In many societies across the world, from the days of old, it would appear men have been at the helm of affairs. Beyond calling the shots in sensitive matters that affect the survival of the planet, more averagely speaking, it is ratio 90:10 to find a young man with lofty dreams to his female counterpart with an ambition. It appears, and disturbingly too, that in the society today, many a young woman feels entitled to what a man owns, however rich she herself is and however much she has done for herself in ways of attainments.
While I applaud women who have broken loose from the very hard shell of a retrogressive and patriarchal culture that conditions the females to demand from men vacuously what they have indeed the power to get by themselves, there are alarming numbers of women who see dependence on the male folk as their right. The average woman is more dependent than the average man on the opposite sex. More men set out to achieve their goals than women do. Why? In a social media post that went viral recently, a female posted the following “a lot of men are ready to support women’s dreams; but a lot of women don’t have dreams except iPhones, bags and shoes.”
While this post may seem demeaning to the sex, there is more truth in it than there is a lie, if at all there is anything false about it. But the question still stands: do we blame this defective chunk on the womenfolk? This goes without saying that many men would rather marry beautiful but unintelligent women without ambitions (trophy wives) because they feel rather insecure around women loaded with purpose. Intelligence in a woman is almost counted leprous and something to avoid in our society.
But a twist that distorts the narrative: most of these men are discovered to go about cheating on their dull wives with brighter women and almost beg at their concubine’s feet to fund their dreams. They find haven within the circuit of their embrace and share highly intellectual conversations over a glass of wine with twice as much ease as the lie flows in to wet their lying throat.
While these adulterous men should be whipped silly, we cannot turn a blind eye to a society that has done too little by way of encouraging the female child as it does the male to accommodate great dreams and nurture them to actuality. It is a vicious cycle. Even now, many a father would pay more in sponsoring the education of their male child than their female child, subconsciously. They consider the former more culturally important than the latter: a ghastly notion to our everlasting shame.
Therefore, these same men who would prefer an intelligent woman for companionship and moral support would constitute the greater bunch of the ones who would cut their daughters short from their full potential. And this, I think, is why we find so few women with fully realised potentials.
I believe that should the society encourage and churn out more beautiful, intelligent women, the men would have no choice than to embrace the new status quo and learn to sleep in their own beds with no excuse of infidelity on grounds of little or no intellectual feedbacks from their wives. Or altogether not wed at all, and save good women bad marriage.
Efe Ronald Chesterfield,
Author, Comedy of Disgrace.