Protect the Penis and Vanquish the Vagina

So dear JZ doesn’t like the fact that (an imitation of) his genitals is on display. The ANC marches for human dignity and the Zuma children are pissed off that everyone can see their dad’s dick (wasn’t that the case before the painting was exhibited anyway). All because Brett Murray decided to paint the Presidential Penis. Big woop. I am sitting in the Netherlands, a country with more water, sheep and types of cheese than I care to count. A country whose inhabitants I have happily boasted to about how beautiful my homeland is. And yet, no matter how lovingly I describe the landscape, people and culture, the question that is always asked is “Is it safe there?”. And what, may I ask, can I possibly say to that except “No”. Holland is a country where it is perfectly acceptable for young girls to ride their bikes around the neighbourhood at night and for children to walk to school without being mugged. It is a country where women do not have to fear the man walking on the opposite side of the street, and where locking your car doors means you’re paranoid, not careful. My aunt, who lives here, tells me that when slowing down at a traffic circle once, a man tried to open her car door. Screaming, she kept one hand on the steering wheel and did her best to stop him getting into the car, when it turns out that all he wanted was to ask for directions. My intention is not to start a Europe vs. Africa debate, or tell my fellow Seffricans back home that Europe is so much better. It’s not. There are aspects of this society that are so backward I need a whole other post to discuss them. (Let me just mention that people are still able to smoke in some restaurants here. Ja. Smoking. Remember that?) But what I am saying is that while I am trying hard to enjoy a trip that I have paid through my arse to finance I can’t help but be dismayed at the media attention, time and government finances that are being thrown at a little prick that (was) on display in a Johannesburg gallery, when the safety of a good portion of South Africans is threatened daily.

All over South Africa, women are being raped, abused and murdered. Women are told to fear men or seek their protection, not see them as equals. The penis stands for a lot of things in our country, and not many of those are positive. Like the spear (the one that is used in battle, not this fucking painting), it is capable of violence.

And yet the polygamous president of the country with some of the highest rape statistics in the world and who himself was the subject of a highly publicised rape trial a few years ago (remember that anyone?), is a little pissed off because now we have all seen (an artist’s impression of) his member?

Forgive me for going Germaine Greer on you, but really, when is it going to be the Vagina’s time to shine? Or to get a little attention? Yes, the vagina, remember it? The female reproductive organs which get more time plastered across pornographic websites and in hospitals where they are sewn up and tended to after being brutalised by men than they do in the South African spotlight. I can’t actually imagine half our country getting worked up about a vagina being depicted against its will in a gallery, because in South Africa, the vagina is objectified every day, in every way, and at every stage of its development. The female body is ripped apart by the male gaze, subject to digital manipulation and visual dissection. Not an hour goes by when a woman’s body is not violated in some way. It is so insidious that we don’t bother to question it anymore. We just accept that it is part of life. Natural.

And yet, when our president is himself exposed and objectified, he fails to use this opportunity to gain insight into the female experience. He has just encountered the plethora of emotions that accompany bodily objectification; feelings of vulnerability, loss of dignity and hurt pride, having gone through what South African women endure on a daily basis, and he doesn’t use this position to empathise with the members of his population who experience this everyday? Fuck him man. One man’s genitals are on show and the whole country gets excited. Really? REALLY?

Forgive me for not caring for JZ’s human dignity one bit. While our president SHOULD be attending to the little problem of, oh, say, baby rape, for instance, he sits in a corner and licks his wounds, sending his legal cronies to fight what shouldn’t be a battle to begin with. This self-obsessed, power-hungry polygamist is wasting legal resources, time and money fighting an unsuspecting artist who painted his winky, when there is a war on women’s bodies going on right under his nose.

How could women possibly live safe, dignified lives in a country run by a phallic-occupied man who has more wives than brain cells? What is the possibility of escaping objectification, sexual violence and injustice in a country that spends more taxpayers’ money trying to shackle its artists than its rapists? And really, let’s be honest here, how can we ever expect to escape the frightening possibility of our daughters, sisters, mothers and wives having unwanted penises thrust into them, when our country is more focused on the member that exacts this damage, rather than the vagina’s who bear the brunt of it?

Very little I’m afraid. Vanquish the vagina and protect the penis.

We live in a perverse society.

Let us live and strive for freedom in South Africa men’s land.

