Assessing Modern Day Women’s Obsession with Grand Titles.
What’s our obsession with ascribing kingdomless royalty titles to ourselves these days?
Yesterday, I came across a video of one of the most critically acclaimed authors Africa has ever produced, and by far, one of my favorite thought leaders in the world: CNA. Odelora…….okay, Chimamanda, as you know it.
In it, she’d made the following assertions;
- That women were not any more special than men, and to believe otherwise would mean that we could validly expect a higher level of morality from women than we could from men.
- Flowing from the above, she did not agree with the aspects of womanism touted by modern women where they vaunted themselves as queens or goddesses, because they birth children, thereby fetishizing fertility and motherhood, as though it automatically placed women at a celestial level higher than men.
You can watch the clip here.
Anyone who knows Chimamanda knows that she was one of the pioneering voices of modern feminism in Africa.
Since the release of her first novel, she has built an image as an unflinching women’s advocate, and long before this rabid, social media version of feminism became the norm, Chimamanda was the poster child for gender advocacy.
So, if anyone is pro-women, it’s Chimamanda. She’s also a mother, as she gladly reminded us in that short clip.
Yet, she was saying in this conference that she was uncomfortable with the veneration of women for their maternal or nurturing capacities.
In her words, anyone can learn to be a nurturer. The world of science isn’t exactly clear on this point. While alot of persons believe that the assumption of women being more nurturing is simply a product of cultural conventions, others argue that this is in fact, a product of biological functions.
But the truth or otherwise of this last point is not my focus in this post.
What I’m most concerned with, are two points she raised;
- Modern women’s obsession with calling themselves queens. (Apparently, this isn’t just women anymore. On social media, men are referring to themselves as kings alot lately. It appears to me like the delusions of grandeur. Why do we need to call ourselves grand names to feel good? )
- The valuing of women solely for the sake of our birthing capacities, as though that is the core & essence of womanhood.
CNA in that short clip summarised my entire thoughts on these two areas. I’d wondered for the longest time why modern women are so obsessed with referring to themselves by these bogus appellations that take their roots in extraterrestrial habitations. Words like goddess, earth goddess, life source, etc.
Names and descriptions that presuppose a life form different from mortality. Some even refer to themselves as gods, and not within the scriptural context that covers both the male and female children of God.
Some of this deification is also seen amongst some factions of the western feminine (not feminist) movement, where women are taught by female ‘coaches’ how to tap into their ‘divine feminine.’ Many times, these feminine coaches employ cosmic and spiritual terms in describing women’s powers to their followers, and teach them how to key into these complex, celestial powers they possess as women which intrinsically make them more attuned to the earth than a man.
Men are often imagined in this artificial world as brawny, one-dimensional, bone-heads who move around without a spiritual depth.
Phew!
Without doubt, I know that this culture of women pedestalising their own gender is a trauma response, a pushback response against the society’s default of de-emphasising women’s roles and dismissing conception and motherhood as just another basic biological function.
So, in return, women feel compelled to elevate/ venerate their identities, and mysticise their birthing capacity, as though we are co-sovereign creators with God in the making of humanity.
In some way, yes, we are co-partners with God in furthering the human race. But no more than men are.
Conception will not happen without an egg and a womb. But it'll also not happen without a sperm.
In the end, it's obvious where this approach would lead. The goal of equality agitations shouldn't be to dethrone one aspect of humanity and enthrone the other. The goal should be the total dismantling of all forms of oppressive and irrational inequities.
Any obsequious elevation of one's role over the other would still produce an imperfect society.
The second point Chimamanda raised in that clip was the deification of motherhood, which begs the question: Is motherhood the pinnacle of womanhood? Is motherhood the essence of being a woman?
The answer is simple. This reductionist view of women is nothing short of banal. If we’ve already established that both men and women contribute equally to conception and the propagation of humankind, then it is a curious thing that we turn around and question a woman’s existence outside of her ability to procreate.
Are men similarly defined by their ability to reproduce after their kind? Does the value of a man’s identity come into question if his role as ‘biological father’ isn’t the focus?
If we have no challenge believing that asides his spermatic contribution to conception, a man is valuable, why do we have a challenge with esteeming women just as valuable, outside their ability to produce oocytes and birth babies?
We can balk all we want, but the reality remains that not every woman would be a mother, whether by choice or by medical reasons.
And yes I agree; enduring the herculean troubles of pregnancy, the visceral pains of labor, and the demanding journey of nursing a child, children even, are daunting tasks!
To belittle these roles or dismiss them as mere biological cycles that every woman should easily fit into, is ignorant and inhumane.
And I’ll be the first to admit that this deplorable culture is common with extreme corners of the manosphere.
In recent times, a common fad online is seeing men- people who have never and would never feel birth pangs, men who are less likely to be tasked with the selfless calling of child care- constantly feel the need to dress women down and tell them authoritatively that their contributions to preserving the human race and family lineages are nothing more than basic and rudimentary roles which come pre-installed in the vagina, so why do women inflate their importance so much on account of these?
The real and only contribution that matters to humanity, in the minds of these menfolk, is the work of providing finances, which in their distorted minds, is done exclusively by men the world over.
It’s also why modern men are insidously making a case of the 50-50 sharing formula in homes these days; because in the first place, alot of them do not really consider the domestic or maternal contributions of women as weighty or equivalent to whatever they think they do.
So naturally, a woman constantly faced with having to defend the worth of her own contributions, contributions that take more from her than financial metrics can capture, is faced with a natural choice: beat her own drum, toot her own horn, and insist that, what she brings to the table, even outside of her financial contributions, is not just equivalent, but by far out of this world.
Only that, like most human responses given in a fit of rage, the final expression is problematic, and in this case, exclusionary.
There is no single and ideal way to present as a woman, outside of the context of scriptures, if you may. When most people think of the scriptural pattern for a woman, what readily comes to mind is the woman described in Proverbs 31, a scripture notorious for its titular character, but whose verses not alot have read.
Yet, a more thorough examination of the scriptures from Genesis till Revelations would show that God used, interacted and engaged different kinds of women, different by backgrounds, marital status, virtues, backstories, origins and temperaments.
These women were relevant to the story God was telling in their times, not singularly because they were mothers, but often because there was something about them that attracted God to them.
So, while it is correct that women contribute infinitely to families and their societies by their maternal roles, motherhood is not the exhaustive definition of womanhood.
A woman is valuable in and of herself, simply because she is a human being, and every right attendant to individuals in a civilised society, applies to her.
The pinnacle of women’s identity is not motherhood.
While her children and family might be integral to her life, they are not the source of her meaning. Quite simply, any definition of identity anchored on another party apart from the giver of life Himself, and the one who lives the life (the woman), is problematic to me, especially if the same is not equally required of men.
This is why pedestalising women in their roles as mothers is nonsensical to me.
And while it must be very tempting for women who are mothers, to seek to enjoy the societal prestige that comes with having their own families, every woman must understand how precarious that is. If the society you exist in only considers you worthy of respect because of something or someone you have outside of your own self, then clearly you’re not enough.
