Soft porn in the name of love...

By Ruona Agbroko
Monday 29, March 2010

No, the inspiration for this piece is not the fact that I have no significant other and have consistently failed in my duty as a child to bring home a “young, Christian boy” to pay my tribal lobola of less than R3 to Mother. This article merely seeks to understand the phenomenon whereby any random gust of cool wind, some well-trimmed grass and open space (or any three) is a license for Witsies to commence mild acts of pornography.


I must daily walk the distance from International House through the Matrix, past the Library Lawn and towards my department or outside of Wits. On each trip, I am regularly confronted by couples in various stages of foreplay—ok, “snogging”. There will be the chance that once I shift my gaze to give a guy distributing saliva all over a girl’s nose some privacy, that gaze will fall on the vision of someone else’s face buried between the mammary glands of another.



Being nothing of a voyeur, I again avert my eyes and just as I look to the serenity of manicured lawns to gather my creative thoughts for the day...BAM! That attempt is foiled by the sheer numbers of couples basking in the sun, entwined in various poses that could easily illustrate articles in sex manuals and relationship magazines.



Don’t get me wrong. I am all for holding hands, sharing the odd necessary cuddle and dropping a random kiss on a bared shoulder, but there seems to be no boundaries for the grosser acts of intimacy. I have been on registration queues at the Senate House and had to endure the pre-orgasmic face of a fresher whose boyfriend had her facing me just so he could keep biting her neck.

I have also been at a checkout counter in a store and had my time wasted just because a couple thought it was romantic to caress each other’s nether regions through the pockets under the guise of looking for small change. Vomit. Copiously.



Even worse, I have watched with dismay as a mother instinctively spread a palm over her child’s face on a Sunday afternoon to stop the little girl from having her innocence ruined by the sight of two humans rolling in the grass at West Campus Village as they kissed—no, make that osculated—the life out of each other.



I am willing to concede that I may be biased. Maybe I am this way because of the conservative approach to a public display of intimacy that Nigeria has. In fact, I have often rebelled against the hypocritical bent of this approach, and applaud public displays of attention (PDAs). I have always been the girl sighing and endlessly recounting “how romantic that was” etc.

But I must now call a spade a spade, not a farming implement.

With due respect to the understandable headiness/freedom that campus brings and the inclination to explore life in much the same way everyone else is doing, I do feel commonsense should prevail.

It is terribly anti-social to disrespect the sensibilities of others when trying to prove you love someone else, especially given that PDAs can’t possibly be okay in every given situation.



Yes, it is much impressive to be gross in public and show the rest of the class that you are meant for each other. Yes, yes you are right... it’s cheaper, as well as your right to spread a blanket in front of West Campus Village and throw in some fare from The Matrix rather than to go out to a restaurant and book a room, but with intimacy should come responsibility. And respect. For both yourselves, and the people who must share the same academic spaces with you. End of.

*Agbroko is the 2010 Niall Fitzgerald scholar doing her Honours degree in Journalism at the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa. She writes this column for www.vuvuzela.org.za, the website for Wits' Journalism department.