WOMAN LOOSE THYSELF!

This is a belated tribute to the International Women’s Day which was marked on the 8th March although I am not sure whether some of my readers will think of it as a tribute by the time they get to the final full stop.

March 08 came and went; and I can bet with my life that there was a significant number of people out there, women included, who did not know that it was the International Women’s Day. In fact, I am sure some of you reading this article now are going “Ooooh! You mean? I didn’t know that! What is it all about?”

As I celebrated all the things that come with being a woman; I was struck by one of those reflective moods. On my mind were a number of questions: What defines the 21st century woman? What gains has she made compared to her predecessors? Is she liberated, empowered and able to claim her natural rights? These were not easy questions to answer and so, I decided to do some research, albeit jua kali. I set out to observe today’s woman; how did she conduct herself, how was she portrayed in society, the media and other arenas? The findings of my research left a lot to be desired.

Today’s society, including a good number of women, would have us believe that the 21st century woman has nothing to complain about. She is educated, she is serving in the army, she brings home the bacon and she is driving a top of the range vehicle. As if that is not enough, she holds a parliamentary seat, I mean, for heaven’s sake, she is a government minister, secretary of state of the world’s most powerful nation and a president!

In fact, some people would tell you to shut up if you started saying that today’s woman is still shackled, maybe more than in the past. You would be accused of being a lunatic and probably committed to one of our mental institutions but not before receiving a severe scolding by both men and women.

But is today’s woman really free? Freedom, they say, is the ability to choose your chains. So, let us explore the chains today’s woman has decided to bind herself with, working on the assumption that she is free, as so many 21st century women consider themselves to be. The first voluntary chain that I came across was the chain of behaving like men. There is this branch of feminism, which in my opinion is barking the wrong tree, which believes equality means being equal.

The women who have chosen this chain are out there proving that they can be as badly behaved as the boys. If the boys can down eight martinis, they can down 16; if the boys can talk vulgar, so can they; and who says that a woman cannot engage in as much promiscuous sex as she desires? It is not a preserve of men only; we too can enjoy a tumble in the hay.

The reason I believe that this kind of feminism is a red herring, misplaced and has digressed from the bona fide reason for feminist movements’ formation, is not because I think women should not be allowed to do what they want; no. On the contrary, I feel women have the right to be whatever they want to be. But having said that, there are certain socially deviant behaviours that in my opinion no man or woman should engage in for whatever reason.

And the fact that men have been exhibiting these bad manners for years is no reason for a woman, especially one who considers herself empowered, to ape them in the name of being liberated. That will just not do; if anything, it places the very real and salient issues that feminist all over the world are fighting for in a vulnerable position; with critics using such attitudes to deviate discussion from the real issues. It invites the immature castigation of empowered women as simply women who could not get enough of it and therefore wanted to romp around, who have too much money that they don’t know what to do with it and who should have been born men because they behave as the men. And on that note, equality and equal are definitely not the same thing; but that is a discussion for another day.

Another chain that many women seem to be choosing for themselves or when yoked with it by society, gladly accept it is the chain of a woman as a sex symbol. I don’t need to belabour this point, all one has to do is to watch music videos. This is one place where the battle of the sexes does not exist with both male and female artistes agreeing that women in their videos need to be portrayed as sex objects.

Female artistes gladly emphasize their curvaceous almost nude bodies in their videos, gyrating their hips and revealing enough booty leaving very little to imagination. Their male counterparts on the other hand are in the production of soft pornography with these videos that air day time on our local TV stations showing them in all manner of sexually suggestive situations with their bikini clad women.

I am not attacking female sexuality; heaven knows our sexuality as women has been used against us for a long time as a form of oppression with FGM and prescribed dressing being just but a few examples. However, emphasizing if not forcing society to see us only as sexual objects again beats the purposes of the so many sexual freedoms that today’s woman deserves.

I know I have managed to rile and provoke a good number of women out there to an insane degree, but I have no apologies to make. As long as women continue to throw away their freedom by binding themselves with manacles that they need not have, then such articles will continue being written by me. It is time we truly liberated ourselves as women by wisely choosing our shackles.