Behold, the man-haters!

If you have been spending a considerable amount of time online or around groups of women, then you have noticed that men are the latest victims of gender prejudice.

Men are increasingly being portrayed as stupid, unable to bring up kids and useless at anything else other than bringing home the bacon, and sometimes they are chided for not being adequate providers.

Kenyan women are spending a lot of time in conversation and on blogs emasculating men.

Saturday Magazine conducted a dip stick survey of women between 21 and 36. Of 18 women surveyed, 14 admitted to having openly expressed man-hating sentiments in the past year.

While most of it was done in frustration, some of the women we spoke to seemed to think of man bashing as liberating and progressive.

Liz Karita, a 28-year-old master’s degree student and social media enthusiast said, “It is what it is. It’s our turn now and men should be able to take it in their stride without whining.”

Anita, a 32-year-old music teacher reckons that women are generally not happy, and bashing men comes in handy to cheer one another up and to empower one another.

“Men control virtually everything. A woman has to work twice as hard just to be at par,” she says visibly agitated.

What is most worrying is that these anti-male sentiments aren’t directed at specific men for specific wrongs but at all men in general. Even dependable men are mauled.

Take Leo, a 30-year-old single father, for instance. This insurance salesman has been raising his five-year-old son single-handedly for a little over two years now.

He has many female friends and admits that it is difficult to be around them especially when one of them is going through a breakup. The negativity towards men, he says, leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

IRRESPONSIBLE, DOESN'T THINK

“My son’s mother is irresponsible, to say the least, and our arrangement was a verbal one. I have thought about filing for legal custody of my son but I haven’t.

I sometimes worry that these attitudes that paint men as irresponsible and selfish may be present in our courtrooms,” he says.

 Your husband is your first child, men just don’t think, he can’t be trusted to take care of the kids – there seems to be no limit to what women can say about men.

On the other hand, even good-natured teasing directed towards a woman will land a man in trouble.

Collins Nabiswa, a social media editor who spends a considerable section of his day online concurs that the Internet has become a breeding ground for pervasive anti-male sentiment. He attributes it to the sense of security and sometimes anonymity that hiding behind a computer gives. He admits that this is a subject he feels strongly about.

“A culture is being created where it’s acceptable to bash men and rant about how awful they are.

What if the same things were said about a woman or a child? Would it still be acceptable?” he asks.

Are we trying to say that men are undeserving of fairness? This trend of vilifying men and idealising women seems to have caught up with the advertising world.

Tune in to any local television channel and you will not miss an advertisement portraying a man poorly especially around the home.

“All these anti-male tirades make me wonder whether I should refrain from getting married or I should marry expecting hurt and disappointed from the man I say “I do” to,” shares Serah Githu.

Serah, 29, is a member of two women-only chamas. When they are at group meetings especially when there are news reports of a rape or domestic violence, every group member seems to have something bad to say about men.

“If these men are as stupid as they say, as heartless, as irresponsible, I wonder why they stay married at all,” she says of her peers.

 WHY WOMEN ARE ANGRY

With the help of feminists, women have come a long way in their liberation journey. They have tolerated years of discrimination and abuse from men.

Have the tables turned? Is this their way of paying back? Should oppression be fought with aggression?

Looking at it from an anthropological perspective Nairobi-based consulting anthropologist Bernard Moseti says that it may seem as if women are feeling a need to step in and take charge because men have messed things up but according to him, the reality could in fact be the opposite.

“The assumption has been that men are in control and thus when things start going wrong in the society, women automatically blame them.

They think that the failure of men is the source of all their problems. The leader is always to blame,” he explains his view.

Mary Wahome, a sociologist and the lead researcher at the Schizophrenia Foundation of Kenya, is of the view that this form of reverse sexism says more about the basher than it does about the group being bashed.

She notes that there are women who are really angry out there.

