Shouting and incivility by male officials or public figures are being rejected in what passes for the modern world, and are generally regarded as being revealingly regressive as well as a tattered badge of toxic masculinity.

The immediate outcry on social media, radio and television platforms about the shouty tone of South African Tourism’s acting CEO, Themba Khumalo, during a press conference that was called to attack Daily Maverick and journalist Rebecca Davis for exposing the Tottenham Hotspur R1-billion branding grift, is evidence of this. And a case in point.

When Daily Maverick published a second story verifying behind-the-scenes collusion in the deal by SA Tourism chief financial officer Johan van der Walt, Khumalo was forced to back down and apologise.

Not only did he have to apologise for his public attack on a journalist and a media publication, but also for the tone as well as his threat to isolate the brave individual who had leaked the files.

Later, Khumalo apologised for his tone and also for his comments about whistle-blowers.

Significantly, a week later, SA Tourism issued a strong public statement saying whistle-blowers needed to be protected and that all exposure of corruption should be applauded.

Targeting whistle-blowers is as passé, cowardly and unacceptable as shouting.

You look like a ‘poepol’

Shouting is no longer a signifier of dominance or authority; it just makes you look like an immature poepol unable to control your emotions.

Those who have found themselves on the receiving end of a shouty man know how unattractive it is, and how much it resembles a two-year-old having a tantrum in the sweets aisle of a supermarket.

Writing in The New Yorker in 2019, journalist Amanda Petrusich noted that “physically, it’s nearly impossible for a human being not to be deeply and instinctively alarmed by yelling”.

“It makes sense, then, that in an era already defined by boundless stress – and to a generation that normalised the term ‘micro­aggression’ – yelling has been recategorised as unacceptable behaviour.”

Petrusich added that the change had come about alongside “a broader shift away from behaviour that reinforces abusive and overtly patriarchal structures”.

And though there was no empirical evidence to suggest that men shouted any more than women, she noted that “a man yelling is, almost without exception, a more physically and psychically threatening experience”.

King of Screamers

Donald Trump emerged to sit astride the apex of the pyramid as the King of Screamers, politically, and South Africa still has pockets of male howlers in every industry, every walk of life, every sports match, every club, bar, church pulpit or stage.

Men who are not shouty know this. When he is not acting CEO at SA Tourism, Khumalo is a pastor with the controversial Alleluia Ministries International.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Bishop Themba Khumalo is the leader SA Tourism needs. Leave him alone!”

It is in these houses of worship, which have sprung up in all cities, where shouty men often get to show off, go full throttle, dressed in their anointed garments with their cotton handkerchiefs mopping sweat off their shouty brows.

South Africa’s Shouter Supreme is Julius Malema, of course, followed by Durban’s finest, John Steenhuisen. Both were in fine form at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address last week.

One was thrown out of the House while the other stood up to complain that armed protection services members were not allowed to enter the chambers.

Toxic filigrees

The spread of the unseen filigrees of connection that are the internet and its massive expansion over the past 20 years has contributed to interpersonal aggression by men towards other men, women, children or any other sentient being. Of course, it has also affected women and children. When you lower the tone, everything and everyone gets dragged down with you until they have had enough – until it becomes so corrosive that you switch off.

“There is an acceptance of humiliating trash talk in sport,” said Thomas J Harbin, author of Beyond Anger: A Guide for Men, during an interview about his seminal book, published in 2000. “Many of our political bodies sit and scream at each other instead of getting anything positive accomplished.”

Read in Daily Maverick: “Bulls, beads, Boers and barter – were precolonial Xhosas’ Nguni cattle the original NFTs?”

Many men, he added, came to believe and value belligerence “in and of itself”, so much so that it was, among the shouters everywhere, regarded as a virtue.

Over on Twitter, the sewage pipe of social media, male howlers thought they didn’t have to deal with consequences and had no fear of retribution.

It was a type of shouty man who also targeted women journalists or celebrities, threatening and insulting them, doxing them or just being generally as unpleasant as week-old roadkill decomposing in a hubcap.

Until they were taken to court, that is, and found that in the real world there are consequences.

However, opined Harbin, “public recognition of some of the behaviours that we used to accept is no longer there”, and the acceptance of “a lot of traditional angry male behaviour is starting to erode”.

That was a while back. The tide has now washed in and will keep rolling in, dunking the dose.

A psychiatrist at Columbia University, Drew Ramsey, has encountered how younger men deal with their anger, and it is nothing like their shouty older patriarch predecessors.

“I think if you’re a young man in America, the notion that you’re going to yell in anger is hugely conflictual and no longer acceptable and potentially will get you medicated.”

Medicated! You hear that.

South Africa has a long way to go as toxic masculinity and violence continue to tear mercilessly at societies. Mad, bad, angry men do not make up the majority of men in this country, but like one drop of poison in the well, they can contaminate everything.

Femicide, rape, mutilation and the killing and maiming of children and those who are vulnerable and forced to live in unsafe areas are more damaging to society, never mind the economy, than blackouts.

Do the maths.

Anyhow, sometimes patriarchy needs to be medicated with a tranquilliser dart and a few suppositories stuffed with Xanax to calm it the f**k down.

In reality, the only way it will change is when we reach the tipping point we now seem to have reached globally, and push back against the shouty men. DM168

Marianne Thamm is the assistant editor of Daily Maverick.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.