contradiction is that whilst it is the quest for possessions and the accumulation of possessions that have inspired and motivated human beings to progress and development as we have come to know it, nevertheless it is the very relationships that emanate from this process of accumulating possessions that foster the present level of barbarism that finds its ugly expression in man/woman conflict.

I, the man, build the house in which you, the woman, live, I buy the food and the clothes, etc, so do as I say because I am in control. That's the logic.

The two most recent murderous attacks on women were classical cases of this property-relations logic. Imagine in this day and age women being locked away and have to get permission from common-law husbands in regard to what they wear and when they can go out and with whom or even whether they can seek jobs.

Last weekend one woman, who sought a job to better the conditions for her children, was butchered in public, she was stabbed some 30 times. All this is too common to be seen as isolated, individual malaise. It is social malaise, undoubtedly.

Society has as its fundamental basis a system of social relationships that emerges out of the dominant property relations. It has a lot to do with how wealth is defined and valued but once as a result the fundamental relationship is one in which the "powerful" stands diametrically opposed to the "powerless" or subordinate, then the society from the top down will by nature be violent.

As a matter of fact, there is no modern society in the world today that can exist for 48 hours without the coercive arms of the state, ie police and army. No police and no army and immediately the "powerful" and the "powerless" would be at each other's throat.

On the other hand, church, school and family comprise society's philosophical agencies of moulding, mediation and reconciliation geared to minimise conflict and violence but true to say these three agencies are today so outmoded and backward that they are being seriously called to question. With the power of these agencies seriously compromised, society's affairs will more that ever continue to be brutal and barbaric.

Not surprisingly, 90 per cent of all crimes are in fact crimes of passion. Why? Because once the system of relationships breaks down, the most fundamental of all the relations, ie man/woman relations, will feel the brunt of impact.

Women (because a higher level of social consciousness has been generalised amongst them, engendered by the modern education system and the efforts of the Women's Liberation movements worldwide) can no longer tolerate, suffer or concede to the sex and sexual relations that are imposed on them and which reflect the dominant socio-economic and property relations of the day.

In fact women are demanding that "change" per se must begin with change in sex and sexual relations. It is this demand that has been putting their lives in gave danger, precisely because they are in the "vanguard" for change. One wonders if people understand that women must win this struggle if this world is to go anywhere.

The masculine kind by its specific nurturing in the ultra-competitive environment of maleness is in fact the greatest repository of aggressive violence. Challenged by almost everything, even by life itself, power relations have served to mould within males the deepest fear of being incapable, the fear of failing, the fear of being less than what is essentially required, the fear of being inadequate.

That all-embracing fear and its corollary, the urgency and anxiety to succeed, not only in the general affairs of existence, but also in the affairs of the heart, even if it is about the obtaining and maintaining of an "erection", creates the fragile ego, the tumultuous rage of jealousy and insecurity which underlies all crimes of passion.

The motivation for most men is to love and to possess. That is their interrelated measure of manhood. Anything therefore that threatens this imagined edifice, such as the intrusion of another, the scaling of a fence, that may seem to lead to a lost of possession and control and thereby result in the diminishing of self, the diminishing of one's measure, can and often triggers a frenzy of killings, ie homicide and suicide.

There has to be developed a whole new way of seeing and being. All our institutions and relationships, particularly our agencies of mediation and reconciliation, have to be re-examined for relevance and thereby reshaped to accommodate and fashion the new kind of man and woman we envisage.

Societies of ancient times had clear-cut separate "rites of passage" through which young boys and girls were indoctrinated before they were proclaimed and adjudged to be "men" and "women". Modern society abandoned any such distinct cultural "rites of passage" into adulthood and has left everything up to church, school and family, all of which to one extent or another have come to be compromised and corrupted by the dominant property relations and are silent on human development issues.

The key question is how are we to fashion the men and women of tomorrow utilising agencies that are themselves outmoded and inappropriate? And how are we to get people to be comfortable with their sexuality and to recognise that "fighting-up" with it is non-productive? Moreover, how are we to get men to comprehend that they are incidental to the propensity of women to "ring bells"?