‘Girls mature quicker’ is a myth

by C. S. Hadebe

I became aware of how mythical and cancerous the belief that “girls mature quicker” is one afternoon in 2020, just a few weeks after Mr. President announced the countrywide COVID-19 lockdown. A high school girl—looking smart in her green blazer and matching long pants—had walked past me and a host of other men standing in line behind me, waiting to collect their COVID-19 unemployment grant from the Post Office. A man behind me tapped my shoulder, and I turned. He grinned and commented on how “big” the schoolgirl's vulva was bulging through the uniform.

I was mute with disgust. How could a grown man look at a girl that way?

Biologically precocious or not, a girl is a girl. And this myth—that girls grow faster—scoffs at this reality. The myth is an abyss of exploitation, into which young girls fall and can never be heard, no matter how loud they scream for attention. It is this same hole where young boys are shoved into the curse of underdevelopment. And so young girls are left stranded, pitted with underdeveloped young boys who become dead men that terrorize them for their bodies. The myth, I can’t help but think, forms the heart and soul of places where young girls are still sold off into child marriages, where young boys become desensitized to this cruelty and become men who follow in those footsteps when they have daughters or decide to take wives.

Families devote themselves to educating girls on what’s right and what isn’t. Sharpening their eyes so they’ll know what kind of clothing choice would make them come across as “prostitute-ish”. Honing their lips so they’ll know how to talk “like a lady”. Cooking, cleaning, washing, and minding any younger (and older) siblings; outstanding school work; the constant game of survival; all these weigh down the shoulders of many girls from a tender age. Very seldom do girls enjoy a carefree childhood that is uninterrupted by the pressure that comes with the force of rushing them into adult responsibilities.

We graduate girls by over-teaching them, thinking this will twist them into responsible women, not understanding what kind of boys are being developed as a result. We neglect boys and teach girls what boys should be taught in the first place. Girls are taught to do things not to culture them into mindful and accountable people, but simply because they are female.

I can't speak for other worlds and cultures, but I've seen this extensively in our cultures as Black people. Not just on a personal level as a Zulu person; I've found the principle to be widespread in other African countries. I’ve seen it in how my Mozambican neighbors made their daughter cook every single meal, despite her brother being her age and just as capable. I’ve seen it in memoirs written by Nigerian authors detailing their experiences as girls growing up in male-oriented homes.

However, this imbalance—this obsessive grip we maintain on controlling girls versus the live-and-let-live approach to raising boys—unwittingly creates a chasm that breaks the world in two. A divided world. Boys on the more privileged side, girls on the other, much leaner side.

Egoism and entitlement grow into boys, who are not taught how to be responsible for themselves and their actions. Male kids grow to understand that aspiring toward full mental and emotional maturity and human responsibility isn't their lot. They stop growing once they realise girls are taught that being female is a religion. And where there's religion, there are deities and rituals to maintain the relationship.

Male children habituate themselves with the understanding that they are those deities, the owners of servants who should carry out the rituals that they may be pleased. Rituals girls are taught through the Bible of their elders.

The underdevelopment of boys creates men with a shallow thought ceiling, limiting girls and women to people who should be doing things and not becoming things. The egoism and entitlement birth something I call the Ngoba Ngindoda Complex, a way of thought that men—because they are men and nothing else—can do whatever they like. This includes fantasizing over perverted lusts and preying after vulnerable girls like that man in the Post Office line.

We further doom girls by watering this underdevelopment, sunning it with patriarchal language and teachings, such as “real men don’t cry” and “boys will be boys”. Speaking a tongue that doesn't encourage healthy growth mentally and emotionally in boys and men alike.

“Real men don't cry”, for example, is qualified almost universally as the best medicine to negate a boy’s diminishing inner strength. This teaching stifles the proper emotional development of boys. Even worse, the boy grows to despise his inborn sensitivity as a terrible disease, not as a blessing and an advantage that can better help him sharpen his empathy. Discouraged—at home and in society—from being in touch with his emotional side for fear of being seen as weak, the boy misses the chance to exercise and feed his emotional intelligence—the very thing that would contribute greatly to his growth and maturity.

