Figure

MEN, FEMINISM AND IDENTITY POLITICS

Pretty or beautiful is a subjective adjective and I’ve always thought I had a pretty face but not a pretty body… Until recently. And my confidence spiked, and I’ve been regaling in all my sensuality.

 

This year, however, I’ve been getting a lot of male attention especially on the streets and it has, in turn, brought to my attention, how genuinely all-round fucked up patriarchy has made men to be. I wish I could have some sort of invisible cloak and reveal myself only to those I feel are conscious and worthy.

 

They cannot stay away, the more I try to stay away and hide, the more they flock around me like moths around fire… They mark me and I can’t seem to get away from their attention. I’ve never been used to getting male attention even when I’ve been getting it from everyone in general all my life. For someone who doesn’t really like people, or more aptly put, who doesn’t like unconscious people who seem to be much more than the conscious, I easily get on their radar.

 

They smell that I’m different, an anomaly, and they fear what they do not understand. They either get activated to own me, or quickly try to break me into exactly what they are familiar with.

 

I am scared, not entirely of these individual men, but of the realization of how they’re just mere products of social conditionings, of the society at large. Every single person contributes, either consciously or unconsciously, including I, to how fucked up we all are, especially men who are the focus of this piece. 

A boy is supposed to act this way and that, not cry, we strip him of his ability to feel, turning him into a psychopath in the long run. We tell him to hate everything that’s considered feminine and is punished if he as much as wears feminine clothes or is nice to women. Fucking simp isn’t he? We do not care about his feelings as an adult, we tell him to buckle up and just work work work as that’s a measure of his worth and manhood. Then the society turns around and says why has money taken precedence in his life that he doesn’t care about humans, and especially about women who he has told at every turn in his life to both fear and detest?

 

There’s the parents raising him “as a boy”, and not “as a girl.” We’re all tabula rasa, un ardois blanc, and as children, we didn’t have any self ID. We learn about who we are from the society, we mirror what the society tells us we are and in the long run, it’s really difficult trying to let go of that mirror even the negative reflection that hurts us.

 

Religious institutions keep telling this boy that girls are just bad and sinful and an older girl caused all the evils in the world, the fall of “mankind” and made us all fall from grace. You think this story, as ridiculous and made up as it sounds, is not seared into everybody’s subconscious? Women, imagine this is told of you about men, wouldn’t you subconsciously fear them and consequently hate them even when they haven’t done anything to you other than existing? The hatred can be expressed in many ways as can be seen in misogyny. Let me not even talk about Islam that outrageously has instructions on how to beat women.

 

There’s the media constantly telling men what masculinity is and tells them to guide it like it’s a cult, even building cult groups around it because they do not know how else to navigate the world anymore. They have been conditioned to behave exactly that way to women, repress women, fear women, hate-love-hate women and grab women on the streets. It’s orderly and it is expected and “natural.” What you give is what you get. Any boy or man that deviates from this norm is called a simp, unnatural, “like a woman” and ostracized from this cult of masculinity and even punished by femininity and asked to “leave our space.”

 

Bell Hooks quoted Stoltenberg in AIN’T I A WOMAN on page 100:

 

“The social process whereby people born with cocks attain and maintain masculinity takes place in male bonding. Male bonding is institutionalised learned behaviour whereby men recognize and reinforce one another’s bonafide membership in the male gender class and whereby men remind one another that they were born not women. Male bonding is political and pervasive. It occurs whenever two males meet. It is not restricted to all-male-groupings. It is the form and content of each and every encounter between two males. Boys learn very early that they had better be able to bond. What they learn in other to bond is an elaborate behavioral code of gestures, speech, habits and attitudes, which effectively exclude women from the society of men. Male bonding is how men learn from each other that they are entitled under patriarchy to power in the culture. Male bonding is how men get that power, and male bonding is how it is kept. Therefore, men enforce a taboo against unbonding – a taboo which is fundamental to patriarchal society.”

 

And hence, the intense contempt for “simps”, the traitors. It’s also very ludicrous to chalk this risk of ostracism to “oh, these men just pretend to be feminists so they can have sex with us!”