With the shift in gender roles, women have had to abandon that fantasy that men will always provide for them without fail and have found themselves burdened with financial responsibilities leading to the pent up anger they have against men.

“It will be easier for this woman to bash than to admit a need for a man,” she says.

Sadly, bashing men doesn’t seem to be fixing anything.

 HARMLESS FUN?

Our gender differences have become a fertile breeding ground for malicious jokes directed at men.

Ideally, men and women should be able to tease one another in good taste but when this teasing capitalises on one’s failure and starts coming off as man-hating, it becomes a different story altogether.

Seeing as women have been on the receiving end of these attitudes, male bashing shouldn’t come as an utter surprise as emotions, just like a pendulum, tend to swing from one extreme to the other. One wonders whether it’s being expected makes it justified.

Anti-male sentiments have become so natural that women barely recognise that they are involved in male bashing.

The problem with this is that they do not shield the young generation from these attitudes.

According to Mr Moseti, the anthropologist, while male bashing might not permanently impact on a man’s self image in the present, it might cause possible future problems and even become a threat to the family unit.

“It may look like entertainment or harmless fun but children are soaking up these images,” he says.

We are sending messages to our sons that it is acceptable if they are belittled and that their feelings aren’t important.

A woman may imagine that bashing men is empowering herself but she forgets that she is supposed to raise her daughter to grow up with high expectations of the men she meets.

Male bashing could also be a threat to your immediate relationships.

Whenever he hears strong anti-male sentiments, Christopher Mwaeni, a 36-year-old flower farmer writes off that woman as hateful.

He shares that before last year, he didn’t pay much attention to snide anti-male remarks. He simply dismissed them thinking they couldn’t hurt him, because it was just talk. Sometime last year, he was serious about marrying a single mother he had been dating.

Then he saw her six-year-old daughter in a shirt printed, “Boys are stupid.”

“It didn’t go down well with me that she could buy or let her child wear such a shirt,” he recalls.

He began paying more attention and while this woman wouldn’t try to put him down, she only had negative things to say about her daughter’s father and even her own father.

She seemed to have soaked up this attitude so much that she seemed to be going through their relationship expecting him to disappoint her.

“I thought about having a son with her and then having him grow up in such a hateful climate. I couldn’t,” he says.

 WHAT CAN WE DO?

“How do you react to male bashing?” I ask Amos Ndege, a 29-year-old interior designer. His chosen career field is female-dominated and every so often, he’s had to listen to women bashing the men in their lives.

Once or twice, he’s seen cruel anti-male stickers on cubicle walls around the office. What did he do about it?

“Nothing. At a glance, most of it comes across as a joke and you begin getting offended when you think about it some more, which most of the time will be after the person that made the joke has left,” he says.

Silence is how the average Kenyan man seems to react to male bashing. Getting offended but ignoring it and silently hoping that it will go out of fashion.

Unfortunately ignoring it only seems to be making these attitudes stronger.

Gender activist and author Dr. Warren Thomas Farrell in his book; Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say writes that the highest hurdle towards eliminating male bashing is that men are afraid to speak up so that they aren’t seen as woman-haters.

This might explain why why male advocacy groups like the Nderitu Njoka-led Maendeleo ya Wanaume mostly speak out against physical violence while verbal anti-male sentiments go unmentioned.

 Dr Farrell advocates for both sexes speaking up and both sexes listening so that their children do not inherit this anger.

This means starting on a personal level. Being aware of these attitudes is the only way a woman can consciously avoid the negativity. Take a stand for the men in your life by refusing to participate.

Mr Moseti, the anthropologist is of the view that these omnipresent man-bashing images can be neutralised by changing how our children are getting socialised.

“Male bashing stems from women trying to reclaim their space. Socialise your boys and girls to grow up seeing each other as partners rather than competitors.

African life is communal, men and women are in partnership, not competition,” he says.

Seeing as the women are unaware that this could be harming their offspring, raising public awareness about male bashing seems to be another possible way of tackling it.