CONVERSATION AROUND GENDER

CHALLENGING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM AROUND THE SUBJECT OF GENDER.

Now this is one of the most challenging subjects to tuckle but allow me to introduce this topic by a story about a friend of mine James, a person i could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. Now this guy was the first person i ever heard call a lady a feminist. I was about 17, we were in another friend's house arguing. Both of us bristling with half baked knowledge from the books we had read. I actually don't remember what this particular argument was all about but i can remember that as we argued and argued, he looked at a lady friend seated adjacent to me and said, "do you know you are a feminist?" This didn't sound as a compliment, i could tell from the tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like, "you are a supporter of terrorism".

I did not know exactly what this word feminist meant and i didn't want the group to know that i didn't know either so i brushed it a side and continued arguing

The lady did not complain either, she actually seemed to love that title and because she was a very bright lady i resolved to it as being a compliment anyways.

But the first thing i planned to do when i got home was to check the word up in a dictionary.

Now fast forward and years later i read about a novel of a man who among other things beats up his wife and when i checked the reviews and comments i realized that people were saying that the novel was feminist in nature and some actually advised the author that she shouldn't call herself feminist because feminist are women that are unhappy because they cannot get a husband, but this author was actually married in a seemingly happy family.

Some would say that feminism wasn't an African culture and that he was calling herself feminist because she had been corrupted with the western books called the" feminist classics".

Actually to me i thought feminism is fundermentally a justice movement and the word feminist has so many negative connotation which it doesn't deserve.

So here is a story from my childhood, when i was in primary school. my teacher said at the beginning of the term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest grade will become the school prefect. Being a class prefect was a big deal then because you were given the power and privilege to write down the names of the noise makers. You would also be given a cane to hold on your hand as you go patroling and supervising the work.

A lady got the highest score in the test and to my surprise, the teacher said the prefect has to be a boy, she had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she had assumed that it was obvious. A boy had the second highest score on the test and he would be the class prefect. Now what was even more interesting about this was that the boy was this sweet gentle soul who had no intention of patroling the class with a cane while the lady was full of ambition to do so. But she was a female and he was a male,so he became the prefect. I actually have never forgotten about that incident and oftentimes i make the mistake of thinking that what is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Take for example my dear friend James , He is a brilliant progressive man, we would have conversations and he would tell me, i don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women, maybe in the past but not now. I wondered why he could not see what is so self evident until one evening in town when we went out with other friends and a lady was the driver, and then in town there's this wonderful fixture, the sprinkling of young energetic men who hang around outside establishments and very dramatically help you park your car. We we impressed with the particular theatrics of this man who found us a parking space that evening, and so as we were leaving, the lady driver decided to leave him a tip. She opened her bad and brought out some money that she had earned from doing her work and gave it to the man. James was seated at the core drivers seat. This man became very happy and greatful, she looked across to James who was on the other side and said thank you sir, James looked surprised and asked "why are you thanking me? I didn't give you the money then i saw realisation down on his face.

This man believed that whatever money the lady had ultimately came from the man.

Men and women are different,we have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities, women can have babies, men can't atleast not yet, men have testosterone and more generally physically stronger than women.

Statistically, there are slightly more women than men but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late kenyan Nobel peace prize winner Wangari mathai put it simple and well when she said, "the higher you go the fewer women there are". It's so likely to find a man and a woman doing the same job with the same qualifications but the man paid more because he is man. So in a literal way, men rule the world and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived in the world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival, the physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men are physically stronger than women of course there are exceptions. But today we live in a vastly different world, the person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger but the creative person, the more intelligent person, the innovative person and the there are no hormones for these attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative and to be innovative. We have evolved but it seems to me that our ideas of gender has not evolved. Some time back i witnessed a man walking into a hotel with a lady, the waiter greets the man but ignores the lady. The waiter is actually a product of these same women they ignore. I know they don't intend any harm but they are a product of a society that has taught them that men are important than women. It's actually one thing to know interllectually and another to feel it emotionally. Each time you are ignored you feel invisible and upset. Everyone is just as worthy of acknowledgment, they are little things but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most.

I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better. Gender matters everywhere in the world and it's prudent of people to start dreaming of a better world, a fairer world, a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves, and this is how to start, we must raise our daughters and sons differently.

We do a great deservice to boys and how we raise them, we stifle the humanity of boys, we define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard small cage and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, we teach them to be afraid of weakness and vulnerability.

In high school, a boy and a girl, both of them teen-agers, both of them with the same amount of pocket money will go out and then the boy will be expected to always pay to prove his masculinity, and yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents. What if boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money, what if the attitude was not that the boy had to pay but rather whoever has more should pay?