What the world ends up with are underdeveloped boys destined to become men unable to process emotion without throwing fists and spraying insults. Men who, because they never got to use emotion productively in their formative years, get used by emotion. What women are stuck with inside their marriages and relationships are mentally and emotionally underdeveloped boys, locked in the skin of grown men. Men who meet disputes with primordial instinct instead of constructive reason. Men that settle any question of manhood with physical aggression instead of sensitivity and mindfulness.

I remember seeing this in play on a popular TV show about polygamy in South Africa, roughly a year ago. During the final episodes of the show, one polygamist implied, on national television, that the reason he took wives from the younger side of life was that they were easier to bully. Just like that. This reasoning is what the curse and the Complex speak to—physical domination used in place of reason, because the reasoning capacity is not developed enough to be used constructively. Here is where there’s Myth-and-Complex interplay—the Complex dictates that a man can take someone far younger and more immature than him because “ngindoda” and the Myth comes into play because “girls mature quicker”.

And this curse—this patriarchy-driven underdevelopment—traps boys and men (and girls and women) in a never-ending cycle where narrow-mindedness begets more narrow-mindedness.

I once had a great argument with my little cousin and younger brother on this topic. We were speaking on the hypocrisy of our society as Black people, that says it isn’t right for a woman to have multiple partners but that men are encouraged to have more than one.

Phela indoda isoka, my brother and cousin had said, answering why it was normal and praiseworthy for men to be philanderers, whereas women were shamed for such behavior. What they never understood was that it was the underdevelopment speaking; the gap created by under-teaching boys and over-teaching girls. What they never understood was that their underdevelopment had set them on a course to becoming men with a possessive view of their female equals.

We wonder why young boys end up parroting ngoba ngindoda, justifying misogynistic roles of which they have zero understanding. Then we frown and scratch our heads when men are unable to understand the meaning behind the #MenAreTrash movement. Not foolishness. Not incapability. Underdevelopment. The curse of stunted growth.

At the heart of #MenAreTrash are not men-hating women. The hashtag is about calling out the system. Patriarchy is trash. And on a much more individual level, it’s about women tapping me on the shoulder, challenging me to question the patriarchy that grants me gender-specific privileges. My friend, Zasembo, once told me she and her little sister were groped by an old man in the street. Yet, I have no recollection of myself ever being sexualised by older women as a little boy in all the seven years I’d walked to and from school.

Instead of addressing this privilege, men rage against the hashtag. They rant at feminist women, dismissing their thoughts as unhelpful tirades fashioned to bash and rubbish men.

I've always felt like this happens because men are not developed to the level of being in sync with their sensitivity. The traumas and abuse anecdotes, the rape stories from real-life survivors are dismissed. Rendered totally useless. Men with the Complex are more offended by the #MenAreTrash hashtag at the end of a post than the hebephilia being described. What’s more, their rage implies they would’ve done the same ngoba ngindoda.

This is the chronic sickness that comes from the curse, this merciless cycle of linear thinking that complicates the Complex. #MenAreTrash ends up being taken at surface level. The blindness that comes with stunted emotional intelligence and the lack of confidence in themselves being able to use their minds to resolve issues without involving force or violence.

Because of this, men are unable to see the system being spoken about, the system they are being invited to question. The Ngoba Ngindoda Complex doesn’t permit the belief that women are equal to men. Equals deserving of the same inheritances of physical and mental security, of authority, and of equal weight and power. Because of the Complex, men see women wanting equal footing as them as wrestling for superiority. As a result, men respond only as children would. Or at least as far as the underdevelopment permits them—with petulance, with raised voices, with throwing their toys out the cot hoping to get their way.

Unaddressed, the curse of underdevelopment lives on in generational cycles. The myth that girls mature quicker gets passed down, travelling through the veins of father to son, uncle to nephew. Growing stronger.

Unchallenged, the myth chains girls and women to a life of possession, where they are forced to walk the distance for themselves, and for men.

Men are the key to dismantling the myth and the curse and the Complex. It has nothing to do with girls and women. If the underdevelopment is addressed, I see the Complex being reversed, and the myth re-written. Maybe we'd start to see a world where boys are raised with care and attention, a world where they become men mindful of correcting their own tongues and the distorted lenses of what it means to be a man, and how girls should be looked at.

‘Girls mature quicker’ is a myth

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