#WhyAfricaNeedsWomenInLeadershipTuesday * Today let me take a little detour and address something that has been bothering me for some time. I will post something more meaningful such as the newly appointed female interim president in CAR later or next Tuesday* There is a small but growing number of South African men who have decided to be experts in relationship advice specifically aimed at women. They either post on FB, or they tweet, or blog and lately they are writing whole books about it! They have taken it upon themselves to educate, Empower, help caution us women against players, losers, commitment phobias men and just bad men in general. These experts want us to get the right man, they want us to be married and have babies and a great life. They care that much for us poor women. What is disturbing about this trend of new experts is that they are not only condescending to both men and women they are myopic in their approach and quite frankly arrogant. They use one boring narratives that is solely focused on women changing and adjusting and bending over backwards while completely ignoring the actions of the man. Their narrative hardly ever go in detail about the behavior of these men that we are being protected from. They will touch briefly on how men respond to certain things but they will never go into detail about why men respond or behave that way. Why? Because they dont know themselves, they have never taken the time to ask men, they have never done a comprehensive research on the matter. They just looked at a handful of guys around their vicinity, they maybe read Steve Harveys version and concluded that the people who need to adjust their behavior are us women. The people who need to be told what to do, what to say, what to not do, what to not say are us the women. The irony of it all is that these books are actually dis-empowering or rather burdensome to women, in a sense that the burden of making relationships work is solely put on the shoulders of a women. Meaning we must carry both our own sins and the sins of the men in relationships. If he cheats on us, we must have done something wrong and therefore we must adjust something. The possibility of him just having taken that decision out of his own will and free choice is ignored, no one cares about that. What they care about is that a woman must either stop something or start doing something to stop a man who just found someone else attractive and went for it. The biggest problem perhaps, with these books is that they dehumanize men, they reduce men to stone aged, unchanging, unevolving, perpetually horny, big babies with no impulse control who need to be managed and monitored. Managed and monitored not so that they can be shown where they go wrong but rather monitored and managed so that women can adjust and accommodate these men further. If he suddenly develops an apatite for dreadlocked women, you better get rid of that weave and be a natural woman, if he develops a taste for skinny women, you better hit the gym and start eating grass, the list goes on. These books do not encourage taking any responsibility on the part of the man, these books treat grown men like children which is disturbing at so many levels... The saddest, saddest thing about these books is that women in their numbers buy them. But I know that this will change, with more women finding their voices, with more women getting informed and reading better books they will outgrow these nightmarish books and start dictating how they want their relationships to run. Let me pause.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 05:13:43 +0000
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