Something I wrote at Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Farafina Creative Writing workshop

The first time a man shouted a sexual comment at my daughter, she was 22 months old. We were seeing my friend off, she and I swinging my toddler over muddy potholes, when — 

“Na wa o! Fine girl, na only you get all this yansh?!” 

I recognised the speaker, the joker among the group of laughing men, as the shop owner from whom I bought Ribena and plantain chips for my daughter. He often asked after her. 

“Excuse me?!” 

My friend’s hand drifted to my arm, the light pressure telling me, ‘leave it alone’. Leave it alone. I’ve known since I was in secondary school that often, all you can do is keep walking and hope they go away. I would walk past my house, or go into shops to buy things I didn’t need, or even give them my number just so they would stop bothering me. I’ve been knowing that I’m supposed to leave it alone. It was time to try another tack. 

“Are you alright?! What did you just say?!” 

The men looked at one another incredulously, their faces lined with irritation. 

“Abeg o,” the speaker said. “I was only joking with your baby.” 

I have known for a long time that mothers can’t protect their babies from everything; I was seven years old the first time A Bad Thing happened to me. Still, hearing a grown man refer to the child who he just heckled about her bum as a baby reified that knowledge like nothing else had. My daughter exists in the world in a female body, and so of course she will treated like public property — an object communally belonging to every man who should desire her in any way. The psychology of street harassment is the same as the psychology of rape and every other kind of gendered violence. We believe that the bodies women inhabit are to be colonised, consumed and conquered by men, and that women themselves are responsible for this violence. All female bodies are nothing but vehicles for the expression of men’s sexuality and power, and all gendered violence — the sexualisation of babies, the kidnap of young girls into sexual slavery, marital rape, the murder of transwomen — is a manifestation of that.

We have all been told that there are ways to be both female and safe in this world. The patriarchy teaches us that if a woman follows the rules — if she limits the scope of her life, divorces herself from her own desires, smiles on demand, goes to the bathroom in a group, stays indoors at night — she will be alright. Is there a greater lie than this?

Product: Woman. Sell-by date: Age 22

This post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but can someone tell me why pop culture's cut-off age for women's sexual desirability (ergo value, because everybody knows women's value is intrinsically tied to their usefulness to men, most especially sexually) is the age of 22?

I was listening to a Ray Charles song yesterday that had a line about a party with '50 girls, none over the age of 22'. This morning, it was a Bruno Mars song about a lost opportunity with a 21-year-old Brooklyn girl. Taylor Swift's ode to (White) girlhood was precisely about 'feeling 22'. There's the sweet sixteen, the finally legal eighteen, the YES GOD! 21, and that's it. Even Adele appears to have quit her career with her last album (titled, yes you guessed it, 21). Lol...

People expect (Nigerian) women to be married by 25, and they don't say 'the big three-oh' with dread in their voices for nothing. I remember saying to someone once that I felt like I'd 'wasted' being 21 because I was pregnant at the time. Where did I get the idea that being 21 was somehow the best part of my youthful womanhood?

Think about the existence of the word 'starlet' -- and about the high turnover rate in Hollywood for those women. Apply the same thought to video vixens, at home and abroad. Think about how the only supermodels over 30 still working have the bodies of teenagers. Think about every Linda Ikeji blog post about how unbelievably young-looking a woman and her body are.

Think about how Nigerian (African?) parents switch their tone from 'is that a boy I just saw you talking to?' when their daughters are starting out as young adults to 'when are you going to bring home your future husband?' in their early twenties. Or, our oh-so-popular refrain; "you aren't getting any younger, you know!"

Men are allowed to grow old; they are rewarded for it in fact. Why aren't women?

I wrote about rape (again) for Olisa.tv

You can see links to all my writing published elsewhere here, but I just wrote a piece about rape and victim-blaming over here, in reaction to an infuriating debate I had yesterday.

Victim-blaming is far too common, and like racism, which many people think is defined very narrowly as 'hating Black people', there are some kinds of victim-blaming that are 'benevolent'. A good example would be how parents/authority figures tell girls not to do certain things to 'limit the chances' of them getting raped.

I call bullshit.

"Stop and think, for a moment, what your desire to victim-blame is rooted in, and how much sense it really makes. Victim-blaming, in any context, assuages your fear of the possibility of experiencing a similar fate and shores up your knowledge that bad things only happen to a certain kind of person — a person less intelligent than you, less worldly-wise than you, less obedient, more slutty. 

Victim blaming ensures that you will always feel like bad things can happen to anyone but you (and people like you). If you know better (and you will prove that you do by citing all of the things the victim could have done to ‘prevent’ their rape), then they should have known better. And if they didn’t know better and they got raped, well there you go. Better luck next time!"

Read the whole piece here.

Gender Justice, Intersectionality and What My Feminism Means to Me

That title is a bit heavy-sounding, I realise (and probably a little misleading, as this post will not be the meaty 5000-word essay a title like that would lead one to expect), but I was having a conversation with my colleagues yesterday, and it helped to solidify a lot of things I've only been aware of peripherally in my own journey as a gender justice advocate.

