Carnivorous Cow

Carnivorous Cow looked a little worriedly at Gramsci. The Object of Men's Desires had brought her a "travel safe kit", but it wasn't a shower. It wasn't even a clove of garlic, or amadumbi. It was.... condoms. She wasn't sure this was a good idea.

She could picture the scene at customs. "Anything to declare?" "Well, yes, the risks of a man contracting HIV from an HIV+ women are remote, and a shower helps minimise that still further." "OK, you're a real South African, not a Nigerian trying to smuggle yourself through on a fake SA passport, you're clear. Enjoy your stay."

Not that risks were necessarily a bad thing. According to an article in the Guardian, experiencing fear together was one (of six, identified) means of bonding with a potential lover. "Perhaps," muttered Gramsci speculatively, "that was what uMalume had in mind with his little episode?"

The Cow doubted that. After all, bonding didn't appear to be what he had in mind, having chosen the shower over the post-coital cuddle, at the very moment when the bonding hormones ought to have been surging.

Her mind was flipping through the other bonding strategies. Body language, soft rock, chocolate, eye contact... jokes. Jokes? Ah, now she understood! She smiled knowingly at Gramsci. "It all makes sense now!" she said excitedly. "The recent salary increases - they're an attempt by the University to encourage staff to bond!"

Gramsci shrugged. He found the absence of eye contact when most line managers informed their staff of their increases quite telling. "Perhaps they should try music instead?" he suggested.

Carnivorous Cow had always blamed George Bush for messing with the climate, but she was beginning to think he was getting a little help with that. At least, if the hysterical adolescents in her office were anything to go by.

"Rat tailed maggots! Yuck!"

"I'm vegetarian! What if I've swallowed some???"

"They're huge! What if they hatch? What do they hatch into - rat tailed mosquitos?"

Gramsci nodded sagely. He, too, was sure that the hand dryers had a role in this. They may not be melting ice caps - yet - but the climate in Sir Carruthers's cloakroom was definitely changing.

Still, he hoped fervently that mosquitos were not what the larvae hatched into. Given that uMalume had set HIV/AIDS thinking back twenty years, we were smack-bang in the era of worrying about HIV+ chefs infecting restaurant diners by bleeding on the lettuce leaves, getting infected by kissing your Grandmother politely on the cheek, or... by being bitten by a mosquito who'd just snacked on someone infected.

"Funny, that," the Cow remarked. "Back then we worried about the salad dressing. These days we worship it as a cure. Odd how these things turn out!"

But Gramsci didn't like the direction the conversation was taking. It was only a step, he worried, away from generating a myth that raping green monkeys would be a cure...

The Cow shrugged. "Misplaced concern," she sighed. "There won't be any left - the hand dryers will have wiped out all the rain forests by then...."

"It was bound to happen," Carnivorous Cow admitted to Gramsci. "In fact, it was foretold. So we shouldn't really be surprised!"

But Gramsci was, still. It hadn't occured to him that food purveyors from the far north of University Avenue would make their way under cover of twilight each evening to seek out the single shower that nestles deep in the secret basement of the Beattle Building.

It wasn't as though there were no showers north of Jammie Steps. Last heard, no one had bombed the Sports Centre, despite its happy associations with generations of exam writers. And a plethora of showers could be found across in Leslie - better lit, more accessible, roomier. Why seek out the single, cramped, most hidden one, known only to initiates of a secret sect from which food purveyors were by definition excluded? Gramsci had no idea.

Aside from... uMalume!

"Still", Carnivorous Cow added, "he could at least bring his own towel! It's a bit much finding that the entire Beattie paper towel supply had been expended on his shower - and left in sodden lumps all over the floor, for SuperCare to pick up - with nary a red bin or latex gloves to facilitate the safe disposal of these high risk waste materials! Inflicting ones own high risk behaviour on others is really morally questionable!"

But Gramsci was still puzzled. Why did he not simply avail himself of the freely available condoms? uMalume at least had the excuse that his stocks had run out....?

