We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable.
Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don’t teach boys to do the same? I.
And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy.
Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.
It is easy to say, ‘But women can just say no to all this.’ But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even.
Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?
We raise girls to see each other as competitors – not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbid.
And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an art form. I.
I know that they don’t intend harm, but it is one thing to know something intellectually and quite another to feel it.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care... What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I don’t think so. So you’re black, baby.
La cultura no hace a la gente. La gente hace la cultura. Si es verdad que no forma parte de nuestra cultura el hecho de que las mujeres sean seres humanos de pleno derecho, entonces podemos y debemos cambiar nuestra cultura.
Allow” is a troubling word. “Allow” is about power. You will often hear members of the Nigerian chapter of the Society of Feminism Lite say, “Leave the woman alone to do what she wants as long as her husband allows.” A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one-sidedly – and it is nearly only used that way – should never be the language of an equal marriage.
We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way.
For me, feminism is always contextual.
Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? ‘Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.’ To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best.” Richard.
Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.
She was too afraid to hope, now that it seemed possible.
I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise bi-racial kids, do it in Nigeria.
Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful.
Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.