It was announced that Chimamanda Adichie is in the running for a Grammy this Sunday, thanks to the excerpt of her 'We Should All Be Feminists' speech that Beyonce featured in 'Flawless***', and this news sparked an interesting debate about feminism in the African(?) context.

One of my coworkers insisted that feminism is a 'Western' import and has no real relevance here, implying that African feminists are mindlessly replicating a struggle that has no bearing on our lives. I found that incredibly difficult to stomach, because apart from his ahistorical analysis which 'proved' that African women are not oppressed (on the basis of matrilineal inheritance laws that may or may not apply in some communities and events like the Aba women's riots), he persisted in saying that women in African societies are empowered, despite hearing testimony from the mostly female group about how our lived experiences prove the exact opposite.

It was interesting to see how, despite real people providing real evidence to this intelligent person, he refused to even acknowledge that  he could be wrong. His worldview and intellectual position on a matter which he was not an authority on (based on the absence of either any real research or lived experience) were more important than the actual reality; it was easier, safer, I will even argue, to hold on to the comfortable and familiar delusion of a world where women of African descent are safe and happy, than to engage with the reality as presented by actual women of African descent.

An interaction on twitter yesterday between Rosie O'Donnell and Lauren Chief Elk ran along similar, albeit more violent lines; Lauren asked Rosie to pose critical questions to a guest billed to come on her show, Eve Ensler. Eve is a prominent White feminist whose work has been critiqued over the years by marginalised women; women of color, trans women and female children have been harmed by the erasure and exploitation that characterises Ensler's activism (see a Google search of 'critiques of Eve Ensler' here).

Rosie's response was violent, disproportionate and racist: she dismissed the (legitimate) questions as being a 'cruel attack', used images of herself with Black girls to 'prove' that she was not racist (as if proximity equals respectful engagement), used a racist slur on Lauren, and even said that she and/or Eve Ensler, both of whom are rich, White, cis-gendered women, have 'done more for women of colour than any woman of colour'.

Needless to say, I was genuinely horrified by her behaviour. But as I thought about it, I realised the parallels between her 'rationale' and my colleague's: We all have biases and prejudices that prop up our worldview which determine whose voice we consider valid/valuable, as well as determining which narratives we dismiss whenever they conflict with our constructed perception of reality. It is my theory that the more privilege one has in an oppressive system, the stronger the effect of these biases on one's ability to reason and to adapt one's ideas upon receiving new information.

I used to get angry with people like my colleague and Rosie, but there are way too many of them in the world. Shit gets exhausting, fam. Now I just use this knowledge to check myself. Oppression is rarely a linear thing; there are intersecting sliding scales of oppression and privilege, depending on the context of any interaction within the system.

Despite being an areligious dark-skinned, unwed African mother uninvested in performing femininity and living on the continent (which therefore places me quite low on the 'value' scale in the neo-colonial capitalist patriarchy that holds sway in most 'Third World' regions and in the White supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the West), I still have privilege based on my status as educated, middle-class, cis-gendered, and urban. There are many, many, many struggles that I can not identify with and in many cases am not even aware of, because they are simply not my story.

Yet, the fact that something is not my story does not invalidate that story, nor does it make it untrue. Gender activism in my region is far from being inclusive (I have many theories as to why this is, but this post is way too long already), and the only truly transformative way we can progress in fighting for 'women's rights' (notice how in activist-speak, 'women' generally means straight and cis-gendered females), the only way we can effectively intervene in the issues affecting marginalised groups that are not like those of us privileged to have the education, resources and platforms that enable us to call ourselves activists, is to share our platform, de-center ourselves when we purport to be allies, and amplify the voices of these groups rather than claiming to speak for them.

In summary, it is vital to listen. Even when it is uncomfortable, we must. Even when it challenges our ideas and shifts what we perceive as 'reality', we must. Progress for some marginalised groups is not progress for all (mainstream White feminists and Real Housewives of the Nigerian NGO, I'm looking at you). We must discard the ridiculous notion that oppression is a binary of powerful and not powerful, and that everyone is always and forever either one or the other. And we must leave no oppressed person behind. This is what my feminism, as an African woman, demands.

What does your activism demand?

Respectability and the Woman II: Sex

slut

slʌt/

noun

derogatory

1. 1.

   a woman who has many casual sexual partners.

   synonyms:

   promiscuous woman; More

Ever wondered why no pejorative for men who have 'many sexual partners' exists? 

Patriarchy is why. 

Feminine agency of any kind is a threat to The Man, but feminine sexual agency is (almost?) the worst kind there is. In a patriarchal culture, the female body exists solely to please men (and procreate) and this is why female objectification, hyper-sexualisation of children, reproductive rights abuse and rape culture, among other things, proliferate.

When people say feminism is about women wanting to 'become like men', they are very wrong, but also right in a roundabout way. They fumble into being right in the sense that feminism is about agency - the right of the female, as a human being, to choose and define the parameters of her life, and to be able to function within those parameters without fear of reprisal and worse. In the patriarchal system of oppression, no one is allowed to be fully human (not even men), but as far as hierarchy goes, men have a much better go of it than women.

