(CNN)On a warm Saturday afternoon, more than a dozen young men and teenage boys sit on plastic chairs in a yard in their neighborhood.
They gather to talk about women, respect -- and s*x.
It's a meeting that occurs twice a week in Pankop, a small town in Mpumalanga province, in eastern South Africa.
Some of these young men are v*rg*ns, and the group's head, Kabelo Chabalala, is at pains to emphasize that it is OK to be one.
"There's a lot of toxic masculinity," Chabalala, 27, told CNN of the stereotypes portrayed around masculine gender roles in his country.
He believes that some of this is down to many young men in South Africa growing up without good role models.
"I realized that growing up without a father figure in my life could have influenced me to make some bad decisions," Chabalala said. Many of these young boys "don't have fathers that are present."
"We see quite a lot of femicide [killing of a woman or girl] in South Africa," he explained. The global rate of femicide for 2015 was 2.4 per 100,000 women. In comparison, South Africa's rate for the same year was 9.6 per 100,000 women according to a 2018 report by Statistics South Africa.
"I thought that maybe if we work on how boys and men are socializing, we can have a different generation of men," he added. "Instead of complaining, one could do something positive."
edition.cnn.com/2018/12/21/health/south-africa-male-group-toxic-masculinity-intl/index.html
