This Gender! (Part 1)

I want to tell you stories about my gender.

One happened when I visited Scotland; I’ll tell the others in my subsequent posts.

I visited a friend who had two daughters. In her kitchen my friend has this small corner dedicated to her daughter. In that corner there was a “kids kitchen” made of toy pots, gas cookers, utensils etc.

She said she wanted her daughter to learn how to cook.

So I asked her a question:

“If your daughter was a boy will you still buy this toy kitchen for him and teach him how to cook”?

She paused and stared at me. With a face like: “what kind of question is that”?

She responded and said: “No, I won’t!” “Why should I buy a toy kitchen for my male child”? She asked. And turned to continue cooking.

You see, many a time, we as parents and women, including those clamoring “equal rights for women” and those who claim to be “feminist”, we have a huge role to play in this race of “Gender equity and fairness”.

It starts from your homes! From the toys you buy your kids, 

The career paths you chose for your kids,  and 

The kind of household chores and activities you limit to certain genders.

Children don’t know what PINK and BLUE is when they’re growing up. We make those choices for them. In fact, we impose it one them.

 “She is a girl, she has to love pink”, 

“He’s a boy, so it definitely has to be a blue jumper”.

What makes you think that only girls should learn how to cook? And the boys shouldn’t. 

Since when did eating food and learning how to survive become a girls thing?

I think it is really unfair to male children. Because you’re fully depriving them of acquiring skills for their own survival.

Often times we say to boys: “don’t cry”, “be a man”! These are phrases with which we rob boys of being “human”.

This, I suppose, is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie implies when she says “we need to teach male children the language of emotion”. 

We raise the boy child to think that he’s super-humans when he’s just as human as a girl child. We teach them that they need to be a “man” a term that has nothing to do with gender or being human, but means being tough, showing no emotion, feeling no pain.

Can you see how patriarchal we have been as parents and as individual players in society?

It’s high time we changed this narrative. And our role in creating this change is indispensable.

I’ll say whilst we go on preaching “equity” & “fairness” for women, we need to also fix the root of the problem.

“Charity, they say, begins at home”!

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