For example, sex.

Consider the moral concepts of chastity and virtue. The white wedding dress, if you please. Virginity as a worthwhile pursuit is marketed solely to women; no one ever tells boys that their virginity is their pride, or that their worthiness as a spouse (as a person, in fact) is directly correlated to their sexual status prior to marriage.

I remember being berated by an aunt once for sleeping with a boyfriend because, according to her:

1) I had cheapened myself and was now worthless

2) he could not possibly have an interest in me beyond sex

3) the only way to make a man stay in a relationship is to make him wait for sex till after the wedding.

#pause

She asked me why I slept with him. I replied, "Because I wanted to." I earned a slap for my honesty, and this is why: purity culture (which is actually rape culture), does not allow a woman to enjoy or control her sex life. It simultaneously reduces a woman to her reproductive organs while dissociating her from said organs so that every woman is literally nothing more than a walking vagina, and her value as a person is entirely dependent on whether or not a penis has 'conquered' this vagina. Ergo she has no real value as a person. Ergo she is not a person.

Why is it impossible to consider that, apart from my sexual prowess, a man can be interested in my mind, my ability to hold a conversation, my amateur comedienne skills, my ambition? Why is it impossible to consider that I might choose to have sex because I am a sexual human being, and I therefore like sex? I've heard women say things like, "I have to make him work for it." Again, #pause. This kind of thinking reduces women to inert creatures, prizes waiting to be won, rewards at the end of the qualifying process, as opposed to people with sexual agency.

Women (and our bodies) are not vehicles for men's sexual expression. We are human beings. Complex, nuanced, sometimes sexual, sometimes not, but human. Not vaginae. Not uteri. Human beings. And human beings all have the right to choose what to do with our bodies, including having sex, because that's what makes us human; our ability to choose. 

Disclaimer: this is not an anti-abstinence campaign. I believe that abstinence/celibacy is important, even crucial to spiritual growth. But it should be approached with the right mindset, because when women are made responsible for being the gatekeepers of sexual purity while simultaneously being marketed as meat to men by mass media and cultural norms (polygamy, permissive infidelity, statutory rape in the name of 'child marriage'), the result is what we have in Nigeria and other patriarchies: a rape culture that completely dehumanises women, glorifies the male gaze, reduces women's bodies to sexual disposables, and propagates all forms of violence against women. 

Respectability and the Woman

Do you remember being little and hating to hear the words "you should not"? Or was that just me? I have always been fairly rebellious, and few things irked me more than the should-not's and supposed-to's of this world, so I learned early on to ask "why not?"

Needless to say, I continue to be surprised by how rarely I get a coherent answer. It used to amuse me no end to watch an older person flounder while trying to come up with a valid explanation for telling me not to do something they honestly believed wasn't acceptable behavior. Now it's just saddening.

I think it speaks to the power of conditioning and socialisation that people will accept - hook, line and sinker - restrictions on their lives and personhood without ever asking why. We live our lives, day to day decisions and behaviours informed by myths, and we don't question these things because someone told us so, and pretty much everyone is acting in accordance, therefore these things must be valid.

It is at this point that I like to cough, "bullshit."

Of course, no respectable woman should curse. Nor should she smoke, wear mini-skirts, twerk, use contraception, or ask a man on a date. She should wear makeup, but not too much. She should marry as early as possible, cook, clean, and never raise her voice. She should be a virgin till she marries but a freak when her man demands it. She should have less than 2000 followers on twitter and no cleavage on Instagram. And she had better know her place on game night!

The more patriarchal a society is, the more prescriptions of proper behaviour women are saddled with, restrictions which are almost always designed to limit women's pleasure in themselves (as in personal fulfilment) and their bodies. On the one hand, there is the status of 'lady' and eventually 'matron' to aspire to; the respectable female who has conformed to the patriarchy's code of conduct, and on the other - the temptress, wanton, slut, bitch, 'independent woman', bitter woman, gold-digger...there are probably as many names as there are patriarchal cultures, and more besides.

The thing that really grinds my gears though, is that most of the things women are not supposed to do, men are not just permitted to, but even lauded for. The average conversation about respectability with regard to, say, monogamy/fidelity, vice, parenting (I acknowledge that one might need to adjust for biology in some cases, but stay with me), money management - pretty much every significant aspect of adult life, will include vilification of non-conforming women and excuses for 'non-conforming men'. ('Non-conforming men' is in quotes because there is almost no such thing; men are 'respectable' by default in a patriarchal system, at least until they deviate from the defined norms of 'masculine' behaviour.)

There are far too many manifestations of this phenomenon for me to be able to address it in one blog post. Hell, in one lifetime! So I'll just end this by leaving you with this thought: next time you see a woman doing something 'unladylike', ask yourself why you think her behaviour is inappropriate. I bet you nine times out of ten it will come down to - you guessed it - patriarchy.

Doesn't that just make you want to punch something?