The Cow shook her head sadly. "None to be had in Beattie!" she said. "And Arts is down to its last few, too. I think it's time to summon Mr Delivery for more."

Gramsci beamed. "Don't forget extra garlic on the pizza!"

As balanced, objective comment on uMalume's rape trial goes, Carnivorous Cow had to concede, Jon Qwelane's probably smoked the biscuit.

Essentially, Jon's gist is that anyone who does not condemn the complainant in the rape trial as a brazen liar comes from (or perhaps, belongs in?) hell. Oh, and a string of other noble characteristics such as silliness, mendacity, inconsistency, blindness, and the crime of making Jon sick.

Gramsci chortled. "Well, that's tit for tat then!" he announced smugly. "Reading that column had pretty much that effect on me! I've seldom encountered such a thinly disguised tone of misogyny, coupled with a generous dose of homophobia. His mother must really have beaten him when he was a boy!"

The Cow rolled her eyes. She could just picture the feeding frenzy among the lawyers, all lining up with cries of crimen injuria, defamation, hate speech, on behalf of those vilified by Jon, and those queuing up for Jon's business, as they'd be assured a fair bit of work, too.

She had no idea how old Jon was, but was saddened that he couldn't fill his fun quota like most middle-aged men - well, at least according to this report on IOL. Still, the report did mention a gender bias - and she couldn't help think of uMalume, who, after engaging in carnal activity with or without consent, declared it "delicious", despite the obvious non-enjoyment of the woman. "Perhaps," she suggested sadly to Gramsci, "if uMalume took up the poison pen, like Jon, it might be better?"

Carnivorous Cow was delighted to learn that two of her favourite style icons had lasted through the mielie season, and attained octogenarian status within, oh, days of each other.

Hugh Hefner, the indomitable spirit of Playboy, recently celebrated his 80th birthday at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles (which is apparently somewhere in North America) with a little help from his friends.

Meanwhile, floating on a damp island in the North Sea, good queen Liz settled down in front of the TV and fed the freshly-baked scones to her corgis. At least, muttered the Cow, that's what Germaine Greer said, and since she said it in The Guardian, it must be true.

"Ah!" interrupted Gramsci, "but she gets two birthdays, and the official one happens in June, so perhaps she's saving the naked men leaping out of the cake for that one?" A bit warmer then, the Cow had to concede.

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Carnivorous Cow rolled her eyeballs as yet another Zuma joke hit her inbox. "Honestly," she grumbled to Gramsci, "the amount of bandwidth being consumed by the transmission of bad jokes would probably be more than enough to download hundreds of Paris Hilton sex videos to keep students out of the sheets and the showers. It's just irresponsible!"

Gramsci shook his head sadly. This grumbling was, he felt, akin to Dr Garlic blaming the media for reporting uMalume's "Shower Guide to HIV Prevention" rather than taking the opportunity to distance herself, her ministry, the government's HIV prevention strategy and all cordates with a central nervous system from those infamous utterances.

But the Cow was on a roll. "Perhaps uMalume should do a course in basic stats," she suggested. "Then when he speaks of negligible chances, and reducing chances, he can toss numbers around glibly, and sound learned."

Gramsci agreed. After all, there were some factors in uMalume's favour that he could have cited ahead of his shower anecdote. For example, his age. Or the claim - unverified, as the prosecution shied away from an in loco inspection - that he was circumcised.

Instead, though, he put his faith in the shower.

Mr Timberland had asked the Cow what the chances were, generally, for a man to become infected with HIV from a single encounter of unprotected sex with a woman. Experts disagreed, as experts tend to, with figures ranging from one in 588 to three in 10 000. However, as reported, this figure increases in the presence of vaginal trauma, bleeding, or ulceration, and the medical reports confirmed vaginal tearing in the complainant after her encounter with uMalume. And, of course, other factors are pertinent, like the viral load of the infected person at the time of the encounter.

All in all quite a complex calculation. Far easier just to reach for the raincoat, or - since he'd forgotten to add it to his shopping list after running out - to dial Mr Delivery for fresh stocks.

