I do not advocate feminism. I don’t think that sisters who find that the tenets of mainstream feminism resonate with them know what they are looking for. They know something is wrong with the relationship between man and woman in society (and that I see too), but they do not know what the solution looks like hence they do not know what they are looking for.
We live in a society today that entrenches sexism in both overt and covert ways. Women are constantly negotiating their place in society. I will be honest with myself for a minute and say that both Africans and those who promulgate non-African ideas have this issue in common. It has become a protruding issue on the tongue of the media, and in institutional literature around the world in this season. There are power relation struggles at play here. However we need to understand something; has this always been the construct of society? Or has a time where men and women related better, ever existed? Many (feminists) would say, considering that it is such a prominent feature in captured history, it has always been this way. However I think not. The problem is finding a balance, and I refuse to believe that societies have lived in a state of imbalance, awaiting the messiahs/saviours of modern feminism to deliver us from this evil. If ever there was a time where they kept a proper balance of the ‘ecology of people’, when and how did they lose it? What steps would need to be taken to get it back? And what would the implications of that be to our society?
I should firstly reiterate that I am not in the pursuit of feminist ideals or any such thing. I know that true emancipation (for lack of a better term) should never take such a one dimensional approach, because the mind of ‘gender oppression’ (like racism and all these other negative ‘isms’) is firstly a mind that both men and women should be trained out of, and secondly it falls into a bio-network of distortions that occurred in what I call the social-deconstruction rather than the popular term social construct.
What I mean by social-deconstruction is simply an opposite concept to that of a social construct. Social constructs are those things that have become shared societal paradigms or rather ways of seeing things (understanding and thinking) and doing things, which are not a result of our nature as human beings. They are a result of what we decide about each other. Now these things are necessary within a ‘social contract’. When we desire to live in a harmonious society, there are things we construct, that keep us within certain bounds for the sake of the sustenance of our society. Now social-deconstruction is a reaction or the result of the breaking down of the decided order of things either, over time, or very seldom, through defining moments.
Let me use what I believe is a distortion of gender ‘power relations’ in a black community, as an example to further explain what I mean by this.
However so you have a good grasp of the example, I want to expound on something first. If society has decided, or constructed that man will be the head of the household, and woman and child will create the rest of the body that is the family (as was the construct of many black societies). It was not a plan by narcissistic men sitting somewhere in a room, taping their fingers, trying to figure out how they can make a woman’s life hell. There was a sound (sensible), practical reason for this. This is why historicising this social construct is important. Historicise means to put it in its historical context. We honestly can never fully know this historical context in its accuracy. However from what we have read and heard, we can extract the idea. The idea was that, from what they have observed to be natural, men usually grew bigger than women. Of course there were big women and small men but they were a minority. Therefore when it came to tasks that required lifting of heavy objects, working extensive periods of time, and veering off or intimidating anything (or anyone) that had the potential to harm people, they (men) seemed the most endowed to do that. They thus gravitated towards these tasks. There was no group of people who sat down and said “you, that’s your place! And you that’s your place, in the kitchen!” well, I’m not sure about European society (who knows what they sit and plan in their chambers), remember I am speaking strictly of an African context here.
The most important thing to the society being the security and thus the continuation of the society, and men being the ones seen as most capable to perform this mighty task, starting from within the families, were imbued with this ‘headship’. They were assented to make important decisions (in a way all linked to the sustenance of the family) in the absence of the woman, which they seldom ever did, most of the time they consulted their women. When this gradually became a norm, women were not dumbfound, silenced, non-thinking agents who were taken blindly by the wave of this construct.
Women too (or at least most of them) have things they sort of naturally gravitate towards.
Now if you think I’m part of the “women are just more emotional than men” bunch, you are right. However I am in undeviating opposition to people who say that our being “emotional beings” makes us weak or irrational. These three terms need to be redeemed from their interchangeable use. There is a link between emotions and irrationality, but I am beginning to think that that link is prevalent mostly in men (mainly because usually when you hear someone preaching the ‘irrationality of emotions’ they are a man). Women are intelligent beings, able to have both (emotions and rationality) coexist in their minds in peaceful separation, and at times refer to both in making well balanced decisions. The point is that, because of this, everything that women do (unless they are coerced) tends to reflect how they are feeling. Please understand that this is not a bad thing at all, if we learn the proper balance. For example, if a woman is unhappy, even the plate of food they put in front of you will be ‘unhappy’, and if they are feeling good, the plate will reflect this too.
This is why they gravitated towards those things that allowed them to pertinently express themselves. Like taking care of their man by, cooking for him, washing his clothes, and other such like tasks. Now what society did is that over time, it took these tasks, and used them to define women, and eventually to enslave them. Now here I will say, for all those women who refuse to be defined by the kitchen, I understand that the kitchen has become a place of bondage rather than a place where women can freely and constructively express themselves. When I say kitchen I mean it in the literal sense, and the metaphorical sense of, anything that is today known as the ‘roles of womanhood’ or what defines a woman.
In the attempt to order society, these tasks were imposed on women. Even those who felt they could or did not naturally gravitate towards them. Because the problem really is not that women are in the (proverbial) kitchen and men are in the (proverbial) garage, it is that when women have the desire and capability to be in the garage, why can’t they be. This is the issue that feminists want straightened out.
However this does not explain the power-relation dynamics that we see at play. Now for that I must get into that example I was initially trying to give.
Let us say, the situation was that society acknowledged the headship of men, and it could only work properly if the man was around. Able to see the needs of the household, and make decisions based on that. So men were on their homesteads, only leaving the home to go somewhere in the village. They provided for their families through the vegetation they harvested in their fields. So upon the arrival of the settler, many African families lost their land, many losing the fields they used to provide food for their families. The European took everything away and the only access we had to a comfortable life was through menial labour (working for them). Men had to leave home, and go find work, which they had never done before, leaving the women in the position of head. This at some point was the reality of black families everywhere (not all, but many).
Now when the man comes back home, will the gender relations not be distorted? Especially if they never understood that what defines them (as men) is not these tasks per se, but whether they ‘perform them efficiently’ (for lack of better wording). They began to try and impose their ‘manhood’ (a manhood that was emasculated by colonialism). They were trying to restore that sense of importance they once felt in the structures of the home, and society. However they were, and still are, going about it wrong. This was adopted by the generations that were brought up in that complex.
Young boys becoming men too early and having picked up only that man are the head, never that there comes great responsibility and accountability [to society] along with that; also never learning where the woman as the nurturer of the family fits in, started to lose sight of her importance.
Example complete, now I want to talk about the woman’s role in this. Do not get me wrong, my essay is not on gender violence, which is another topic on its own. I am simply talking about the dynamics that could have led to the degeneration of the intended idea [of gender relations] into an ugly beast.
Parallel with the disintegration of the relationship between man and woman, a new age was being birthed. The era of strange technology, and what has come to be known as ‘modernisation’. This era came with inventions and innovations that replaced the woman in her role as nurturer. Now Edgar’s and Ackerman’s make clothes for her husband and children, Pick n Pay and Shoprite grows them food, KFC and the microwave cooks them food and the television and computer teach her kids. She has no place left to express herself.
What is her role anymore when she does not know how to do anything for her husband; sex is not the most important aspect of marriage. It is important but not the most important. In other words, society today is constructed such that there is no need for her in the family. This also counts for the husband though, but we are not talking about him here.
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