 

Men see these anomalous men as simps and women see them as stupid so much so that when a feminist, a woman, recently wrote about men being really nice to women in relationships and marriages, she saw it as the men being “idiots too” like women, and not as something that should be in the first place.

 

At every turn and corner, men are badgered right back into that cult of masculinity by everybody.

 

He tries to be a feminist, we say no no, you cannot be a feminist! You’re a man! You don’t know women’s realities and you cannot be part of it. When I opine that realistically, men cannot LEAD women’s movements, I am also asking exactly why men cannot be feminists.

Why are we even having this debate?

What exactly do feminists want then? To keep bashing men ? While the few ones who try to venture out of the masculinity cult get kicked right back inside of it?

Does anyone who have opinions, say on marriage or differently abled rights necessarily have to be married or differently abled? Do you have to have kids before you understand that child abuse is wrong? Since when must someone go through something by the virtue of their gender identity before they become part of that movement?

See? It’s so bad that men who want to resist patriarchy and its conditionings don’t even have a place in the society. They’re rejected by the cult of masculinity and the cult of femininity (because it’s also becoming a cult that you have to look and act a certain way to be a part of) outrightly rejects them too.

 

Trans women that should be loved and used as points and batons against patriarchy are literally murdered and asked to not exist because “oh we have to protect women’s spaces.” Which useless space do you have inside patriarchy? You understand oppression until it comes to oppressing others, don’t you?

 

Trans women are big slaps in the face of patriarchy. Perhaps you even know it, you’re just an oppressive baskad asking people not to exist and cry foul when men do the same to you.

 

We’re so not used to men being nice and amiable that they’re either simps or trying to pretend to be feminists to have sex with women. Sex is REALLY cheap to be honest and if misogynistic baskads are getting laid (don’t you see how women and girls literally get wet for the likes of Andrew Tate and Samuel Kevin for goodness’ sake and literally simp on Solomon Buchi’s page), then perhaps, these men are indeed just trying to be nice and let go of toxic masculinity?

 

Why are we so intent on doing exactly what patriarchy do to men by cornering them and kicking them out of feminism, saying they’re not real men and they’re just trying to get some? EVEN if they’re trying to get some by “pretending” to be feminists, is that not progress indeed, when they could just as easily get some and even marry AS misogynists ? A few days to Solomon Buchi’s wedding, this man derogatorily attacked women’s sexual freedom and body autonomy fa! And he got married! He more than “got some.”

 

We ignore everything I have listed and forgotten to list and just zoom in on individual men, attacking them day in day out.

 

We ignore all the systemic and constant brainwashing structures, we don’t want to attack religion and its dogmatic idiosyncrasies because then we won’t have NGO funders again and you’re put on a leash and asked to gatekeep. I’d be getting funds from “feminist international corporations” right now if I would only “tone it down.”

 

We won’t attack marriage institution that commodifies women and literally asks men to be the heads that women submit their essence to because ha, wo I must marry too! You sometimes don’t even know why you just want to do something, and THAT is social conditioning. Something that happens to these sexists we attack, instead of attacking all the structures that keep fuelling the social conditionings.

 

We do not attack how childbirth and child rearing are one of the backbones of gender roles, if not the major backbone, because we want to have kids too and have little humans, selfishly if I may add.

 

We keep trying to enter all these structures that build the kind of inhumane society we have, especially the kind of men we have around us, we do not want to reform or dismantle these structures and we bare our teeth and solely hold men, the products of these structures, responsible. I do not agree with the school of thought that men are the ones building the society, either socially or through scientific inventions, women also contribute a lot with their inventions and social contributions, even in upholding patriarchy.

 

What I see a lot of feminists trying to do is not trying to dismantle these oppressive structures so we can live and co-exist peacefully. They want to stay right inside these structures, oppress and control men too while calling it “women’s rights.” And it’s laughable really because she awon okùnrin wa’ye waa ta epa ni? If it was you, would you want to be controlled and oppressed? Is that not why you’re a feminist in the first place? But you want to do it to another person? And I see you gleefully doing that to trans women over whom you’ve been given a systemic power, you ain’t any different from sexists to be honest. You just want your own piece of oppressive cake too.

