Nigerian Patriarchy, American Patriarchy

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi) - 

America (read: The US) is a patriarchy.

Nigeria is a patriarchy.

America strongly discourages polygamy, domestic violence, spousal rape and other acts which denigrate the self-worth of the female person.

Beyond a sociological aversion for all these, America creates and maintains institutional agencies to push her cultural preferences, so that even though she remains a patriarchy, the birth of a female child is not as tantamount to a mild tragedy which must be endured and borne stoically at best, as most in Nigeria have been forced over time to see it as in our enclave.

America is a patriarchy.

Nigeria is a patriarchy.

The American legal system won't let anyone on their soil withdraw their underaged daughter and go marry her off to a man because she is a girl.

In patriarchal America.

No cultural paradigm can be foolproof as they are results and by-processes of conscious evolution of a developing species.

Patriarchy is no more evil than Matriarchy is, so it is not throwing a "patriarchy is evil" hashtag or declaration here and there that should be all a conversation on women's rights should be about, as experience shows that the rights of women can yet be protected even in a Patriarchy and can be abused in a Matriarchy on complementary bases of class inequality.

The real struggle out there is class-based, but that's a topic for another day.

The issue here is that most who mouth off about feminism in our society are totally bereft of the necessary knowledge and intellectualism a venture as lofty as transforming social consciousness and traditions sorely needs.

If all of your education is the length of a hashtag, and the greater bulk of your reading is done off the social media, you would be misled to conclude that patriarchy is the opposite of feminism and thus the sole enemy to be slain. Then you will shadowbox some and find yourself at the same point.

Taken literally, the opposite of Patriarchy is actually Matriarchy, and not Feminism. What more vigorously opposes feminism is actually Misogyny.

The enemy to be tackled therefore is misogyny and not necessarily patriarchy as most would believe.

It is no use empowering a phantom and then grumbling that the phantom has become too overwhelming for any good. All this power being attributed to the monster patriarchy is the empowering of a phantom. Patriarchy does not stop a modern woman from inheriting property, from heading parliament, from running her own business enterprise, from employing labour to run her home. Even in matriarchal systems, women were restricted from certain employments and the more physically tasking labour went to the male folk. Little wonder then that as the agrarian age gave way to the industrial age, the ones who did the back breaking work would of course have the tides turned in their favour.

Cultural systems for the most fade into benignity as time goes on, so that they are reduced to being merely more than conceptual than actual affects.

America might have more misogynists than Pakistan, but American misogynists would get away with much less than a Pakistani misogynist would if it came to perpetuating measurable harm on a female person.

Pakistan by the way has been under the rule of a woman. America never has. In modern times as this.

Is the picture getting clearer to you now, just why your social media gab-fest will keep going round in circles?

You are fighting a phantom. It will change shape and shift because that is the nature of these things, so that you are left chasing your tail, protesting or defending one hashtag after the other.