Women Are Trash
E.X.A.C.T.L.Y!!!
That reaction you just had reading this headline is the
reason why gender parity ‘advocacy’ cries like “Men are trash” are a problem.
“Men are trash” has been trending on my Facebook timeline for a while now and
more intensely over the past week or two.
I’ve tried hard to avoid being part
of the debate in past months because of how quickly it tends to derail to
accusations and even profanities and how you haven’t dotted your i and omitted a full stop in a sentence.
But I’ve always felt a sense of duty to give my contribution towards shaping
our societies, so I’ll address a few issues raised by this feminist rallying
call.
Firstly, before I’m accused of pissing in the face of the ‘Woke’
and on the feminist agenda, let me state it outright that this is not an
article aimed at telling feminists, who are mostly women, what to say and feel
about what they have identified as their struggles or even how to react to
vignettes of their experiences with the trash that is men. Feminists hate that.
I should know I’m one of them; in the tier that believes in equality of the
sexes and not only women’s rights and interests – a humanist.
This is rather an
article designed to address why it is important that we engage each other in
our quest to correct each other’s dark ways or as I like to put it; how to (up)lift
each other out of the dark into the light.
#DoNotEngage
Yes, men are trashy in their behaviors. All men? For the
purposes of this debate, let’s say ALL men are trash, but then what if the only
thing we social justice advocates are prepared to do on a deliberate, constant
and consistent basis is remind them of this fact? Sure, we call them out for
raping us, molesting our children, neglecting our children, beating us black
and blue, killing us, cheating on us and not helping us deconstruct patriarchy
and the other structural drivers that work unfairly to their advantage but to
what end?
What becomes our purpose as feminists, lovers, sisters, nephews and
woke colleagues if we are ready to slander men but unwilling, even when men ask
us, to explain and illustrate to them what all these accurate accusations and
convictions about them look like and translate to in our day-to-day
interactions?
I was told at least twice this past week that my argument to
‘educate’ the man doesn’t hold because 1) the responsibility to educate should
not be placed on the oppressed (who is already exhausted) 2) the oppressor
[read man], by virtue of being the oppressor, should automatically not only
know of all their wrongness but also how to correct it. The burden faced by
those who fall into the ‘not-all-men’ category seems worse because even when
they attempt to engage they are ignored because my fierce feminist Facebook friends
have decided to operate on the hashtag #DoNotEngage.
Would it not serve the struggle for women’s emancipation
better if in between our venting, we also encouraged men to use their male
privilege to ensure that our struggles stay on the social, political, economic
agendas? I could be wrong, I’m constantly learning and I sure hope someone is
willing to engage and school me on a counter view about this.
Awareness and Antagonism
Itolo loku (just yesterday) we were
happy participants in these trashy men’s behavior – happy being their ‘blessed’
side-chicks/makhwapheni - without a care in the world of how violent this
conduct is to the other woman who’s married to him. Itolo loku, before we heightened
our level of awareness and ‘wokeness’ we were laughing with him at his ‘jokes’
of memes ridiculing women’s bodies and thoughts and suddenly we don’t want to
engage him? I’d also feel tad alienated and even antagonistic if I was this man
because name-calling and disconnecting from me in a whim is no different a
violent behavior than the many that feminists accurately criticize men of.
In my line of work I organize a lot of girl’s empowerment
sessions. There isn’t a single one of these sessions where these girls have not
given feedback that boys should also be invited to participate in these
empowerment sessions because, “Even now when we return to school, the boys will
attack us and say we think we’re better than them. Sometimes they physically
shake us up to show us that we’re not better than them; they still have power.”
This always gets to me because I’m raising a man – my son.
So of course I’m vehemently opposed to the view that men
should… basically figure it out. Also because none of us, not even Lumumba,
Sankara, Fanon, Ngugi… woke up one day and they were suddenly ‘woke’. Just like
we didn’t all wake up one day knowing that we ought to commemorate the March 8
Women’s Day and not the one on August 9 next door. In addition to books, it
took some great deal of engaging people, including themselves, for the great
men cited above to emerge the revolutionary teachers that they are.
Imagine if Biko, Sobukwe, Tambo, Kenyatta, Nyerere and all
the great African thinkers kept what they came to know about colonial
oppression to themselves; would we have made the strides we’ve made towards
emancipating ourselves from the clutches of the calculating colonialists? Would we ever know of the Organization of
African Unity? The views of these great thinkers are relevant still today because
deconstructing the mind and unjust systems is a process and not an event so imagine
if Biko decided not to write what he likes - to teach?
Guns blazing, many of our African leaders rightly recognized
the need to establish guerilla units to fight the violent colonial regimes but
they also recognized that sometimes - perhaps unfortunately so - negotiating
with the oppressor is the best way to score in your favor. How else do you
demand your right and freedom from a man who didn’t think you deserve it in the
first place besides telling him explicitly to his face what it is you demand of
his efforts to correct his evil ways?
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