Tag: gender

Today, a creepy trend ensues: the Nigerian man is incidental. He has become disposable means to self-indulgent ends. But the Nigerian woman isn’t; she is hopelessly accidental, even as she giftedly uses and disposes of her men. But she does not know that. That is why, despite their touted talents and depth, the best of Nigeria’s female icons pale irredeemably, against the colourful rainbow of hope and expectations that heralded their emergence.

I will not agonize on the wantonness and serial silliness of successive occupants of office of the “First Lady” yet as their tragicomedy furnishes interesting discourse for another day. Apology to the “First Lady” with substance and the will to be truly humane; if she ever truly exists.

The antecedents and on-going travesty of the Nigerian “female icon,” “alpha female” or whatever, hurts the nation today. It devastates the Nigerian girl-child and woman alike simply by injecting a false and gratuitous default amount of animosity in them towards men and Nigeria’s established patriarchy.

By their politics, they neglect the boy-child, girl-child and woman living in extreme circumstances to burden impressionable females with gifts of obscene chips on their shoulders and axes to grind. These impressionable youngsters breeze through the processes, as you read, internalising every anti-patriarchy psychology they could glean along the way until they learn to give vent to internalised discontent.

Eventually, we have too many women screaming ‘women’s lib’ and professing to protect women’s rights. And we have too many women reading too much meaning into everything and agitating about anything, like the television commercial in which a joyous father of a newborn yells into his mobile phone’s mouthpiece:  “Mama na boy o.” To them, such advert constitutes an offensive patriarchal mindset. Such paranoia is wholly enabled by the emergence and practicability of Nigerianised version of Western feminism.

Many advocates of Nigerian women’s rights and greater women empowerment today, comprise what a “discerning” and “assertive” female friend has described as “closet feminists” and “liberated feminists.” Together they seek greater women participation in politics, commerce and other crucial aspects of society claiming development cannot be achieved when Nigerian women have been excluded from the decision making process.

However, not much credit can be ascribed to the few privileged females involved in Nigeria’s decision making process. No thanks to the latter, an anti- female power structure has emerged purportedly for the advancement of the Nigerian woman, but is unable to do so because it is dominated by two cliques of women. The first clique comprises of women married to powerful men and spoilt brats of aristocratic descent. The second comprises ambitious, Ivy-League-trained and dazzling females who have risen to the apex of their careers through meritorious service. Together they constitute Nigeria’s greatest nightmare.

That is because by their citizenship, Nigeria suffers devastating blows to its value system and family structure. This band of self-styled fortune hunters like their male counterparts, conveniently choose to ignore the balancing, nurturing and conscientious roles they ought to play at checkmating the unbridled excesses and terrorism of the male folk.

They shamelessly perpetuate an oligarchic female power formation leveraged on patron-client patriarchal structures – the same structure that incites their revolt. They owe neither moral nor legal obligation to further the ideal of their fellow women rather they exploit their positions and opportunities for economic gains and political relevance. But lest we castigate this new breed of Nigerian female, it is important to acknowledge that they constitute an unavoidable response to the unspeakable insanity and insensitivity of the Nigerian male folk.

Lower down the ladder of this band of fortune bandits however, exists an even more desperate gang of insufferable women advocates. Think advocacy gurus, women’s rights activists and female C.E.Os, students, youth leaders etc.

Their modus operandi involves reading too much into everything and projecting their own neurotic views of reality over far simpler and true reality. They redefine the world upon straw men where there are none and fight needless battles against a ghost army. Yet this fantastic quest of theirs is hardly about maximizing under-privileged women’s lot or improving the lot of the country hence in doing battle with their ghost army of straw men, they alienate their actual allies and indifferent peers – consequently, they attract more blowback to themselves.

The blowback of course, is relative to each feminist and whatever incites her discontent. And as this never-ending discontent becomes the primary source of their righteous victimhood, they desperately lust for and seek to acquire wealth, power, status and any other enablement that would guarantee their comfort and rebellion against the established order.