And, while he had Mr Delivery on the line, he could ask for extra garlic on that pizza...

"It was one of those depressing discussions," Carnivorous Cow reported to Gramsci. "Someone asked, how many people here think uMalume is innocent? No one indicated. Next question, how many people think he'll be found guilty? Again, no one indicated. Perhaps he'll join OJ in hunting down The Real Perpetrators once the verdict is announced, in which case the ANC can redeploy him without too much embarrassment into the ministry of Safety and Security."

"That would be a logical next step," Gramsci admitted. "After all, that portfolio was once held by a comrade who famously declared that wife beating was not a serious crime." Teh Cow wondered if uMalume beat his wives. That was, after all, as much a part of "Zulu culture" as some of the other things he'd quoted during the trial. But then, so was belonging to Inkatha, and she wasn't sure uMalume was prepared to go that far for his "culture".

"Then again," she mused, "I'm sure Manto would offer him something in the Ministry of Health. After all those emails circulating about the two of them going into business to produce garlic-flavoured shower gel as HIV prevention, I'm sure they've realised they're onto something!"

"But what about the Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry?" asked Gramsci. "He's made showers awfully popular!" The Cow sighed. Her mind was still two steps behind. "I'm beginning to think there might be something to all this conspiracy theory talk of factions after all," she mused. "If uMalume knew about the HIV-cidic properties of showers, why didn't he share that information with Parks, and save him from that painful death of poverty?"

Within the past few days, Carnivorous Cow has been getting two kinds of feedback: "Where is Mr Timberland? We hear so little of him these days!" from some, and "Your blogs the last few days have been great, it's so nice to read about people and events one knows about!" from others, off-Campus. And so, to appease both camps, a post about Mr Timberland and uMalume.

Which was all Mr Timberland's fault, really. He phoned the Cow and somehow manipulated her onto the subject of The Trial, and its coverage in the media, and how each report he read was swaying him more and more in uMalume's favour.

The Cow spluttered. "What???" "You're spluttering!" remarked Mr Timberland. "I'm, I'm, I'm... not!" managed the Cow, before launching into a tirade about the recent utterances of uMalume, and What These Signified. Mr Timberland was unimpressed. "You're doing what the media's doing," he remarked calmly. "You're taking random potshots at things he's said; you're not looking at what's been happening, and commenting on that."

The Cow spluttered again. "Of course the media is latching onto what he said!" she gasped. "If you had a former Chair of the AIDS Council undoing decades of donor-funded labour by shrugging off the chances of HIV infection from unprotected sex with an openly HIV+ person as 'minimal', that's newsworthy! And completely irresponsible!"

Mr Timberland sighed. "It probably is minimal!" he said. "Unless you have a STI, or have repeated encounters, the chances are probably quite negligible. For normal sex, that is. And he's claiming that's what it was."

"Well, lucky then that you don't share my bedclothes!" the Cow harrumphed. "With that kind of attitude, no wonder HIV incidence in SA is what it is! Besides, uMalume's idea of normal sex might involve an inert female body, but if a doctor could pick up 48 hours later that sex had taken place, there were clearly signs - abrasions, bruising, whatever - all of which increase the chances of transmission. And are you believing his claims of being STI-free - assuming he made such? Syphilis, for example, becomes asymptomatic with time, but remains very much there! And having multiple partners increases your chances of transmission - something uMalume has admitted to, quite freely!"

Mr Timberland muttered something about male to female transmission rates being higher than female to male rates, but the Cow was on a roll. "And fifteen minutes! He claims it lasted fifteen minutes! As if that makes it normal!"

"I thought fifteen minutes was quite good, actually," protested Mr Timberland. "Aha!" crowed the Cow. "That's another reason I'm glad you don't share my bedclothes! But after fifteen minutes of exposure, standing in the shower is going to reduce your chances of exposure? Like a toddler blows germs off a fallen lolllipop!"

Mr Timberland changed his tack. "Well, the complainant hasn't emerged with her credibility intact either! It will be interesting to see how the Judge rules on this one!"

