I met Pearlie Joubert in November 2012 at the Queen of Tarts café in Observatory. We had a conversation-slash-interview-slash-ideas-storm about a project on how to start a social revolution. I do not recall the details of all we spoke about, or what I said to her. It was something about fathers who have precarious employment or are unemployed, and the structural violence that underpins and feeds their own interpersonal violence. Something, then, about the violence arising from social structures that burrows into men’s veins and infects their inner lives, and the violence they take out on others or themselves, some even taking their own lives sooner or later.

What made me want to meet her in the first place was an article she had written a few years earlier, in 2007. The article, titled ‘Men Who Speak with Fists’, had stayed with me for two reasons. First, it told a story of an almost uncontrollable drive in some men to control women. Second, and equally sharply, it portrayed some men’s need to learn, to reference Thich Nhat Hanh one more time, other ways of ‘how to fight’ with mindfulness.

The annual ‘16 Days of Activism for No Violence against Women and Children Campaign’ had started the week Joubert and I met. We did not talk about the campaign. The article she wrote was, however, relevant to the 16 Days Campaign. It is relevant to the campaign of last year. And this year’s too. It will be relevant to next year’s campaign. And so, in fact, it is relevant to all the other No Violence Campaigns until there is no need for a campaign against violence.

As we spoke about a social revolution, the 16 Days Campaign was, then, in the background of our conversation. In the times in which we live, all conversations about this campaign are at the same time conversations about men – which is to say, today, all conversations about men’s love and men’s masculinities have to face up to the fact of men’s violence.

In Joubert’s article, what was as memorable as the men’s violence against the women they are close to was what the men she interviewed told her.