A woman’s place is in the kitchen. Well, this particular woman’s place is in the kitchen.
My friend Kesi knocks on my door on a Thursday evening, interrupting my fortnightly feeding of the houseplants, heads straight for the fridge and starts eating my food.
She’s in a huff, dressed in her workclothes, her hair politely pulled back with clips and things. Struggling with the lid on the bottle of olives, she hands it to me and says: ”I think I might be a misogynist.”
This comes as a surprise to both of us, since back in university she was captain of the feminist league. She wrote poems about her lady-bits and recited them in her saucy Mozambican accent through a megaphone outside the Students’ Union. Today she has a very good job as regional marketing director of a cosmetics multinational.
”I don’t just dislike women,” she says. ”I think I hate them.”
This is unfortunate to find out in Women’s Month, when the promos on TV are telling us in fruity voiceover, with the synthesised strings playing in the background, that there ain’t no such thing as a bad woman.
”Oh, yes there is,” Kesi says. Apparently she’s working with three of them.
The words ”backstabber” and ”stooge” feature prominently in the next sentences, along with several anatomical references last heard through that megaphone outside the Students’ Union, though this time they’re used very differently.
These women Kesi’s talking about don’t sound like the kind you want to know.
”And what about the guys?” I ask.
”They’re assholes too.”
Funny that she should mention the women first.
And there it is. An answer to the question I’ve been carrying around in my tummy all Women’s Month, as speeches are made declaring women to be ”kind”, declaring women to be ”strong”, calling them ”nurturers”.
I’ve been wondering: ”Aren’t women allowed to be just like real people? Each one different?”
We’ve all met unkind women and there is such a thing as a bad mother. The propaganda, however, wants us to believe differently. Next month they’ll be celebrating that blacks have great rhythm or that Jews are good with money; if you’re not paying attention, it seems like a compliment. Here’s what it’s really saying:
”Don’t get any ideas about being like the rest of us. You know your place. Stay in it.”
Given that women’s liberation is, at its most useful, about human beings getting to choose their own place and their own way, it’s incredible that we tolerate this ”blanket amnesty from wickedness” Women’s Month nonsense.
There’s a story you might’ve heard about somebody who chose their own place and their own way.
On June 29 2008, Thomas Beatie, a man in the United States, gave birth to Susan Juliete Beatie, a healthy baby girl.
This isn’t the kind of news people like you and me are supposed to get excited about. It’s one of those tabloid freakshow stories. And when we see Thomas Beatie on Oprah or as the tailpiece on the TV news or on the cover of one of those primary-coloured, boldfaced magazines at the end of the queue at Woolies — the ones we wish we were brave enough to pick up instead of the copy of Visi or The Economist we make a show of adding to our basket along with the certified organic pasta sauce and gelatin-free yoghurt — when we see the pregnant man, we roll our eyes.
We’re Mail & Guardian readers and feeling superior is a full-time job. After all, there was nothing medically remarkable about the story: Beatie was once a woman and, when he decided to become legally recognised as a man and had gender realignment surgery, he held on to some of his lady-bits in case he felt like getting knocked up some day.
But the picture was something else. It was a pregnant man. He had the beard and the tummy. That was a strange thing to see. But nice. It looked like progress.
A quick Google reveals that medical science isn’t too far away from giving men who were born with man-bits the opportunity to fall pregnant too, the way Arnold Schwarzenegger did in that movie with Danny DeVito. If they feel like it, why not?
(My Internet search also revealed that Michael Jackson wants to live with leprechauns and that aliens travel to Earth for Chinese takeaways, but we’ll save those for future columns.)
Me, I think this is all a good thing, people deciding who they are and what they’ll be. It suggests that there isn’t really such a thing as a perversion of nature — nature eats perversion for breakfast, nature gives in, nature welcomes a bit of improvisation. There is no right way. And there is no necessity for women to be ”kind” or ”nurturers” or even ”strong” the way they’re told they should be.
Of course, it’d be great if the women Kesi worked with weren’t so awful. But don’t they sound suspiciously like people? Held to an impossible standard, they just stand out more.
Which is something I understand because Kesi’s rolling her eyes and drumming her fingers; I’m the guy who can’t get the damn lid off the olives.