The Cow snorted. "I think the defence were being too clever for their own good on that one! By painting the complainant as a basket case, they're undermining the very crux of the case - consent! If she's the loony-tunes they paint, she's clearly not capable of giving consent, and the encounter then becomes statutory rape!"

Mr Timberland was silent for a minute, then stated, "Well, I'll put money on his getting off!"

The Cow sighed sadly. "Me too," she admitted reluctantly. "I'm sure on a technicality, they'll be unable to prove a case beyond all reasonable doubt. But what really gets me," she continued, "is the way someone who's positioned himself as quite progressive in other ways, has appropriated and reconstructed essentialist notions of 'Zulu culture' to serve his own interests, seeking to downplay his own sense of agency in an encounter where agency was certainly something he exercised."

Mr Timberland chuckled. "But don't we all," he commented.

It was one of those conversations one can never quite remember how one got into, Carnivorous Cow recounted to Gramsci. But it got there, nonetheless. The Cow was talking to a friend - we'll call her T - who'd recently split from her long-term partner and was getting used to the space that comes with, well, having space.

T was finding how much she enjoyed being able to shave her legs and paint her nails, without having to engage in debates about whether or not such actions were undermining the Feminist Revolution of the 70s.

The Cow glanced down at her shiny blue hoofs, and shuddered. Bovine legs were never as smooth and seductive as the airbrushed perfection Cosmo sold, somehow. But she saw T's point. Surely the whole point of feminism was to allow women to live out their female-ness in whatever way they wanted, rather than conforming to some stereotype - whether punted by men or The Sisterhood? Yet when Kate Taylor had dared suggest on the Guardian Blogspot that the new feminists wore crop tops, she'd had her head taken off.

"Maybe because she used the word 'chick'?" suggested Gramsci.

(But of course she didn't. Not once, in her entire article. The "chick" manifested in her headline courtesy of a sub-editor.)

"I think they're just jealous," ventured the Cow. "Those 70s feminists with the Amazon rainforest in their armpits see these other women getting further with a lip-glossed smile than they managed with three decades of marching and peer-counselling and vegetarian cooking behind them, and they're miffed. They've been taking back the night for these kids to go and fling themselves from one man's bed to the next and they're fuming. No wonder G-strings are getting such bad press - they suggest that someone out there might actually be having sex and enjoying it! That's not what the Sisters want to hear - what room is there for enjoyment when there's a war to be fought?"

Gramsci mused long and hard. "I think the new brand of feminists are nicer," he decided. "They take themselves far less seriously and some of them even have a sense of humour."

Though he was hard pressed, when pushed, to define clearly the difference between these new brand feminists and yesterday's bimbos...

"A feminist," declared the Cow, "is a woman who lets her boyfriend use her razor. So that when the cops find the murder weapon, it's his fingerprints they find, not hers!"

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According to Reuters, the bottom has dropped out of the German sex trade, forcing many women to retrain as nurses or telemarketers. Gramsci shook his head sadly at the news.

"Telemarketers!" he sighed. "Have they no morals? Next they'll be retraining as lawyers!" Carnivorous Cow hung up the phone - another cold call, this time someone from the Medical Aid provider wanting to know why she'd not taken up the wonderful offer of a credit card she didn't want - and agreed passionately. Moving from a career that revolved around attending to wants and needs that were denied, to one which revolved around creating wants and needs that were resisted, seemed insane. There was a reason vacancies existed in positions like that - no one else was desperate enough to take them.

Still, she found it sad that the whole argument was premised on age. The age of the sex workers - apparently, those in their thirties were being outcompeted by younger women; and the age of the clients - apparently the ageing population was being blamed for the drop in demand, so to speak.

All of which seemed to fly in the face of local experience. uMalume, at 63, seemed to be as sexually active as any German youth, using up condoms faster than he could replace them. And the complainant in his rape trial, at 31 years of age, was approvingly termed a "real woman" by uMalume, who also called her "big girl". Perhaps age was more of an issue in Europe than in Africa?