Flipping the orange

And then there is Amsterdam. Disguised in my previous blog post was a lament for the chaos and spontaneous mayhem that erupts on a daily basis in the dear Eastern Cape of South Africa, the landscape of my childhood and the home of my heart. The Netherlands is a highly organised country, and despite its size, is one of the European countries carrying Greece through the current Euro crisis. For this beach bum Rhodent, its efficiency was as much an amazing surprise (and a welcome one) as it was baie vreemd!

But there is a city that turns this convenient arrangement on its head and that gives rules a fat middle finger: Amsterdam. Besides the fact that half its buildings are close to falling over, the city is one big trippy tea party with loads of fun to be had. The city provides a riotous assortment of activities with which one can rebel against the great Dutch bureaucratic machine. Sex and drugs are the first things that come to mind, an ample supply of which is found in the Red Light District (which I found myself lost in the other day, much to my Uncle's chagrin). On every street corner, one can purchase a smorgasbord of drug paraphernalia (bongs in shapes I didn't know existed) and, of course, the drugs themselves. This is no meeting-your-dealer-in-the-township thing. This is buying weed in a shop. With Euros. And the shop assistants don't bat an eyelid. In Amsterdam you can score marijuana to the soundtrack of bicycle bells, tram horns and high heels clicking dubiously across cobble-stone pavements. And then of course if you aren't into prostitutes or legal drug-binges, you can just drink your body weight in coffee. (Milk and sugarless, the stuff is like mud here).

And yet, there is something more to this city. As I sat in a coffee shop (caffeine not cannabis - more on that later), I couldn't help but find the endless stream of American backpackers (all 9's on the nerd scale), all boasting about their 3-day, sleep-deprived binges, a bietjie lame. These were clearly kids who had never been let out back home, and now, unleashed in probably the most notorious city in the world, did little to make it seem cool.  Don't get me wrong, the coffee shops are dope (haha) and what I have seen of the RLD so far is funny in the oh-my-GOSH-I-want-to-wipe-that-from-my-memory-right-now way, but there is far more to Amsterdam than what tourists have made it famous for. Of course, the Hemp and Cannabis Museum is pretty cool, and the seedy sex shows with " Live F#&king" plastered across their signs are, to say the least, pretty eye-opening. But at the end of each day that I've spent in this fantastic city, I am always left thinking about something else; the art, the architecture, the culture. Besides, forbidden fruit is always exciting because it is exactly that, forbidden. Half the fun in getting high lies in it being an illicit and illegal pleasure, something that could possibly get you into a lot of shit. And although it isn't illegal, I am sure it is pretty much the same thing with sleeping with prostitutes. (Though since I have no experience in this case, I could be wrong).

And while the good residents of Amsterdam aren't getting stoned or sexing ladies of the night, they are dressing beautifully. Never before have I seen so many people that look like they walked off the Sartorialist's website: crisp linen shirts, black leather jackets, vintage blazers and suede shoes, perfectly-tailored trousers and artfully-rumpled t-shirts with the names of obscure indie bands scrawled across them in mock-graffiti. And that is just the men. Women are a whole other ball game and need another post to do their sense of style justice.

On a side note, leather is big here. Which is weird - because in SA people are becoming increasingly intolerant of animal cruelty - you'd think it would be more intense in a country like Holland but people are furnished top to toe in cow hide here. It gets a bit uncomfortable when there are fields of cattle just outside the city happily grazing, while their relatives are being worn by the entire Dutch population.

 
And that's the thing with Amsterdam; it is such a visually stimulating city that it need not be experienced while under the influence of ten kinds of chemical/ herbal substances. The Van Gogh Museum, for instance, is an incredibly-rich experience (if you pre-book tickets - standing in the queue surrounded by French teenagers and Chinese tourists made me want to increase my anti-depressant dosage) - at the time I went there was a temporary Surrealist and Impressionist exhibit on too, with an array of Munch and Manet and Monet. Needless to say, I left the building speechless, and happy.

In this dazed state of post-art gallery contentment, I had a cappuccino in a post/progressive jazz/rock/dub cafe. Just as I was trying to sneak another coffee-creamer into my caffeine-laden drink, I saw the bright yellow of a poster for Pitch Festival (massive Dutch music fest) and the name of the lead act, Die Antwoord, caught my eye. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was serendipitous, and that this city was going all out to charm me. In all honesty, getting stoned in a foreign country in an unfamiliar city with the possibility of greenies and intense paranoia sort of quelled my thirst for coffee shops before I even got to Amsterdam. But the city has been magical enough without mind-altering substances. Although maybe that's just the shrooms talking. (Jokes Ma).   