 

The point of badgering men everyday is not to see them become better human beings and dismantle patriarchy structure by structure, both societally and psychologically. You want your own personal mumu, you want to scream about how men are bad so they can keep proving themselves to you that they’re not and in turn, you use them. You’re aware that they didn’t just fall from heaven and are born bad, you’re aware of structures and intense psychological brainwashing, you’re aware that “not all men”, especially when it comes to your male family members and the ones you love and fuck and date. It’s always men from the “others” that are bad, no? Definitely not the ones in your life. You hide the ones you love while screaming “men are bad” every damn day on the social media.

 

Men are bad and you want them to stay right there because that’s what you understand, that’s the plane from which you can operate and manipulate and do your own oppression back. You want to control how men resist patriarchy: “This is how they can resist, this is the gate”. And you can’t win because that’s exactly patriarchy’s style, you can’t beat it in its own game.

 

This brings me to the matriarchy debate.

 

To have and maintain a matriarchy, you’ll have to be ruthless. You have to rape, you have to destroy, you have to beat, you have to marry little boys, you have to become a monster, and you have to repress women who don’t want to stay in line and oppress men too. You have to exploit everyone, both men and women, and give women the illusions that they’re now free and in control. Only few women would rise to the top, and frankly speaking, I’m sorely afraid of women having such systemic power. It’ll be bloody and Kimm Liggett perfectly illustrated this in THE GRACE YEAR when they left men’s society and Kiersten took over.

 

There’s no point glossing over these things and uselessly pining for matriarchy when you have not thought about what it’ll take. Matriarchy will be as exactly as patriarchy, it’s an oppressive structure and everybody suffers. It is not utopian as it’s been sold to you. If you take your time to think about it and not get carried away by the patriarchal system that keeps baiting you and funding that idea (because they don’t mind making women the face of oppression while the elites continue to divide and conquer and finish us all and would never sell you that idea if it is INDEED liberating), you would realize matriarchy is also a big fraud and women would STILL suffer, just like men still suffer times two because we just erroneously and automatically believe they’re free and living the life and ask them to stfu, when they don’t even own their lives and all they’re doing is just doing exactly what they’ve been programmed to do. It’s ONLY the few elites that really benefit from patriarchy, while the poor ones only get crumbs and call themselves “heads” inside poverty and societal hatred for their misogyny.

 

They’re told they’re superior without any correlating evidence and reward, struggle to prove they’re indeed superior with women kicking them right back in their illusion, work work work, die.

 

Matriarchy is not a paradise that it’s being whitewashed to be. 

 

You may want to become a monster and control others, I don’t want to.

 

I want equality. 

 

I want change.

 

It’s easy to adopt Animal Farm‘s “four legs good two legs bad” mantra than to make in-depth analyses and confront uncomfortable truths.

 

It’s easier to say women have four legs while men have two legs, while the men disagree and it’s a tug of war forever and ever, with everybody desperately trying to control and manipulate the other and no one yielding, it’s like a bloodbath inside the hunger games cornucopia, everybody is dead… Dead inside… Even the ‘winners’.

 

There can be no winners until there’s a social all-round revolution, until everyone sheaths their sword and we go back to the drawing board.

 

Until we realize that patriarchy and capitalism might have served their purposes, but that they’re irrelevant right now and should be done with already.

 

That gender roles that necessitated patriarchy are now a thing of the past.

 

Women were supposed to give birth and raise them while the men hunted and gathered herbs; now women can outsource raising children, there are birth controls to control when women have kids, there are scientific innovations like EctoLife that produces babies in the lab and makes it possible for anybody, irrespective of their sex and gender to have babies (and would be available right now if only Christians aren’t control fucks) and there are even women like me who don’t even want kids at all. While the men are all refusing the provider role.

 

Patriarchy’s time is up.

