“I’m trying to hold back my emotions, but I can feel my face contorting. That strange heat moving to my cheeks. I always thought it was magic moving through me, but now I know it to be rage.”
― Kim Liggett
The Badge
When pinned on someone, this is a heavy badge to wear, especially when one knows that the title does not fit them. The badge is clearly not one of honour and I do not wish it on my worst of enemies. But worn it must. For you, I shall let you make the choice on your own volition but will attempt to lay the facts bare as I understand them.
In wearing the badge, I do understand the questionable nature of stating that men are misogynistic. The argument may be deemed unsound if we look at the credibility of the sample survey. I mean in a world population of 7.8 billion people, viewing 50.4% of them through the same dark lens could raise an issue. Especially, how the conclusion was arrived at.
False Perfection
Let me attempt to explain. Have you ever come into the presence of perfection? This person, I mean this person is just right. Then you notice that their clothing has the tiniest ink-blot, or there’s a scar on the back of their head, or one of their shoe-lace is untied, or when they passed by you there was an uncomfortable whiff in the air, or they didn’t smile back at you when you did. Now before this point, everything was “perfect”, everything else but that one thing. And for that one thing, the house of cards came tumbling down… the person didn’t deserve a second look, not a hallo, or another smile. How sad, maybe they were the one… We shall never know.
This is what happens when one arrives at a conclusion without considering all the relevant information. Now please allow me to insist that I am not trying to justify a situation. I am just stating that it would be proper to consider a body of information before forming an opinion, one with finality.
Stinging Truths
Initially, I had implied that viewing 3.9 billion men through the same dark lens was unfair. Isn’t the blemish just a small part of the whole and therefore condemning the whole would be a wee bit too excessive? But then again, is it? Look at the statistics. If it’s violence against women, or the economic gender gap, or education gender gap and so on, the scales are unfairly uneven towards women. They are so uneven that the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 stated that.
“None of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children. That’s the sobering finding of the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, which reveals that gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years.”
In a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report in 2015, it was found that $12 trillion (the combined GDP of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom) could be added to global GDP by 2025. How you might ask? By advancing women’s equality. Don’t just talk the talk, walk it as well. Walk it by ensuring that the public, private and social sectors act and work together to close the gender gaps in work and society.
Pretty straightforward isn’t it?
I thought so too… to the extent that the same report, stated that companies that were gender and ethnically diverse outperformed their peers. Therefore, let’s look at this from a purely business perspective. The more women there are in positions of power and influence, the better for EVERYONE. And not just positions of power and influence, but the more women work, the more economies grow.
The Scraps Table
So, why is it not happening?
I mean there it is, in black and white, bare for all to see and with the numbers to back it up. But women are still eating from the scraps table. According to a UN report, “The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics”, below 50% of working-age women are in the labour market. In the past 25 years, this figure has barely changed. The report also states that women held only 28% of managerial positions globally in 2019. The figure has barely changed since 1995 – a whole 14 years. In 2020, only 18% of enterprises sampled had a female CEO. When it comes to the Fortune 500 corporations, only 7.4% or 37 CEOs were women (out of 500 companies).
In politics, women representation in parliament has doubled globally. But it has still not crossed the 25% barrier in 2020. For cabinet positions, the number has quadrupled over the last 25 years, yet remains well below the parity of 22%. In the Kenyan parliament, the two-thirds gender rule has still not been passed to an extent where the outgoing Chief Justice wrote to the President requesting him to dissolve parliament for not passing the bill into law. When it comes to women representation, Rwanda leads regionally and globally with 61%, Tanzania and Burundi 36%, Uganda 34%, South Sudan 28.5% and Kenya lags behind at 23.5%.
Therefore…
These findings cannot be nullified. Economists will tell you with equality, efficiency is not far behind. There is a direct correlation. In all instances where the gender gap from whatever angle one views it from has been bridged, the economy and society in general benefits.
So the problem then seems to be more of a social one. Our understanding, men’s understanding of who women are and their place in society from our own upbringing, personal prejudices and so on has caused us to fuck shit up! And even now, with all the information that disproves men’s thinking of women, we still want to live in the past, stuck in our way of thinking and our prejudices. It baffles me.
Women are so much more than this individual one places in a box. She could be a doctor, an engineer, a singer, an astronaut, a lawyer, a mother…but she will be seen as a woman, just woman. There was a TV interview in the 1960s, a gentleman was asked about what he has that he cherishes the most, and he answered, his horse, three dogs and his wife. The interviewer asked him to reconsider his pecking order and the man was adamant and insisted that he loves his horse very much. His wife immediately got up and walked off the stage.
The Breaking Point
Now there are good men out there, but the rot seems to have spread to all the apples in the basket – all 3.9 billion of them. Or has it? Is this the case of the “perfect” person with an ink-blot on their clothing and therefore for this reason not deserving a second look?
So, maybe by wearing this badge of dishonour, the good men, the real men will feel the pinch, the bite, the incessant tearing into their conscience to constantly work at proving to themselves and others that they are no rapist, not violent to other human beings and are not close-minded misogynistic assholes. Because, when their children look at them, they will see the respect that they as fathers show their mothers. And even if disagreements do crop up, they aren’t based on the fact that her mothers are women. Or when men speak to the barmaids, they will respect them as fellow human beings working to put food on their table and not women with an agenda to loot from the men. And each interaction between a man and a woman, I will take in its individuality and never generalized to all women simply because it happened between two individuals.
If men (forgive me for the generalization, but we made our own bed) continue along this close-minded path, only death and destruction awaits us all. Therefore, the choices men make now on how we relate to, think of and act towards women will define our humanity as we know it.
I have made the right choice. Don’t take too long to do the right thing.
…The whole world sitting on a ticking bomb
The sun may never rise again
The sun may never rise again
The sun may never rise again
The question ain’t if but when
The sea will mourn, the sky will fall
The sun may never rise again
The silent war has begun
We’re staring down a loaded gun
No refuge found no solid ground
Assuming race can’t be won
Don’t wait to say goodbye, you’re running out of time
Whatever you believe, it’s easy to see
The whole world sitting on a ticking bomb…
― Aloe Blacc
mybrokecompass 