Dingaan Mokebe is wrong, women are not their own worst enemy

Actor, casting director and presenter Dingaan Mokebe has become the latest in a series of people to peddle the foolish idea that women hate each other for no reason other than the fact that they subscribe to the same gender conceptualisation.

According to a recent video shared to his Instagram TV channel, he has based this idea on something that recently occurred among some people that he knows.

Long story short; some friends of his who had been married for seven years recently split.

Mokebe said the wife in the scenario shared her suspicions with her female friends, as most people in such a situation would do, and they gave her the logical advice to ditch the cheater, which she later did.

He said he then advised the woman to go home and talk to her husband to see how she was going to fix the situation – if she wanted to fix it.

She chose not to and is currently in the process of divorcing the cheater.

What informed Mokebe’s warped idea about women hating each other in this case is the fact that the wife recently found out that one of her friends who told her to divorce the cheater is currently romantically involved with him and has been for the last three months.

“You watch Uyajola 9/9, you listen to Ask A Man on Metro FM. You hear every single day women talking about discovering their blood sister or friends sleeping or cheating with their man – and yet you have women [who] have the nerve to call men dogs? What does that then make you? If you women loved each other so much, if you women had each other’s backs, why do you hate each other so much?” asked Mokebe.

How is it that in a scenario where a man broke his vows and acted dishonourably, women somehow become the problem?

How is it that the husband in question cheated but the mistress who acted selfishly is the only one who gets blamed?

How does the narrative become about women and this false belief that they hate each other for no reason at all?

Patriarchy, that’s how!

Patriarchy coupled with internalised misogyny allows people to feel comfortable enough to abandon all logic and buy into this concept of people hating each other based on the sole reason that they both have two X chromosomes.

It allows people to come up with silly phrases like “pull-her-down syndrome” and ignore the fact that men do all the same things women do when they do not like another person but they are exempt from all this useless scrutiny and theorising.

As a woman, you’re allowed to dislike the object of your paramour’s affection, even if she is your sister. Men do it all the time when they covet other men’s partners. That does not make it right, it just frames it as less of a “female problem”.

You’re also allowed to dislike another woman because she’s a bad person, you get bad vibes from her or you just don’t like her at all.

After the recent reaction to the country’s problem of femicide in the form of female-led protests and the mostly female-based support survivors have gotten after coming out with their stories, I ask that as a woman, you never allow another man to imply that we do not support each other. Especially not when they have shown us that in a world where we run the risk of dying and getting abused every day, the support of other women is all we have.

Kaunda Selisho

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