Thinking Out Loud

I was watching the newest episode of Black-ish, a sitcom about a black, American, upper-middle class family with four children and their trials and tribulations. In this episode, the wife discovers Facebook and sets up a dinner at her home with her old college friends, whom she intends to impress at this very dinner with how great her life is. Some of her husband's work friends are also in attendance, and as they linger around in the kitchen drinking Scotch or Whiskey or something the first couple arrives. What follows are two minutes of manly appreciation for the wife having lost a lot of weight (going from "fat" to "phat"), but now looking really good. A bit later in the episode, one of the colleagues comments that the women he sleeps with have all been recently dumped: he waits for the ones with the smeared mascara next to a food truck in front of clubs, so that when they drunkenly and sadly stumble towards a burrito he is there to catch them, so to speak, and tell them that they deserve better, just "not tonight" as he adds.

This may seem just like ordinary sitcom scripting. Haha, the joke is on the drunken, dumped girls. Or the fatties who are now phat. But for all this show could be, this episode just made me angry.
Ask yourself:

• Why is it ok to spend 2 minutes of a 25-minute sitcom on the male description of a female body? 
• Why is the conversation by the colleague not seen as extremely creepy? Irrespective of how drunk a girl or how much she is crying or what she looks like, it should not be ok to imply that any girl is "easy" and does not deserve to be treated respectfully. 

Here, I am not being oversensitive. I am asking you : what is popular culture teaching the next generation of of young people about how to interact with other humans? 

Consider this scenario: a young woman sends the guy she has been dating a text, saying "It has been nice knowing you", and next thing you know he is standing in her bedroom, surprising her, and they have sex. How did he get into her house? How does she not call the police and say a stalker is in her there and instead reacts overjoyed by dropping her panties?

Well, this is a scene from the box office hit 50 Shades of Gray. I realise this is a fictional story. But considering the audience of millions that the books and film(s) have, I cannot help but wonder why women have to regress into these subservient, superficial roles and why society (through portrayals of women in the media) seems to encourage this? 

Dove has been campaigning for years to 'real' women to accept themselves as beautiful. Always tried empowering young girls through its #LikeAGirl campaign, where doing things "like a girl" equals doing it well as opposed to weakly. Beyoncé sings about women being 'flawless' ("I woke up like this"). There are so many women fighting for gender equality, and yet as soon as the word 'feminist' is mentioned people seem to lose their minds. Feminism does not mean that one gender is better than another, feminism wishes to promote the quality of the genders (if that was not clear). I certainly have to read up more specifically into the history and objectives of the various waves of feminism, but that is the central argument: we are all equal. 

Why then, in 2015, is it still a contested idea? Understandably, there are numerous cultures across the world with a strong history of patriarchy that is hard to erase. But I think that that is exactly the problem: what is the point in women fighting for equality when men do not do the same? 

I dislike being seen as a strong woman. The reason I believe I can cope with anything, the reason I chose to think that I can do anything, is because there was no one else. There was no man to save me, so the only option was to do it myself. Women are not stronger for having had to fight, for having had to do everything on their own. Women are not intimidating for having opinions, for standing their man (so to speak), for living proudly. Instead of falling into a trap of binary oppositions of gender and strengths/weaknesses, I think one person's belief in him/herself should be encouraging to others to do the same. 

Recently, a friend posted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDTalk We should all be feminists, where she recounts how a friend asked whether she was not afraid that men would find her intimidating. She replied that she had never thought about it, because she had no interest in men that would see her that way. 

I would dare to take it a step further even: rejecting gender stereotypes, we should (idealistically) not be afraid that anyone might find us intimidating, and instead see it as the opportunity to learn from someone who has more knowledge in a particular field than oneself does. 

Le mal(e)

On the farm, I wanted to pour everyone a glass of wine for dinner when my gran looked at me sternly and said that I should let my cousin do it because he is, after all, the man in the room. I have no problem with gentlemanly behavior, hell, I find it rather encouraging if people have nice manners and if men treat women like ladies. But if I've got the bottle already in my hand, if I am a second away from pouring, it is silly to me not to do it because I was born with a vagina.

It angers me incredibly when people tell me I cannot do something for the simple reason that I am female. To this day, I have not met many men that were not in some form or another a disappointment. Everyone is flawed, everyone makes mistakes, and these stupid gender rules that my grandmother and many others live by irritate me endlessly - I have grown up thinking that I could do anything, that my rights and my role in society was equal to every other person's, irrespective of race and gender and age and whatever else you could list as a reason to separate human from human.

Times change, mindsets adapt, but the old cling to their doctrines as though they were drowning in the thinking of the new age. I will also be old and frustrated and feel a sense of loss because I am being replaced by younger generations who ignore that their achievements could not have been accomplished without the foundations that their lineage laid down.

But I think it is stupid to say that you cannot change the old, that "because they are old" you cannot have a discussion with an elderly person. I love my grandmother, but I cannot stand to hear her speak of the k*****s, of the "anderskleuriges" ( people of a different colour) as though we were not all the same. And she should know better : she speaks fluent Sotho ( one of the 11 national languages), she built a school for the black children on the farm, she always treated the workers on the farm with dignity. Also, she says that the best time in her life was when she worked as a teacher before she got married, and her biggest regret is not doing it for longer. In a life filled to the brim with more fantastic experiences and a great family, I cannot understand why she fixated on those two years of independence,but tells me that I should submit more to a patriarchal way of thinking.

I like hearing old stories and asking questions that only my grandmother can answer since she has lived the longest. She should be wise and I should learn from her, I should be able to take her life and mould mine accordingly, but all I want to do is shake her and say that for 60 years, she has believed wrongly,that she is ignorant and foolish and keeps making these errors without accepting any blame, without taking any responsibility. I want to say, "Ouma, skrik wakker, wees in beheer van jou lewe, en hou op om die heeltyd so flippen die moer in die wees. Alles was jou keuses" ( Gran, wake up, be in control of your own life and stop being so damn angry. Everything was your own choice). Instead, I ask her if she wants more coffee, listen to every story and complaint 20 times because she forgets she has told them before, and forgive her for not being what I imagined a grandmother should be.