When they acquire it, they loathe letting go of it and become addicted to it, like junkies. Just like their men. And they will stop at nothing; even if it means adopting both destructive and constructive measures to craft and sustain power in their lives as a dependable safe-guard against the proverbial monstrous man. This breeds a self-perpetuating cycle of hate that keeps such characters unsatisfied and their men, eternally less than.

The consequence is that instead of enjoying life naturally and as each situation peculiarly demands; the new Nigerian feminist reduces her own quality of life by seeing the world through a sexist filter and not as it truly is. This goads a considerable segment of the female folk to pursue whole-heartedly, the perversion of certain established social and universal absolutes that had at one time or the other served as their moral and psychological compasses and comfort zones. Think custom and religion. Asides family, the church is a major casualty of this anomaly as the gospel currently asphyxiates in the heat waves of “expedient evangelism” of Nigeria’s dandy female pastors.

If religion stands no chance, culture doesn’t either. Traditional and divine absolutes of old are of little or no basic worth today; that is why the average Nigerian woman today stands the scripture and tested norms on the head as she spiritedly seeks to emasculate her man and call the shots at home, in the boardroom and even the temples of God.

The central goal of an average Nigerian woman today is to attain self-actualization at whatever cost, often times. This change in ambition is inherently liberating; as it frees a multitude of women from the drudgery of injurious marriages and societal norms. However, this radical change in disposition negatively affects their life arc as a whole; it perverts their relationships, self-esteem, stress levels, pastime, sexual culture, and time and resource allocation – a reality they never actually bargained for.

Driven by lust for financial independence, they seek to achieve every other kind of freedom even as they close their eyes to the tensions and contradictions consequent from the interconnectedness of those freedoms. They choose to ignore the fact that with freedom comes a future that can neither be predicted nor controlled and that changes they seek will oftentimes, negate their heartfelt dreams.

Consequently, they constitute a rehash of a more aggressive trend of radical Western feminism, like a breath of fresh stench in Nigeria’s mortuary of hope and humanity. Female icons we have now are ultimately harmful to Nigeria’s womanhood and State; they are insidiously worse than the patriarchy they seek to eradicate. Why?

• To be continued…

To be a ‘modern’ feminist, if not a defect, is at least a fetish; like porn. The ‘modern’ feminist is that woman who dulls down to an artificially created set of sexual-political sensibilities, in order to satisfy her emotional lust for being perpetually ‘oppressed.’

Like porn addicts, paedophiles, rapists and racists, such woman is an emotion junkie – infinitely handicapped yet propelled by her lust for unearned benefits. And when she seems truly deserving of sought benefits, gluttony and wile pervert her claims until her agitation attains the tenor of a ruckus, much like the ghastly cries of feral cats jostling for the largest chunk of carrion flesh.

To do pioneer American feminists justice, many of them have publicly repudiated the ideas they once held: Betty Friedan now talks of the importance of the family. Judy Goldsmith (former president of NOW) deplores the feminization of poverty due to easy divorce laws, and Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, laments the effects of sexual liberation and the feminist adoption of the lesbian cause: “We tried to make people proud of who they were” says Brownmiller, “…but then the sadomasochists came out of the closet and became proud of themselves.”

Unfortunately, Nigerian feminists, always five leap years behind the American sisterhood, have not seen the light yet and attempt to pervert State and Federal policies even as they lay to waste, the traditional family. Feminists, without doubt, should not enjoy the natural ‘privilege’ of having children. They are taking care of that anyway – as you read; the “Free the Nigerian Woman” movement is working assiduously to achieve total liberation from patriarchal fetters for the Nigerian woman and girl-child.

However, like their foreign feminist heroes, the feminism they propagate presupposes and necessitates male blame. It espouses man-hating as an intrinsic part of its modus operandi thus institutionalizing misandry as a central tenet of its crusade. Although, many a Nigerian feminist will contend that “the feminism we espouse does not require man-hating, we simply choose to liberate the Nigerian woman from servitude and patriarchal dominion…”; reality tells differently. Feminism cannot exist without man-hating and that is the cold-hard truth.