   

A Clockwork Orange

The Netherlands, where life is orange. And on time. When the train schedule says a train will depart from Lelystad station at 9.38 to arrive in Amsterdam at 10.18, it does. When neighbours invite you to coffee- tea is for the weak, and the English - at 3pm, you go next door at 3pm.

If you leave your bicycle in town to take a tram around the city, you can expect to find it in that same spot, hours later. If you stop at an intersection, your doors can stay unlocked, your windows wound down. Burglar bars are unimaginable. So are alarm systems. Dogs don't bark loudly, and they sure don't guard. There are no beware-the-dog signs; if anything, windows and walls are decorated with everything from the name of the residents' new baby to Mother-In-Law's Tongue.

Signboards, promotional material and certain buildings carry the hue of the nation; orange.


Fruit is shiny, measured, weighed, perfect. Carefully inspected, only the cleanest, freshest fruit enters its borders from the supply country. Bananas are imported from South America. A half-joking myth passed around here says that unless they are 5.5 inches long and 1.1 inches wide, they will not be found in the Netherlands.

And, did you know that carrots were once a purple root? The Dutch, in a fantastic display of organic engineering, turned them orange. Those vegetables you see on your plates are thanks to a few ambitious Dutchies and their obsession with Holland's official national colour.


You can forget white privilege and Afrikaans-owned farms. Here, the term "reclaimed land" has nothing to do with land redistribution and more to do with dikes. What you see in Lelystad, for instance, was underwater 50 years ago. The earth upon which houses and schools and railways now stand was taken from the ocean. When you control the sea, everything is easy.

Natural parks and 'wild life' are not to be confused with nature or the wild: life cycles are overridden and forests carefully planted to mimic nature. Despite protests from conservationists, wild horses are fed in Winter so they don't starve. My uncle told me that they were once given blankets for the cold, and I'm not sure that he was joking. Don't be fooled - this is not nature. This is the system, hard at work, and work it does.

The windmills of touristy postcards are few and far between. Instead, monstrously-tall wind turbines litter the landscape - some, the colours of the rainbow.

Highway art is the norm - Satan's Tongue, a sculpture that struck me as ironic, is a giant tongue that appears to stick up from the earth. To me it points at, rather than towards the sky and something about it rings true about the country's control over its environment. Most of the Netherlands is just on 6m underwater. If the dikes burst, they're toast. But burst, they won't. You see, this is the naartjie-coloured land of the terrestrial mermaid; where sea and sky have been conquered. There is no place for deviation, no space for error. This is the epicentre of European control. This is the Netherlands.

Swapping Slundon for Amsterdam

Tomorrow is the day I put my REAL big-girl panties on and go see the world. Well, at least a significant portion of it - Europe. To say I have no idea what to expect is an understatement. As a virgin to international air travel and such, my notions of what Europe's fair land has to offer is nothing short of a garbled assortment of cliches and cringe-worthy interpretations of cultures I have no idea about.

Well no REAL idea. Although various sources (read: TV) have given me a few ideas.

I have visions of dropping my dorpie-accent (Slundon English, shudder), putting on a beret and wandering around quaint European villages with my nose in the air and excitement about my eyes. Unfortunately, I was last in the 'Eat-Neatly and Be Graceful' queue so I will probably be that awkward tourist with those "comfy walking shoes", a siff puffy jacket and wild eyes as I pillage the whole of Europe's cheese and wine supplies like a deranged lunatic let into the sunshine for the first time. Plus my nose is too flat to actually be "in-the-air" so to speak. I would have to walk around with my head almost touching my spine to achieve the illusion of such things.

I have promised my friends and family that I will be careful, and, although I have NOT watched 'Taken' (be the next person to tell me to watch it, go on, I dare you), I do understand the dangers of being a small town, 1,4m high tourist in the mecca of all of things touristy. I promise to not do drugs (eish - I'll be in Amsterdam for a large portion of the trip), go off with strangers to wild warehouse parties (isn't that the whole point of going to Europe?) or accept proposals of marriage from Italian locksmiths (a real concern of my boyfriend's).

Oh, and I would be flat-out lying if I promised to wear that GOD-awful fanny pack everyday. I would rather risk appearing to have misshapen-shaped breasts and shove my passport in my bra everyday than be on of those tourists.

And if all goes well, I should return to South Africa in two month's time a little more worldly, a lot more experienced, and hopefully, not completely broke. But if I am broke, then at least carrying a suitcase filled to the brim with kitsch fridge magnets and Eiffel Tower memorabilia. And maybe one of those miniature ponies from Holland, if he keeps quiet during the flight.