Now ofcourse because of historical advantage, it's mostly men who will have more, but if we start raising children differently then in the next fifty or hundred years, boys Will nolonger have the pressure of having to prove their masculinity .

But by far the worst thing we do to men by making them feel that they have to be heard is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more "hard man" the man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is and then we do a much greater deservice to girls because they are raised to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, we say to girls,you can have ambitions but not too much, you should aim to be successful but not too successful otherwise you will theeaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man,you have to pretend that you are not especially in the public otherwise you will emasculate the man. Some women will actually pay their own bride price because the man cannot afford but still hide it pretending that it's her man that actually paid it.

But what if we question the premise itself, why should a woman's success be a threat to a man, what if we simply decide to despose that word "emasculation."

Why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage but we don't teach boys the same. I read of a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn't want to intimidate the man who might marry her, and i also know of unmarried women who when she goes out to conference she wears a wedding ring because according to her she wants the other participants of the conference to give her respect. I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends,from work to get married and they are pushed to make terrible choices.

A woman at a certain age who is no married,our society teaches her to see it as deep personal failure and a man at a certain age who is unmarried we just think he hasn't come around to make his pick. It's actually easy for us to say that "oooh but women can just say no to all these things but the reality is more difficult and more complex.

We are all social beings and we internalise ideas from our socialization, and the language we use in talking about marriage and relationships illustrate it all, the language of marriage if oftenly the language of ownership rather than the language of partnership. we use the word respect to mean something a woman shows a man but not often something aman shows a woman. Both men and women will say i did it for the sake of peace in my marriage,now when men say it, it's usually about something they should not be doing anyway and when a woman says it, she's usually talking about having given up a job, adream or a career. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is all the have to do, we raise girls to see each other as compatitors not for jobs or for accomplishments which i think could be a good thing but for the attention of men.

If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our son's girlfriends but a daughter's boyfriend? God forbid. We praise girls for virginity but we don't praise boys for virginity and one would wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves both gender.

You could hear of stories of a young girl who had been gang raped and the response to the young men and women would be something along the lines of this, "yes rape is wrong but what was a lady doing in a room with four men." Now if we can assume to forget the horrible inhumanity of that response, these young men and women have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty and to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings without any control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame and make them feel as though being born a girl they are already guilty about something and so girls grow up to be women who have formed pretence to be an art of form.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Now imagine how happier we would be, how much freer we would be if we didn't have the weight of the gender expectations. Take for instance cooking, women are more likely to do more of the cooking in the kitchen, but why is that? Is it because women are born with the cooking genes, or over the years they have been socialised to see cooking as their role. Actually i was going to say that maybe women are born with the cooking gene until i remembered that majority of the famous cooks in the world who are given the title chefs are actually men. What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender, or on interests instead of gender.

I know of a woman who has the same degree and the same job as her husband but when they get back home from work, she does most if not all of the house work, which i think is true for many marriages, but what struck me about them was that whenever her husband changed the baby's diaper she said thank you to him. Now what if she saw this as perfectly normal and natural that he should infact care for his child.

Am trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that i internalised when i was growing up but i sometimes feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.

Gender is not an easy conversation to have for both males and females. To bring up gender discussions sometimes it encounters almost an immediate resistance. So because gender can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have there are very easy ways to close it. So some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bowed down to male apes and that sort of thing, but the point is we are not talking about apes and some will say poor men also have hard time, which is true but that is not what this discussion is all about. Gender and class are different forms of oppression.

The basic fundermental meaning of this discussion is that we should all want equality and we should all want justice. Because There is so much hostility to the communications around feminism and this idea that women just want to be full and equal human beings or they want to be considered because they are obviously. Women are full and equal human beings but the world refuses to acknowledge that, in so many parts of the world, women are socialised to deny their anger, to be afraid of being seen as angry. To be considered a hungry woman has so many negative connotations and i think if you are a black woman it's disastrous because there's already a stereotype about the angry black women,and i think because women are aware of that, there's a tendency to downplay their power.

I think women really need to start owning their anger because the anger is justified, and most of the people in the world who cares about justice should be angry too because there's so much that isn't right, and o think anger can be a propelling force, sometimes because we are angry we are compelled to act. We should get to the world where we no longer need feminism which means there has to be a democratic idea.

I heard a story about an old woman in a certain neighborhood who was considered a troublemaker and the reason she was considered troublesome is because her husband had died young and his brothers wanted to take away her properties and she resisted. She said she have children she's supposed to take care of and so they cannot take her things, and because she resisted she was considered troublemaker. And so i think troublemaker maker is a wonderful label for a woman as long as it's a good trouble.