Blaming socialization for women’s predicament constitutes the worst of feminist claptrap.

The socialization-learned roles-sex stereotyping feminist argument to excuse feminists’ claim to  perpetual victimhood has no basis in fact. If social forces and upbringing have such a profound effect and influence on women’s choices then they must also have a profound effect and influence on men’s choices – if considered within the feminist parameters that both male and female gender are created as equals. This means that nobody, anywhere, under any circumstances, is capable of making a ‘free choice.’

The concept is arrant nonsense; if it had any validity then none of us could be held morally or personally responsible for the consequences of our actions. Picture a society that operates by this belief system: thousands of men locked up in prisons could use the same defense for shooting, robbing, raping, drug dealing and so on. Why not argue for example, that the culture of masculinity, a background of poverty, and a materialistic and religiously intolerant family  makes them behave in anti-social ways? Individual men are held responsible for their decisions and actions, so how can feminists legitimately claim that women should be exempt from personal responsibility?

Misandry and demonization of men, has devalued men’s worth to the extent that it has made society blasé about the disposability of men and the boy-child. This is responsible, for example, for the shocking bias in the lack of attention to men and boys’ health in general while the mass media and health advocacy groups perpetually obsess about women’s health and the girl-child’s.

The idiocy of this mindset is that while girls are badgered with crucial health information even before puberty, boys, with whom they engage in random acts of sexual misdemeanor and experimentation are virtually ignored.

The cultural and institutional misandry perpetuated by the feminist aggravates the destruction of the family system and denies the boy-child the comfort of an external role model especially when he has to seek outside his family for his role models.

This is one reason boys are perpetually in trouble; due to the lack of positive male role models in their lives, they would get what they could from TV, violent films and video games. All they need is someone whose exemplary footsteps they could follow but the society provides them only men they could dumb down to.

A recent analysis of 2, 000 mass media portrayals of men and male identities, found that men were depicted mostly as villains, aggressors, perverts, and philanderers. From this stock-pile of anti-heroes, the boy-child is expected to navigate for a good male identity. Promoting the image of men as juvenile, mean and stupid is cynical and exploitative; which makes the tide of inverse sexism that has swamped out television screens for instance, even more appalling.

In modern Nigeria, boys and young men have a dire lack of good role models; especially if they are raised in a single-parent home, as one in eight children now are. The situation is worsened by the lack of positive role models in government, and the perpetuation of overwhelmingly negative images of men by the media and feminist scholarly research. Ultimately such portrayals lead to negative social costs for society in areas such as male health, rising suicide rates and family disintegration.

Women need to be thought of as ‘victims.’ Without the banner of victimhood to rally around, feminist coffers would run dry, career feminists would be unemployed and mortgages would go unpaid. Hence thousands of professional feminists can’t just declare victory and go home, because without the feminist movement they would have no homes to go to; they would have no jobs, no families and no job prospects. And neither would they have a platform from which to pound their ideological drum.

The irony of feminism’s ‘forever feminism’ is that the sense of perpetual victimhood precludes the concept that the members of the victimized group, women, could actually rise above their assigned position in society and meet that society, and be part of that society, on equal terms. To do that would mean taking personal responsibility for their choices and the condition of their own lives. Instead, feminism has designed an ideological crutch to serve as the average woman impediment to self-actualization.

Feminism has gained a monopoly on the subject of gender studies.  Men don’t have a gender identity anymore, only women have a gender identity and an intrinsic value to society and this sentiment is perpetuated by carefully articulated propaganda and research.  The concept of authoritative, strong, independent, passionate and intelligent manhood is persistently repudiated except it exists to serve the feminist cause. So when a young boy reaches the age where it’s appropriate for him to be initiated into manhood, we find the whole idea of “reaching manhood” laughable.

On the flipside, a new womanhood is fast evolving. Stripped of its swathe of fortune and status symbols, it reveals a kind of corpse in future argument with itself, a dead voice hollering and bearing witness to its own achievement, passionate in self-love and incest with its past.