By Olatunji Ololade
An encounter with Taiwo Ajai-Lycett is awe-inspiring, for only a woman cast in her mould could uninhibitedly play the role of mother and godmother to the son and grandchildren of a man who subjected her to physical and sexual violence.
Only a woman like her could survive the trauma of rape by ‘simply moving on.’ Although she doesn’t approve of rape, she hadn’t the nerve to turn what happened to her into a performance theatre for the police, wolfish ‘friends’ and women’s rights activists to exploit. She hadn’t the nerve to ‘bare it all’ on social media while shopping for sympathy and marketable grief.
“When you are able to understand that its not about you, you move beyond past and present hurt, and then you are approaching freedom. You become fully grown. The universe gives you whatever you need to grow, and I am not talking in terms of material things. I would rather build than destroy and leave the universe to judge,” she said.
Indeed, she is all about building worlds. In her neighbourhood, she helps families grow. She is an enabler, who doesn’t focus solely on women. She extends her humaneness to both gender and the family.
For instance, she offered for free, part of her residential space for neighbourhood carpenters to practice their craft. It was her way of ensuring that they are employed and able to cater for the needs of their families.
She said, “I know it’s not easy being a man, particularly in contemporary Nigeria. They needed that space and I gave it to them as long as they kept it clean.” Ajai-Lycett counsels young couples to make beneficial choices. She urges young men, wearied by toil, vicissitudes and age, to support the dreams of their wives. Where need be, she supports their families financially. Thus everybody calls her ‘mummy’ in celebration of her nurturant role.
If Ajai-Lycett is a feminist, she projects that brand of African feminism that developed outside sullied and biased academia. She practices feminism in which the inclusion of men and women is evident, in the nurturing of family across social, economic, and political strata.
Her brand of feminism, as Awapa would say, is about people, their children, their work, their day to day experiences, their stories of the past and hopes for the future. It fosters the participation of women in placing the food on the table. It is a brand of feminism that complements and humanises the patriarchy.
Far from her Eden, however, misandry eats deep into the contemporary female psyche, like a virus. It corrupts the middle-aged and young adult female, and burrows deeper, infecting 13 and 14-year-olds. ‘Modern’ teens at 15 through 20, swim in the slurry of misandry, slurping it all up even as they flounder amid its infinite storms. It is the point at which they discover and authoritatively declare on social media that “All men are scum,” among other obscenities.
By age 21 through 30, they hasten through various stages of awareness, confusedly, embracing furry anti-male slogans, weaponising felt and ‘unfelt’ grief into savage animosity towards men.
Yet they need men to fulfill random impulses thus social media becomes their performance theatre, where they share everything online, mostly of a sexual nature, in a no-holds-barred fashion.
A popular misandrist, for instance, loves to post the adventures of her soul as she masturbates, on Facebook. She brags about her capacity to attain mind-blowing orgasms and denounces the existence of God in the same breadth. She recounts with relish how she screams to taunt her very religious siblings and extended family, in the heat of a squirt.
She condemns adultery but boasts about flirting and sleeping around with other women’s husbands. Last year, she got pregnant for a supposedly perfect hunk, who identified with her misandrist ideologies. The latter, she bragged, begged to be with her knowing she could only offer him an “open marriage.”
Unknown to her, her perfect beau simply belted out notes he knew she loved to hear. He was the liberal, alpha feminist male, who joined her in scoffing at ‘chauvinistic’ men, online and offline, while raiding her secret places.
Her gravest mistake was getting pregnant for him. Like this curious character, many a misguided female shops for non-committal sex with random boys and men on social media. She brags about how many ‘oafs’ and ‘scums’ she had bedded and kicked out of her door following random, passionless sex at the back of her ‘personal car,’ her ‘personal sofa’ and ‘six-foot bed’ in her ‘personal apartment.’
If she gets pregnant, she either terminates it or keep the baby. Either way, she becomes very bitter, slipping into default modes: ‘spiritually embittered’ or the ‘sapiosexual’ man-hating feminist, who lives by her own terms and ‘does not give a hoot what anyone thinks.’
Innately she craves for someone to love and trust. Outwardly, she seeks solace in bitter and ‘daring’ feminist literature. She would probably write a daring, ‘feminist’ novel or think-piece that gets celebrated among her herd.
Far from the glitter of acclaim, however, she is just some weak, needy girl craving a man’s love and attention. Sometimes, she chooses to experiment and runs into the arms of a fellow woman or girl, justifying her lesbianism by the claim that men can’t just get her off.
From frolicking with fellow vixens, she moves on to bored housewives or married women who flirt with her on their digital devices from the confines of their offices and homes. Eventually, the latter find her boring, her touches, gross, and her rant too repetitive and a middling kind of brainy. Then they run back to their husbands whom they never left for her anyway.
At this juncture, she realises that it is only on the pages of feminist literature and misandrist fairy tales that married women ditch their husbands to marry or move in with lesbian, feminist lovers, no matter how earth-shattering their joint orgasms are.
She hovers around 35 to 40 years of age at this period. Forty creeps on her while she is busy posting anti-male messages on Facebook and Twitter; and penning yet another feminist-lit blockbuster.
But where she attains no literary or artistic renown, she simply fades frustrated, into her life’s eternal midnight.
Eventually, she finds Jesus. She finds Allah (SWT). She discovers sudden wisdom in religious scriptures that she hitherto pilloried as too anti-feminist and pro-patriarchy. She has no more use for tired slogans and banal anger. Most of her peers are now quietly married away and severing connection with her kind. She begins to covet the marital securities and stability that she scorned in her youth.
She realises that she had gone through life on the wrong track. She finds that she was never created to compete with man but to complement him – as he was created to complement her.
She tries to live again but its too late. She discovers that she had actually been enjoying for hours, her 15 minutes of fame. The truth dawns on her in a moment of eternal damnation. Her orchestra is done playing and it’s time to exit the stage.
Leave a Reply