But the real killer for her was the closing quote, which welcomed the move and argued the need for more people "working in care professions". The Cow assumed that the speaker was referring to nursing, but honestly, what could possibly be more accurately termed a "care profession" than sex work?

"You're being too hard on uMalume!" Gramsci told Carnivorous Cow reprovingly. "Back where he comes from, schoolboys' opinions paint quite a different picture!"

Carnivorous Cow shook her head sadly. She'd also read the report. It seemed clear from the one reported comment in particular that these boys equated the transaction of lobola with the purchase of the woman, despite other representations of this practice elsewhere.

Which made the Cow wonder - if someone arrived at the home of one of these boys with a reasonable number of cattle, and a request to the boy's family, would the boy consent to be purchased as a sex slave? To be beaten as a sign of love, should the purchaser feel he was "misbehaving"? To be set aside for another love interest should the purchaser desire sex elsewhere? There were, after all, men who preferred male partners to female, and the Constitution provided for equality in terms of sexual preference, so should these men not be allowed to exercise their consititutional rights in terms of lobola, and traditional marriage, too? And, given the Constitutional equality of the sexes, should women - among whom there were now some who could afford to pay lobola - not also be afforded the opportunity to pay lobola for the men of their choosing, and have the same rights of access to which the schoolboys felt lobola entitled one?

But, as a Cow, she felt deeply aggrieved at being commodified as an exchange medium in the spousal purchase transaction. She wondered if some political party could be lobbied to champion the extension of the provisions of the Constitution to other species, too.

"How long," Carnivorous Cow asked Gramsci, "does sex normally take?"

Somewhat surprised by the topic of conversation, Gramsci attempted to deflect it. "Anything from seconds, if you're Tso illicitly in a teenager's bathroom, to eight hours, if you're Sting," he replied.

The Cow rolled her eyes. "Normal people!" she snapped. "How long for normal people?" Being a spider, Gramsci didn't have the remotest notion.

But he was in good company, it appeared. Neither did uMalume. uMalume set the bar at 15 minutes - 15 minutes, he said, for "people who enjoy having sexual intercourse". And since uMalume is on record [see below] as viewing anything beyond that as "unnatural", or "wrong things", even 15 minutes may have exhausted his repertoire.

But 15 minutes was probably a good target, Gramsci thought on reflection. 15 Minutes was the gap between lectures, and - unless one had to get from Upper Campus to Hiddingh in that gap - allowed a quick visit to the Beattie staircase, or the Classics section in the Library.

But the Cow was not so easily appeased. Most people appeared to use the gap for coffee refuelling - which, as was argued elsewhere, merely adds to the pressure on the staircase. Perhaps 15 minutes was a bit on the high side, then?

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Carnivorous Cow was heartened to hear uMalume educating the Nation about how to minimise chances of HIV infection following unprotected sex with an openly HIV positive person. Shower.

That's it. Shower.

It sounded to the Cow a bit like the Five Second Rule. Anyone who's seen supposedly intelligent people blowing on a retrieved food item that has fallen on the floor to render it fit for consumption will recognise this triumph of desire over common sense. Still, the Cow found it comforting that someone who had sat on the AIDS advisory council was so fully informed about matters of risk and prevention.

uMalume had previously stated that the reason he proceeded to have unprotected sex with the complainant was because "the risk was minimal" for him to become infected with HIV. This he had gleaned from his work on the AIDS advisory council.

Carnivorous Cow could not help wondering how, in that case, men who claimed to have sex only with women became infected. Women were not, as far as she knew, infecting each other in large numbers; yet the incidence and prevalence of HIV infection among South African women was high. If they were being infected by men, how were these men being infected in the first place? By other men - in which case there was dishonesty about sexual practices on an unprecedented scale, and previous estimates of one in ten men engaging in sex with men were completely inadequate.... or by women, in which case uMalume had it wrong. Carnivorous Cow found it difficult to decide - was the likelihood of an entire industry of research being wrong greater or less than the likelihood of a popular leader being wrong?

