This is International Women’s Week and even if I wanted to, I could not prevent myself from thinking about womanhood.
What is a man to make of women these days? Since the feminists took over, it has become extremely difficult for my gender to interact with females.
Once, in a newspaper office, I casually smiled at a lady sub-editor who looked good to me, and answered her query with: “Yes, sweetheart.” She came on me like a ton of bricks: “I am not your sweetheart. Don’t call me sweetheart.”
This puzzled me for two reasons: first, in my culture, if you like the looks of a lady, you do convey the idea to her. Otherwise, how could the flirtation start that might grow into a mature, er, “relationship”? In my youth, you next graduated into buying her toffee or chocolates or perfume. If she liked you, she would make some groundnut cakes for you.
She would pretend she hadn’t heard, but smile secretly to herself, if you called her delicious names like “love is veritable death”; “my pumpkin-necked heart-string” or “bamboo that spears me within its folds”. Yeah.
Secondly, when I first came to live in England, it was the women who tossed affectionate words to the men. You could hardly say a word to a shop assistant or tea lady, and even some secretaries, without being called “love” or “darling”.
Anyway, the way this lady sub-editor rounded on me was terrible, because I realised that she did not have the slightest intention of fancying me. Otherwise, she would not have unleashed such virulent “anti-blokism” on me.
The second reason was this: the feminists whose attitudes she had adopted were, unlike her, probably extremely unattractive individuals whom no man would think of addressing as “sweetheart”.
Or maybe these feminists – who had sprung from the United States- simply preferred other women to men. That would make a lot of sense, of course, for knowing some men as I do, I wouldn’t like to go near them myself.
But should these attitudes apply to me, an African from a matrilineal society who had been taught to worship, and be adored in return, by women, right from infancy? How could you signal to women that you worshipped them without articulating the adoration? Oh, I was confused.
It goes to show what cultural differences bring into relationships. If I had grown up in the US, I am sure I would have been able to address the sub-editor in the following terms, “Look here, you – I am not responsible for the deity endowing you with attributes that negate my powers of rational discourse and reduce me to applying nomenclatures to you that might denote a patronising disposition on my part, right? Affectionate words from me do not fall into the pattern of the male chauvinistic bullshit to which you are accustomed in your decadent Western culture, OK?”
Whereupon she would no doubt have fallen into my arms and exclaimed: “Oh, Cameron darling, you do talk to me as if I were a bloke, your absolute equal! How absolutely lovely! No man has ever dared to use bullshit in my presence for years!”
Actually, International Women’s Day does have its serious aspects. Campaigns are being waged all over the world against wife-battering, which continues to happen even in places like Kenya, where recent reports suggest that the opposite – husband-bashing, sometimes akin to Bobbiting – is on the increase. But the worst offence against women, to which attention should be drawn this week, is what used to be called “female circumcision” but has now been officially desanitised by Amnesty International and others into “female genital mutilation” (FMG).
This is a horrible practice: the pain inflicted on the little girls or adolescents upon which it is practised must be immense and it is a hell of a good thing that in Paris last month, a Malian woman called Hawa Greou was jailed for eight years for inflicting this torture on 48 African girls living in France. Two dozen of the girls’ parents also received suspended prison sentences.
The notion that since this is an African traditional practice it can be carried out in France does not hold water, for forced marriage could be punished under abduction and kidnapping laws, and the killing of young women for having premarital sex in some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures can also be punished as murder, pure and simple. Human rights are indivisible: a woman is entitled to her sexuality as much as to her freedom of expression.
The legal aspects apart, who invented this dreadful practice that serves only to protect the insecurities of men vis–vis “their” women? I am sure it was invented by old religious/cultural leaders who had passed their sell-by date, as far as sex was concerned. By excising the clitoris or other sensitive parts of women, and thus making it impossible for women to enjoy sex fully, they thought they could retain the women’s loyalty, even when they could not attain erection.
Idiots. Women can bring themselves to orgasm by imagining all sorts of happenings, and without anything touching any parts of their anatomy. Whole books have been written about women’s sexual fantasies.
What a pity Viagra was invented so late in the history of the world. If these limp old men had been assured that they would not be sexually dysfunctional, who knows what suffering many a young girl would have been spared?
Let’s all preach the Viagra message to them: “Down with FMG! Viagra is here, so leave the clit be!”