*Some of this is written with sarcasm and humour... figure it out!
Gender
equality is pretty much on everybody’s mind even if you don’t know it. From
Malala Yousafzai winning the Noble Peace Prize in her effort to go to school
against the ruling of the local Taliban in her region to the capture of
schoolgirls in Chibok, a lot of women’s rights issues is in the forefront. The
history of modern women’s right as taught to us in school started with the
rights of women to vote in the late 19th century onwards after years
of suffrage. I say, “Modern”, because long before then there were gender
equality successes and because our history books sometimes tell us stories like
how the history of Africa started when the White man found it.
As
far back as roughly 1400 years ago in the deserts of Arabia, a man named Muhammad
with a vision from God ushered in a new religion called Islam and with it came
a lot of social equality one which included the rights of women to property
among other things. Prior to this time, infant girls were buried by some of the
Arabs who saw them as a bad omen.
Muhammad
put a stop to these killings as well as giving women a say in who they wanted
to marry. The right to property (even though a certain percentage) thus made
Islam possibly the first monotheistic religion to have enshrined a woman’s
inheritance as part of its social core. Women were allowed to speak (even in
the mosque) and more importantly with the ban on what was essentially an honour
killing (something that can be clearly seen to predate Islam and other
monotheistic religions), young girls were
allowed to live. It’s funny today that a religion associated in the news with
killings was saving girls centuries ago.
Coming
closer to recent history, prior to the suffrage there were of course the
so-called She-Wolves of Great Britain, the royal ladies who ruled or attempted
to rule over England (sorry Mary). These women of course were extended
privileges not offered to the common womenfolk until a royal named William
married a common lass named Kate or something like that. In ancient Zaria of
Nigeria, Queen Amina ruled over parts of what is now Northern Nigeria and what
is now largely a patriarchal society. She like Elizabeth the First refused to
marry for fear of losing power and gender equality. She is also famous for reportedly
sleeping with men from the warring tribes she defeated then having them killed
the next day. The story is she did this so the men wouldn’t brag about having
slept with her. Now you may think she did this to protect her “chastity” as
today’s Northerners do under the cloak of “conservatism” (well, actually we
don’t kill people… not for that), but my theory to why she would do this might
be because she didn’t want to have to fight for joint custody with any possible
future baby-daddy or maybe she heard of the actions of the pre-Islamic Arabs
and was just livid (you know some women can go overboard). Who knows?!
With
the coming of women’s voting rights in the last century, a lot of women’s
issues now came to the forefront like women’s liberation. Of course if you ask
in some fringe quarters of the internet, women’s liberation was nothing but a
ploy by the American elites to tax women (who made up half the American population)
and to destabilize society. Hey, we’re covering all grounds here. This is an
all-perspective equality article.
There’s
no doubt that there are a lot of women issues that should be in the forefront
like education and the rights for women to work, but then there are things that
really have nothing to do with gender equality masking at such. We no doubt
still live in a world where some men fear women in the workplace and not in a
she’s-my-boss-so-I-fear-her kind of way, but in a
what’s-she-doing-here-and-why-should-I-be-taking-orders-from-a-woman kind of
way. It’s for reasons like this gender equality should and does exist. Most
girls in rural areas are given hurried education, in the sense that their
education is limited, because it’s not seen as their main goal in life. In some
of these societies, marriage is seen as the life goal of a woman. If you live
in a developing country you might know what I’m talking about. It is important
to note that marriage isn’t the problem here, but rather the urgency and manner
in which it is sometimes carried out.
It
is also here that I have to point out that while the Chibok Girls issue is also
seen as a women’s rights issue, it is important to note that their captives
Boko Haram aren’t just against female education, they’re against all types of
education they perceive as Western. Before the abduction of the girls,
severally schools were shot at and mostly, if not all, male students were
killed. There wasn’t much uproar from the world until the girls were kidnapped.
It seemed this was the chord that struck the world and even at that it took a
while to even catch the world’s attention. Like I said, while the Chibok Girls
crisis can be seen as a women’s right issue, what led to its happening was less
based on a hatred for women and more a hate on a perceived type of educational
system.
Of
course with gender equality comes feminism, a word/term which many till date
are finding hard to define. Men can be feminists too and for a while we weren’t
sure if we were allowed into the illustrious club. Feminism’s new anthem came
courtesy of Beyonce (all hail Queen Bee) last year with a song called Flawless
in which she tells other supposed feminists to bow down. The song features my
fellow country-woman Chimamanda Adichie, who I just had to mention she’s my fellow
country-woman, because that’s the only link I have to her. Well, that and a
game of six degrees of separation that I can play by linking her and me through
a fellow writer by just two degrees, but I digress.
