Through the Eyes of Men - Part 3

We've made it to week three of our wonderful series, and I don't know about you but I've already gained so much insight from the last two blogs, and this one is about to shed even more light. Next week I'll be giving a summary and commentary of the series as a whole. But for today we have Zakes on the blog. He is a great friend of mine, let's see what riches his narrative has for us.

Q 1: What did the people around you while you were young (father, mother, friends, teachers), teach you about what a woman is and how a man is to treat a woman?

Zakes: I grew up in a house where my father would get drunk over the weekends, and he’d come home and beat my mom up. I used to sit in my room as a child and pray that he wouldn’t come home drunk, and if he was already drunk I prayed that he wouldn’t come back home. Being in that situation made me believe in God, I prayed to Him constantly. Growing up in a house where abuse on a woman was frequent I learnt that a woman is a possession. That you need to dominate her, and overpower her in some way. And because they are women, that came with the connotations that they are weak and that if you are forceful enough, they will comply. I read a quote that said that the reason why men feel the need to overpower women is because women are the birth place of everything. They are the beginning of everything. Without a woman, no growth can come. They have so much worth in them, so by damaging something so precious, we feel good about ourselves, we feel like a god. So when we think about what goes through the mind of a man when he decides that he’s going to rape a girl; it’s a pursuit to feel in control, it’s a pursuit to feel like a god. Women are precious creations of God, and men, like every other thing we do, we try to destroy to creation of God. And by doing so, we try to become like Him. It’s a way of claiming our alpha male-ism. It’s a messed up way of thinking, but there’s a psychology behind it.

Q2: Did you shift from what was taught to you as you grew older?

Zakes: Funny enough, it was because I grew up in a house where there was abuse, that I decided that I wanted to create my own image of a woman and I vowed to never ever hit a woman. I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on doing it. No matter how antagonizing she can be, no matter how bad the situation can be, no matter how all up in my face she is, even if she hits me, I’ve vowed to never reciprocate. It is because of the background that I have that I decided to come up with a new definition of what a woman is.

Q 3: What is your opinion on the current increased violence towards women and children?

Zakes: I think that it is an everyday thing for a guy to find some way to describe a woman to his friends. If it’s not numbers, it’s adjectives. These things, in a way reduce women from being women, these living beings, to just being numbers and adjectives. And they turn into things that appeal to our senses. There’s definitely something wrong about it. I think it starts there, turns from just joking and then it escalates. For a man to turn violent against a woman he had already reduced her to something worthless in his mind. It’s a very psychological thing, it stems very deep and then it turns into actions. For me personally, how I’ve gotten to that point is because of porn. I’ve watched a lot of porn, and now it’s hard to look at a woman and not escalate it to a sexual level. I know that it’s wrong, but it all starts in the mind.

Q 4: How do you think that this situation can be changed? (Either by just men or as a society)?

Zakes: There are movements out there, like #MenAreTrash and these are led by women. Women are fed up and they just feel that enough is enough. But I think that the most change will come if men would get together and realise that how we’re doing things is totally wrong. We need more men speaking to men about how to be a man and how to treat women. Just so we can return to a level of humanity and just recognising them the same as we would recognise another guy. We need more men coming together; seminars, talk shows, something that’ll speak mostly to young men. Because truth be told, we’re messed up.