This is flawed masculinity posing as policing decency of women’s dressing
What you need to know:
- Just sample how common it is to walk our streets with sagging trousers with exposed dirty underwear and half-naked anatomy. Some of the exposed garments make for an extremely offensive sight to encounter.
- The excuse for stripping women that refers to some African culture that sanctions a particular mode of dressing is fake. African culture is very diverse, and in many African communities, the traditional dress would be worse than a miniskirt.
- It is a reaction against the assertion of female personhood, a desire to violently constrain women rather than allow them to unleash their full potential as human beings. What better way to constrain than humiliate by sexualising everything? Justifying stripping women is a mere justification of castrated masculinity.
Let me enter two caveats to my views below about dressing.
First, I cringe when I see an indecently dressed person, be it male or female. But what decent dressing means to me is relative to my taste. Second, precisely because of this relativity, I never lecture anyone about dressing.
The exception, of course, are my children who must wait until they are out of my home to decide how indecently they wish to dress.
We even have an “agreed” family rule about it. If my children want to dress indecently, they can do it outside my compound but make sure I do not see it. They are all advised to leave any bad dressing manners outside the gate and pick them on their way out. For everyone else for whom I am not responsible, feel free to do every silly thing with your dressing and I will ignore it.
PRIMITIVITY
Thus, the current primitive relapse into anarchic violence against women in the name of enforcing some dress code is pure lunacy. What is worse is the juvenile commentary on social media that trivialises any reasoned debate and advertently or inadvertently defends this insanity on our streets.
Let me make three points. First, stripping women on the streets has nothing to do with indecent dressing. If that were the case, the attacks would not focus only on women as if they are the only ones whose dressing deviates from the norm. Indeed, the manner of dressing of some men upsets all my sensibilities about proper dressing.
Just sample how common it is to walk our streets with sagging trousers with exposed dirty underwear and half-naked anatomy. Some of the exposed garments make for an extremely offensive sight to encounter.
This is so common especially among the bystanders at matatu terminals where, ironically, those who have elected to police women dressing loiter.
Yet, you have not seen these bystanders strip the numerous men whose offensive dressing does not accord with known notions of decency.
Second, dress and culture have a relative relationship over historical time and must not be used to legitimise lustful expression of masculinity.
The excuse for stripping women that refers to some African culture that sanctions a particular mode of dressing is fake. African culture is very diverse, and in many African communities, the traditional dress would be worse than a miniskirt. Not only do many cultural dresses expose most parts of the body, in many cases the standard we use to determine proper dressing is colonial.
WHAT CULTURE?
So what culture are these male chauvinists seeking refuge in? Indeed, if our forefathers were to behave similarly, they would have stripped every woman in the villages naked.
Is it, therefore, not absurd that we invoke African culture but in fact make reference to colonially imposed dressing codes? Is it not the highest form of ignorance to parade yourself on social media promising to strip women naked when, in fact, you are so ignorant about the story of the dressing you seek to defend?
And why do Kenyans love these hypocritical and mediocre social media heroes when all they do is to parade their ignorance? Whoever said that a little learning is a dangerous thing certainly had Kenyan social media heroes in mind.
Third, what we are experiencing on our streets is a reflection of what the Reverend Timothy Njoya calls “flawed masculinity”; it is about challenges some men feel about empowered women.
It is a reaction against the assertion of female personhood, a desire to violently constrain women rather than allow them to unleash their full potential as human beings. What better way to constrain than humiliate by sexualising everything? Justifying stripping women is a mere justification of castrated masculinity.
It has nothing to do with culture and neither does it reflect any commitment to decency.
Godwin Murunga is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. ([email protected])
