OPINION | You know where the danger is? Not telling Nota Baloyi how dangerous he is

Here's the thing about TshisaLIVE — it exists to report on celebrities.

We often don't get a say on who the masses choose to celebrate and give their attention to, but once the masses have decided to elevate an average human to celebrity status, we have a duty to report on them, as entertainment reporters. Right? Right.

As it happens in life, sometimes the masses create “celebs” like Nota Baloyi. Talentless men who go around spreading dangerous narratives about anything and everything but particularly black women, who are already an endangered species in SA.

This editorial seeks to make it clear that Nota and men like him, or the kind of men he represents, are dangerous, and just like his estranged wife Berita, we do not endorse nor support any of the bile he spews.

As far as women are concerned, Nota is not a first-time offender. In the past two weeks Mihlali Ndamase was compared to a dog, and Berita, who managed to get away from the man, has been described as someone who has been “brainwashed”.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking this is only about Nota. He's just flavour of the month where “dangerous men using words as their weapons” against black women are concerned. Slik Talk and MacG are two names that pop up when I think about men who've used their words as weapons against women.

I'm yet to talk about some of your favourite celebs, the ones who hold the same sentiments about women but hide it better. The ones who I can almost guarantee will also play the “I suffer from mental health” card when they are finally exposed as male chauvinists and misogynists.

This problem of men thinking they have the final say on how women should live and behave, what they should love and what they should hate and everything in between, is a global disease. For example, disgraced singer Kanye West has it. Former US president Donald Trump demonstrated it multiple times, and so did some of Queen Elizabeth’s son. The Taliban's actions expose the same sentiments about women in a different way

Should I even talk about the bunch of men who recently decided that they could make laws to govern abortion when they can't carry babies?

Why do they get airtime or a news platform? I would have hoped the intro to this piece answers this question, but another is that if we don't cover them we are not doing our jobs.

For all those saying “ignore them”, these men have been ignored for years and  look how well that has worked out for us.

It's a damned if we do and damned if we don't situation. As a team of black women, no matter how offended or disgusted we are by what these men say or do, iJob iJob.

However, I'm hoping you see this piece as another duty of ours. Not just as TshisaLIVE but as black women living in SA and subjected to men like Nota in our homes, our workspaces, in the taxis we use, on social media, on YouTube and just about everywhere else.

We want you to know Nota and men like him are dangerous and the narrative they are pushing about women, and particularly black women, comes from their unwillingness to accept women as humans who are fully capable of living their lives free of men's opinions, rules or guidance.

I hate to write an opinion piece that highlight problems but doesn't offer solutions. However, as women there's nothing we can do to stop men like Nota. I know because we've tried.

What we will do is continue to live life on our own terms. Yes, we will be narcissists when we want to, we will make our own rules, break glass ceilings and we openly express our love for money, among many other things some men think make us “unsavoury”.

While we do that, we hope men recognise that their words, just like their actions, are a problem and that this is a problem to be fixed by men. Y'all can't keep using your words and actions to diminish women.

This can't and won't be fixed as long as men do not see a problem with the things Nota and his kind say. Evidently, men only listen to men.