The #AskAMan hashtag is the latest reminder that when men dominate conversations about women’s lives in South Africa, the real issues are often reduced to casual opinions and loud confidence.
Development Diaries reports that #AskAMan is a popular relationship advice segment on the South African radio station, Metro FM.
It is understood that the show has become a cultural phenomenon, especially on social media platforms like TikTok, where clips of the discussions generate significant engagement, drama, and debate.
The hashtag #AskAMan on the X platform looks like one of those harmless social media games where women ask men questions, men answer confidently, and the comment section accommodates arguments, jokes, and generalisations.
But South Africa is not a neutral playground for gender banter. In a country where gender-based violence feels like a weather forecast, asking men questions online often becomes a polite way of asking the more painful question of why our institutions still fail to protect women.
The hashtag did not grow wings by accident; trend trackers flagged its rise, radio stations dusted off their old ‘ask a man’ formats, and influencers turned it into content.
On Reddit, people were not laughing; they were furious that gender talk had once again turned into a comedy skit while women’s safety remained a national emergency.
For Development Diaries, this was a governance siren, because when gender arguments start trending, that is the perfect moment to audit the safety-and-justice system and the care-and-opportunity system.
On paper, South Africa has a robust plan that includes the National Strategic Plan on GBVF (2020–2030), with its pillars on justice, protection, survivor support, prevention, and economic power.
But the daily reality tells a different story, as even conservative police data shows more than 13,000 sexual offences in the year ending March 2025, and everyone knows the real numbers hide behind underreporting, backlog, fear, and fatigue.
South Africa, like the rest of the continent, has a care economy running entirely on women’s unpaid labour, covering childcare, elder care, household care, emotional care, and every other kind of care that government policies politely pretend does not exist.
And because unpaid care eats time, energy and opportunity, the ripple effects are unsafe commutes at odd hours, economic dependence that traps women with abusive partners, time poverty that prevents them from pursuing justice, and fewer chances to access decent work.
In other words, you cannot fix GBV if you ignore the care economy.
This is why the state cannot outsource women’s safety to social-media debates. When a hashtag becomes the primary accountability arena, something is profoundly broken.
And the truth is, not all women pay equally. Middle-class women can sometimes buy safety such as private security, ride-hailing apps, therapy, and legal support.
But poor women cannot do that, as they face the worst of unsafe settlements with poor lighting, unpredictable policing, long commutes in risky hours, and limited options when danger comes knocking.
So what should South Africans demand when the next hashtag erupts? Paperwork, metrics, and enforcement should make the cut.
Imagine a country where every province publishes a GBV performance dashboard every quarter. Imagine being able to see case progression numbers, forensic turnaround times, protection order processing rates, shelter capacity and repeat-offender tracking.
Imagine walking into a police station and knowing there are minimum standards for handling survivors, not ‘we trained our officers last year’, but guaranteed procedures that citizens can verify.
And imagine that every GBV conversation included a care-and-mobility package involving affordable childcare in working-class areas, safe transport on dangerous routes, proper lighting, workplace protections, and social protection that helps women exit abusive relationships.
The everyday South Africans, too, have work to do. Every time a gender argument trends, they can repost the same five institutional demands instead of recycling jokes.
Also, community policing forums can be pushed to publish hotspot interventions.
As for government institutions, they must also step up, with the police and justice authorities setting time-bound improvement targets and reporting publicly.
Social development must treat childcare, shelters, and safe mobility as essential services, while parliament should conduct quarterly oversight hearings directly tied to the GBVF plan.