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All this time, Carnivorous Cow had thought that Credo Mutwa had cornered the market on representations of "Zulu Culture". Luckily uMalume's rape trial had corrected that misperception, and shown her the light. She would never otherwise have known that, contrary to definitions in law and dictionaries, the Zulu understanding of rape, as presented by uMalume, was - failure to attend to the sexual needs of a woman.

She found it odd, but not unheard of, that a single word could have two diametrically opposite meanings. The standard definition held that rape involved unwanted sexual assault; this new definition proposed that withholding of wanted sexual attention constituted rape. A bit like the word "cleave", then, she mused.

She thought it quite noble that a "culture" usually represented as staunchly patriarchal should foreground a woman's gratification in this way, but wondered about the legal implications of this. The legal burden of proof in a "conventional" rape trial was complex enough, what with everything hinging around notions of consent. She had no idea how a rape complainant in this other paradigm would go about building a case - "but your honour, I wore a skirt - the defendent must have known I had needs, and he chose not to respond to those!"

"Objection, your honour! My client claims the complainant was wearing a coat over her skirt at the time. He had no idea that the signal was still intentional."

And, if there were multiple instances of male present, would they all be chargeable with the offence, or just one selected by the complainant as the target? Could the others be charged as accessories, or under "common purpose" provisions? Could a male who was not charged, claim discrimination, and counter-charge? None of this was clear to the Cow.

But also - what about public figures? What if watching someone on the tv caused a woman to have "needs", which were not addressed by the person on tv - who, presumably, had no idea of this? What if, watching the trial, a whole host of women were suddenly finding themselves with "needs", and uMalume was not keeping up his end (so to speak)? Might he not suddenly find himself with many more rape trials to face?

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Ever since uMalume took the stand, Carnivorous Cow has developed an unhealthy fascination with the trial. The man has merely to open his mouth, launching a hundred headlines, and the bovine brain goes into overdrive.

uMalume, it appears, is somewhat of an expert when it comes to semiotics. Particularly, the semiotics of apparel. A woman, according to the uMalume semiotic lexicon, signals that she "has needs" - of a sexual nature - by wearing a skirt.

Given that, in "Zulu culture" - the other area of professed expertise to which uMalume lays claim - most women wear skirts most of the time, uMalume would have us believe that these women are all walking around signalling their needs, and that "Zulu culture", and most others, is founded on the very signalling of these needs. Why else would every school dress its girl pupils in dresses, if not to signal their "needs"?

"But what about agency?" protested Gramsci. "Even, assuming this is the case, that skirts do equate with sexual signalling... What compels an individual man to respond to the signal in the way that uMalume did? If men can control the world, surely they can control the way they respond to semiotic signals?" The Cow chose to say nothing. She wasn't about to be drawn into an argument like that without sufficient whisky to make it interesting.

But Gramsci was just getting started. "How long before paedophiles start using in their court defence the argument that the 6 year old 'had needs' which she signalled by wearing her school uniform?" he continued. "Are we obliging women to adopt a model of androgyny to avoid the confusion of signalling gender with signalling sexual need?" Carnivorous Cow wasn't exactly sure where gender ended and sexual need began, so she excused herself to go and get some coffee instead.

On her way, the Cow pondered further on the matter. She wasn't sure if it was an ON / OFF signal, or one shaded by qualitative or quantitaive measures. Did a longer skirt signal a greater or lesser need? Did a brightly coloured skirt signal a more intense need, or was it a danger signal? She wished uMalume had given more details in his testimony. She needed to know if her own signals were appropriate to the intention or not - another variable beyond weather, wrinkledness and whim to factor in when dressing in the morning. Perhaps uMalume would open up a helpline?

Walking across University Avenue, she was struck by just how many young women were signalling their "needs". Everywhere she looked, she was confronted by an array of skirts. If others had been following the trial, presumably they were now reading the signals correctly, and feeling obliged to Do Their Bit, so to speak. The stairs in Beattie were going to be busy.... She just hoped someone had remembered to refill the condom dispensers.

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