LUMUMBA EN EL PODER

If men’s violence can be remade as a community good, or at least as an explainable reaction to precarious lives, what about women’s violence?

SL: What about ‘violent woman’ in English, how would you say that?

Guards: Meri bilong pait, bilong kiross, bilong tingting nogut, bilong spa, [women who fight, who have bad tempers, are suspicious, get drunk] dance at different clubs all the time, go here and there, pait bilongman [fight over men.]

Women’s violence was classified in a more nuanced way than men’s violence. A violent woman has some of the same qualities as a violent man: fighting and bad temper. Although these were sometimes discussed in the context of women who treated their children too harshly, for the most part, women accused of fighting and bad temper were said to exhibit these behaviours in their marriages. This in turn was viewed as reasonable grounds for disciplinary violence from husbands or other family members even when, as men said was often the case, they were cross because of a husband’s philandering—and therefore as the guards said in the quote, ‘suspicious’—or if they were fed up with his excessive drinking (Fulu, Jewkes et al. 2013, McPherson 2010, Médecins Sans Frontières 2011).

A woman is also seen as violent when she acts in ways that transgress boundaries of conservative femininity by drinking, dancing and being independently mobile, ‘going here and there’ (Kelly-Hanku et al. 2016). This violence is also related to the threat of HIV, given that mobility (and therefore lack of oversight or control of a husband or family member), dancing in nightclubs and drinking are all associated with unsanctioned expressions of female sexuality (Wardlow 2006, Wood, Lambert and Jewkes 2007). Men discussed women’s sexuality and sexual agency in complex and seemingly contradictory ways. They claimed that women had less sexual desire than men, with one saying that:

Mipela ol man, dispela desire em bikpela moa. Olsem yupela ol meri, olsem, I go daun

liklik. Mipela ol man, 99 per cent. Na long ol meri em 50 samting go down [With us

men, our desire is much bigger. Like, you women, it goes down a bit. Us men are at 99 per cent. And with women, it’s only around 50 and below.]

This was said in a conversation that was primarily about marital relationships and the fact that at all of the research sites marital rape was said to be a significant issue. Women’s reported reduced libido or refusal of sex was offered as an explanation (although not necessarily a justification) for why some men forced their wives to have sex or why they might go and rape other women:

Some men don’t have wives. Their wife has left them or whatever. They are lonely and they want to have sex. So they see a woman and think of it as a chance to have sex. Or sometimes, a wife will refuse him sex, so he needs to get it somewhere else. If it is a chance he will take it. Pilai blok o pasim em [block any play, close the door to him] … Some men will listen to their wives when they don’t want to have sex, others will hit their wives. Hit them, carry them into the house, and fuck them. Sometimes, they won’t even carry them into the house. There will stay outside at the haus kuk [cooking hut.] This kind of man people call them dog man. They don’t think.

Here, men described the kind of man who would force himself on his wife as a ‘dog man’, someone without control and without discipline. However, in other discussions, the same men and others would say that payment of bride wealth and the Christian-derived principle of a wife’s duty to her husband means that it is justifiable for men to demand or force sex (Bradley 1990, Lewis, Maruia and Walker 2008, Wardlow 2006).

Pius, a nurse who conducted sexual health workshops for men, said that he heard this often:

[Men] say things like, ‘if I have paid bride price with shell money, then the woman belongs to me. Whenever I want sex then she has to give it to me. So why should I work hard so that she will give the sex when she has to anyway?’

In the discussion groups that he ran with men, Pius tried to show participants that if men did not pay attention to women’s sexual satisfaction, and if women were being generally treated poorly or dismissively by their husbands, there was little wonder that they did not want to have sex at the end of a long day. He was part of a growing number of community

and health sector advocates, including within many of the churches, promoting more companionate marriage; although within these models too, men remain at the head of the family and responsible for family discipline (Cox and Macintyre 2014, Hirsch et al. 2009, Spark 2010). In Pius’s workshops, encouraging men to ensure that their female partners were ready for and wanted sex was touted as important for healthy relationships, as well as important for limiting risk of HIV transmission (although the illegality of marital rape was not discussed) (Higgins, Hoffman and Dworkin 2010):

Women are not sex objects, where you can just, bang! No way! They have feelings too … I used to say that to have a good relationship then they [men] needed to talk nicely. Also I used to say to [men in workshops] that women are actually better at sex than men, even though we think that because men have these feelings all the time they are better. But men, they are finished in two or three minutes. But even after intercourse sometimes women don’t have [any pleasure] because men are greedy. We want to do at the base of a tree or places like that where sex should be in the house in a private place.

Even though the existence of women’s sexual ‘feelings’ needed to be addressed in conversations like these, it was an open secret that women and men had extramarital affairs because of love and desire. A study of pregnant women and expectant fathers in East New Britain found that 42.5 per cent of respondents thought that pregnant women had relationships with one man that was not their husband during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and 35 per cent thought that women had relationships with multiple men outside their primary relationship; roughly equivalent to the percentage of people who thought that men would have extramarital sex while their partner was pregnant or breastfeeding (Holmes et al. 2012).25 _{As Holly Wardlow (2006, 154) shows in her work} with self-identified pasinja meri [passenger women], engaging in extramarital sex can have as much to do with defiance and resentment in the face of ill-treatment from husbands and birth families as desire, love or a need to exchange sex for money or goods. There is a spectrum of reasons that women engage in extramarital sex in East New Britain, which involve different degrees of consent and some of which include exchange of money or gifts. During my field research, however, women who demonstrated sexual agency

25 _{This is compared with 41.25 per cent of respondents believing that men had relationships with one} woman who were not their pregnant or breastfeeding partner, and 40 per cent believing men had affairs with multiple partners.

were more likely to be described as immoral and money hungry than engaged in relationships driven by mutual desire or affection, or as a reaction to dissatisfaction with a marital relationship. Security guards identified pasin pamuk [promiscuous behaviour] as the central issue. They pointed out that men as well as women could be pamuk [promiscuous person, also used as an insult akin to the English ‘slut’ (Stewart 2014, 30).] However, in more expansive discussions, it became clear that men attributed greater blame for casual sex on women. Women were responsible for pushing husbands to look for sex elsewhere by refusing it in the home, and for ‘tempting’ men into illicit relationships that, men claimed, women in urban areas entered into primarily out of a desire to make fast money.

There are several points to unpack here. The first is the idea that women labelled as pamuk or meri nogut are responsible for drawing men into unsanctioned sexual relationships or behaviours. The second is the characterisation of women as sex workers, which Wardlow has described as ‘a discourse mobilized by men, other women, hospital employees, the police and religious authorities to categorize women—stigmatizing some for their behaviour and controlling others with the fear that they might be so labelled’ (Wardlow 2006, 3). The third is the ways in which consent is discussed in the context of casual sex. The final point is how these threads intersect with transnational and national epidemiological discourse around female sex workers and risk, and men’s obfuscated visibility in those conversations.