 

And the more we hold on to something that has served its time, the more we get hurt.

 

I’m just realising how much men are victims of patriarchy themselves, I’ve been taking my time to talk to them and observe their behaviours on the streets, my specimens I call them ; we wouldn’t know how much of victims they are because they’ve been conditioned to “man up”, or when they try to talk, we shove them back inside the cult of masculinity that cages them. Being fashioned after and conditioned to be a social menace is victimhood and if you recognize that as a woman, you’re not being the bigger person, you’re only understanding better what’s going on around you, it brings more healing and you navigate patriarchy more while successfully seeking a way out and escaping as much as possible.

 

We’re all frustrated and sad and lonely. We all roam about like lions, looking for whom to control and suck their souls.

 

We really really really need to go back to the drawing board and have a heart to heart talk.

 

All these four legs good two legs bad is rubbish and gets us nowhere. I’m really tired of this wild goose chase.

 

I used to blindly defend women and tell men to shut up when they talk about how bad women are too because I also fell into the “women are just love and light and we’re the sole victims of patriarchy” trap but now, everybody has the right to talk about their experiences. And every experience is valid. 

 

You know when a “feminist” on this space gave birth to a boy, (and I’m quoting that “feminist” because honestly it’s just a tag and it means nothing, I look at what the person says, does and the DIRECTION in which they head and this particular “feminist” is just a patriarchal princess that wants to control men and claims the feminist tag to do just that, she’s not interested in any social change), some sexists claimed she had given birth to a potential rapist. It sounds savage but I honestly couldn’t fault it.

 

Absolutely no woman sets out to give birth to rapists and those who commit femicide, they’re just products of all these ideas that we’re not dismantling but instead focusing on the products. Don’t we have brothers and uncles and fathers who are patriarchal jerks? Who are rapists that grope women on the streets? These men are not abstracts, they have women in their lives. Where did they learn to be patriarchal jerks like that? From you? From your family? From the society? From where? Do you see how they act naturally in that jackass way? THAT is social conditioning and even when there are evidences that what they’re doing is wrong, the constant brainwashing won’t let them go. There are a lot of things I struggle to let go of myself, social conditioning is really some scary stuff. Seeing that if they let their guard down, they will be called simps and shamed and manipulated by women and men alike, tell me why they’ll readily let go of what they think is protecting them, when in reality, they’re just left empty and lonely and hated and frustrated. We have built all these cages and punish ourselves for reacting to being caged.

 

A lot of you want to have kids and deep down, you know it doesn’t matter if you’re a feminist or not, your kids, those cute little boys, might grow up someday to drag you and tell you single women are useless even when they’re mostly raised by single women themselves. If we don’t consistently dismantle all these oppressive structures, we’ll have to keep dealing with the products day in day out.

 

We’ll have to deal with shitty women (miss me with women are just good bullshits as women are also oppressors, that they’re oppressed under patriarchy doesn’t make them all-round victims, under patriarchy and outside of it, they oppress too and use that victimhood as a shield and would do worse if given systemic power. They’re not doing their oppression on a small scale because they’re nice, they just don’t have the means), we deal with shitty men, we deal with shitty people. We scream until our voices are hoarse and we constantly seek who to control too when in reality, you cannot control anybody. If you’re controlling and manipulating somebody, chances are that you’re being controlled and manipulated too. Manipulators get manipulated, you have opened yourself up to manipulation by trying to manipulate too. In fact, a lot of times, someone letting you manipulate them is a bait.

 

We NEED to start having dialogues, we need to re-evaluate what we’re doing. Life is not supposed to be this hard, we’re not supposed to be at each other’s throats every minute. 

 

This article is not targeted at anybody or meant to rubbish whatever anybody is doing.

 

This is coming from a place of pain at having to live literally inside a war zone where I’ll have to fight to the death.

 

The loneliness, the frustration, the hatred and vileness that oppressive structures bring… I don’t belong here. I can’t fit in. It burns me inside out everyday, that fire. And I’m desperate for some water.

 

That’s all.

 

Written by SISÍ AFRIKA.

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