Jonny Steinberg discusses in Against the Odds: Engaged Young Fatherhood in Contemporary South Africa that patriarchy functions like a tacit contract for men: submit to the system by working hard, suppressing your emotions and enforcing the hierarchy, then you will be rewarded with dominance, a family to rule over and economic stability. He postulates that capitalism broke that contract. Youth unemployment causes an observed phenomenon of “thwarted belongingness,” a core construct of Thomas Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide that leaves young men stuck in “boyhood”, because manhood is tied to financial capability like financing lobola, a homestead and family support. The male role under this paradigm is rigid and when the culture offers little alternatives to be “valid”, suicide becomes a tragic answer to a rigid question they can’t answer themselves. September is Suicide Prevention Month, and although we describe suicide as a permanant solution to a temporary problem, we cannot challenge this crisis without addressing the systemic circumstances that claim the lives of men and women alike.
Epidemiological data from the National Library of Medicine reveals a stark and uncomfortable contradiction known as the Gender Paradox of Suicidal Behaviour coined by suicidologist Silvia Sara Canetto: women report higher rates of suicidal ideation and survive non-fatal attempts at roughly three times the rate of men, while men die by suicide at more than four times of the rate of women. Yet in South Africa, where men account for more than four out of every five recorded suicides, it is clear that patriarchy is a predatory contract causing a public health crisis. We are confronting a singular, hyper-masculine engine that conditions young men to direct their pain outward to the women around them or inward towards themselves.
This is where visibility bias enters campus discourse. Distress that turns inward is often invisible until it’s fatal, read afterward as an isolated tragedy rather than a pattern. Distress that turns outward is visible, immediate and, disturbingly, sometimes normalised as “just how men are” rather than named as gender-based violence. Both are downstream of the same enforced silence; one is simply easier to look away from until it’s too late.
An academic and lecturer at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Psychology who prefers to remain anonymous describes patriarchy as a “narcissistic parent” with “women as the scapegoat child expected to absorb blame for problems they didn’t create, while rigid gender conformity like homophobia is the golden child protected at all costs. Both reinforce the dynamic and neither challenge it while both are dehumanising positions to be in.” She further lamented that “men blame women and feminism instead of capitalism and the patriarchy, but there is clearly a systemic failure that claims the lives of men, women and other gender minorities. Homophobia is the enforcement mechanism that exacerbates rejection of male victimhood and gender minorities are the scapegoat for cishet men and women alike, which ultimately hurts us all as a society. Gender minorities are attacked because they prove that the boxes aren’t real, which threatens everyone who has built their entire self-worth on staying inside their box.”
The Cambridge Dictionary describes “alexithymia” as the difficulty identifying and naming one’s own emotions. This is the default setting many boys are trained into. “Indoda ayikhali“ (“a man doesn’t cry or complain”) is an instruction where shame becomes socially lethal in a system where vulnerability is coded as weakness. A female final-year BSc Computer Science student and a male final-year BA Law student who prefer to remain anonymous, both speaking about navigating acute mental health crises during their degrees, describe strikingly similar root experiences like isolation, fear of being dismissed and a campus culture quick to label distress as either “attention-seeking” or “just stress.” That dismissiveness isn’t neutral but is, itself, a systemic failure of crisis management, and it costs lives on both sides of the same blade.
Patriarchy doesn’t protect men by harming women, and it doesn’t protect women by demanding men suppress themselves. It fails everyone, simultaneously, by the same mechanism. Recognising that shared root is not about equating harms – it’s about recognising a single system worth dismantling together.
This piece discusses suicide statistics and mental health crises. If you or someone you know is struggling, UP’s Student Counselling Unit and the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) helpline (0800 567 567) are available for support.
