Last week Onyait Odeke, the blogger behind the Chronicles of Eristaus challenged me to give my views on what it means to be a woman and I took the challenge. This is my first episode and you can also visit www.onyaitodeke.com or the Chronicles of Eristaus facebook page for his version of being a man.
Getting back into my version of being a woman, here you go…..
#Being a woman 001: Welcome to my life
I am not going to discuss gender roles or inequalities now; the world has milked that sphere already. I want to discuss sex objectification.
I don’t know whether it’s only me or every woman goes through this but everywhere I go I feel like I am a sex billboard. Please don’t tell me it’s about the way I dress or something of the sort because I am pretty sure I’m one of the remaining decent people in the world.
But every time I step out of the house, I immediately sense it in the air, in the way that CEO or male colleague stares at me. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a presentation or meeting, he sizes you up, undresses you and to his satisfaction he licks his lower lip while starring at your breasts or where he supposedly thinks your vagina is.
I hate it so much and I hate it even more when I am discussing business with a man and he decides to get lost staring at a certain feature on my body or subtly waves off everything I try to say and instead suggest we talk about better things like my sexuality or whether I have a boyfriend, I’m married or not.
Can someone please tell me it’s OKAY for men to stare at me that way and ignore the most important things I want to discuss? Well don’t!! Because my sister says its okay and a whole bunch of women I know say its okay.
That’s why my Boda guy gets the right to stare at me at leisure and the taxi conductor gets to judge the size of my butt or breasts against another woman’s because it is okay!!
I have tried to ignore it, tell myself it’s OKAY but it’s not, it still irritates me. I have tried to ogle at several men’s trouser zippers, their butts and chests but it’s not as discomforting to them as it is to me.
And that is because the society we live in has built men as subjects of attraction and women as objects of attraction.
Tomorrow I will further discuss what differentiates an object of attraction from a subject of attraction.
But for now the challenge is ON!! What it means to be a woman!