A QUEEN IS NOT A KING.

“Who runs the world” is a crappy song compared to James Brown’s it is a man’s world; in the same carping vein I believe female tennis players are slow and excruciatingly boring to watch, unlike their male counterparts who are swift and a delight to watch. Without a doubt, my tendentious statements make me a chauvinist and a potential wife-beater in the court of feminists who don’t fully understand what being a female activist mean. Make no mistake, I respect females to the core and appreciate their impact in the world, I even put a big bold E on gender equality but I’m never entering a Keke driven by a woman again!

The fight for gender equality has gained a lot of momentum lately, it can well be said that it is a matter of time before every misinformed and misguided human being (male and female) realize that we all have the right to do whatever we want to without being hindered by the gender factor such as a male nanny or female BRT driver. However, the downside is that this particular massive movement stands a chance of swinging way too much to the other end and totally tipping the scale, hence the fight for male equality in years to come. So where do we strike the balance between gender roles?

To properly understand why the hassle for gender equality may have been driven a bit too far, we need to know the difference between gender and sex. According to an article I read on the logical India, gender was simply defined as the category to which an individual is assigned by self or others, on the basis of sex. This simply means you are a woman when you have long hair and bigger breasts, while you are a man when you have facial hair and stronger bones. Sex, on the other

hand, is the biologic character or quality (chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external sex organs) that distinguishes males and females from one another. If you don’t have a penis, congratulations you are a woman.

In relation to gender inequality, what feminists fight for is a world where men and women are open to the same privileges, same salary, respect, opportunities, and so on, where no man or woman is denied a thing based on her gender. The truth remains that gender dissimilarity exists everywhere around us, it is rooted deep down in our subconscious that men are superior to women. Before any progress can be achieved in this struggle, our mindset has to change

True feminism means men and women should have an equal right, modern feminism means all men should pay for the sins of other men who have somehow discriminated against them based on gender in time past. Bad people exist in male and female versions, so why bring down a nation to spite a province. Bringing up the gender equality line especially when a woman is a runner up to a man in any given task is the real definition of hatred to humanity. Training a girl child in this type of sphere makes her grow up thinking females are victims, and victims cannot exist without a villain.

Over time, the world as we met it has been built around a patriarchy structure this is defined as a system of social stratification based on sex, which provides material advantages to males while simultaneously placing severe constraints on the roles and activities of females. A perfect depiction is this song some of us sang as kids: “mummy in the kitchen cooking rice, daddy in the parlor watching film…….”. The same mentality that bore my wife belongs in the kitchen and the other room. As beautiful as our culture is as Nigerians and Africans, little loopholes like this makes some of them laughable.

As important as gender roles are in this discourse, it is a double-edged sword that does as much good as it confuses people. People need to understand that culture and tradition can be revised, there is no binding oath that states that we cannot reengage ourselves and align the way we think with the changes around us. Our children, students, mentees learn these stereotypes from people they trust and stick on to it for the rest of their lives. We need to understand the difference between males and females and believe in the existence of gender roles.

Bottom line is, we as human beings need to treat ourselves better, we need to respect ourselves, encourage one another to be the best, enough of nonsense statements like what a man can do a woman can do better or it is a man’s world, let king be kings and allow queens to be queens, there and then equality will inch closer to being fully achieved.