The
song, Flawless features a TedEx speech by Adichie where she talks about
feminism and invited us to the club proclaiming, “We should all strive to be
feminists!” I bought my form the next day! In that TedEx speech she highlights
some of the issues facing women in societies like ours like being made to
shrink themselves or being made to only aspire to marriage and so on and so
forth. Aside from being a good song, Adichie’s speech is one of the two most
memorable things about Flawless. The other being that I always remember to put
my hands up and twist them frantically when Beyonce sings, “I woke up like
this… I woke up like this… Flawless” like such:
Of
course my constant hand-twisting to Beyonce’s Flawless did not go unnoticed in
my former workplace, as my co-worker, a female I might add, questioned my
sexuality. Clearly, despite Adichie’s invitation not everyone was welcoming of
me to the feminist club. It’s not my fault I’m flawless… I woke up like this… I
woke up like this!
Like
all things except maple syrup on french toast, feminism does have its downside. Some men have
faulted feminism as the reason why some women act more manly than men, which
can be worrisome if all you want to do is go home and get in bed with a warm
body full of more curves in all the right places than you have and you can
understand why some men don’t like that attitude, but the worst downside to feminism is when
women turn on women for not being “feminist” enough, even if the word itself
doesn’t come up. You know what I’m talking about.
When
former volleyball pro and fitness expert Gabrielle Reece proclaimed that in her
opinion for a good marriage to last, women should be submissive to their
husbands it drew a shit-storm… mostly from women. It was a topic on Wendy Williams and all those feminist TV
shows like The View. Apparently it’s
a crime in some feminist circle for a happily married woman of 17 years to
mention the secret of her marriage. I thought you all wanted to know!
Now,
Reece isn’t the first woman to mention that being submissive in marriage is a
good thing… for her. It’s been said by individuals and promoted by cultures for
years. We can argue that the problem here is that the duties of married men to
their spouses is never repeatedly mentioned as that of married women and you
wouldn’t be wrong. The other problem is in the new age of feminism, the word,
“submissive” holds some negative connotations and I understand that, but I dare
say to the women who question Reece, how dare you, the nerve of you women. You
don’t see us men up in arms when other men are being submissive or push-overs
like the case of Bruce Jenner, do you? First of all to quote a movie line,
“ain’t nobody got time for that” and secondly and most important of all, it’s
THEIR relationship, not ours. What works for the Reeces or the Jenners is their
business, although after 25 years, word is Bruce Jenner discovered male gender
equality and finally got a divorce so everything is right in the gender
equality universe.
Women
are smart and beautiful creatures on their own, but the sad truth is sometimes
it takes a man to point that out. When Muhammed Yunus started his Grameen Bank
he realized that loaning money to women was way smarter than giving it to their
husbands. For one, the women cared more about their family than anything. When
the men squandered the money meant for their families, the women were forced to
exercise patience and as is usually the case here in such societies i.e
everywhere, the man’s actions were seen as a lapse in character. However, were
it the women who squandered the money meant for the family, it would be very
unbecoming of her. In fact if it were a Nigerian movie, threats would be made,
possibly by a mother-in-law to have her replaced with another wife, preferably
one from the village, because you know… they’re more submissive.
We
can insinuate that the success of the Grameen Bank and inadvertently
microfinance was built on the backs of those Bangladeshi women who managed
their home finances better than their spouses would have. And some men here
would argue that this proves a woman’s place is better at home, but we won’t go
there! My only qualm is those Bangladeshi women never got featured in financial
magazines or were even put on the cover of Women
Today, instead we repeatedly get plastic Barbie dolls and so-called
financial gurus people pay a shitload of money to tell us what we already know
and also things we don’t know, but in the grand scheme of things won’t save the
economy. Thank God when India’s Mars mission is remembered in the future, it
would perhaps be recalled more by this picture of fellow scientists than
anything else:
Photo
by: Manjunath-Kiran.
That
and how India made it to Mars on a budget thus shaming America and Russia for
spending soooooo much money, (because America can’t do anything on scale and
because Russia isn’t about to take smack from America)!
We will continue to praise the likes of Malala, while still praying for our girls from Chibok, all the while questioning why Beyonce was Time's Magazine most influential person of the year for 2014 when in my opinion it should've been Putin (I guess there's no Russian equality in an American magazine conglomerate and let's not even talk about that scatching article on Putin by Madeline Albright. The nerve of that woman.)
And I will continue to listen to rap songs with misogynistic lyrics, the mildest of which
instructs women to back that thang up and I have an admiration for Too Short’s
favourite word, though I hardly would advocate using it (it’s five letters,
starts with “b” and ends with “h”) and I’ll gladly threaten any of my nieces
that says the word, “boyfriend” in a conversation (even though I won’t do much
about it) while in my presence, because you know… it’s a man’s world and like
the lyrics to the James Brown song goes: it would be nothing… nothing without a woman!
