Patriarchy is dead; men have to learn to adjust to matriarchy

I closely followed the discussions and jokes that emerged during the recently concluded Men’s Conference. The conference made me think of the import of the famous African proverb that says that whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, know that something is after its life. Indeed, men are not at ease.

To use W.B. Yeats’ words, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things have fallen apart in the men’s kingdom and now the centre cannot hold.

But this is not entirely new. This reality has been coming for a long time. In traditional African societies, women were masters of subverting patriarchy in subtle ways that left men feeling powerful while in actual fact, it was women who had the power. As a strategy, women socialised boys to forever remain dependent on women.

Esther Vallar explores this strategy in her nasty, but informative book The Manipulated Man.

FEMINIST ARGUMENTS

It is a strategy that has produced many hopelessly dependent men. She argued that feminist arguments that patriarchal structures are oppressive to women were off the mark.

Vallar’s central thesis is that all that feminists say about women’s oppression is a lie. Women have never been oppressed. In fact, they have, all along, strategised and oppressed men at every stage in their life circle.

She turns all the feminist arguments about women’s oppression upside down and concludes that women have trained men to become their slaves.

“Man is always searching for something to enslave him. It is only in slavery that he feels secure and as a rule, his choice falls on a woman as a slave owner, who exploits him in such a way that he feels safe as her slave”.

While this is a matter of conjecture, modern realities and changes have further relegated men to the periphery.

ECONOMIC DISASTERS

It is a fact that men are the primary victims of the latest economic disasters. These cataclysms have made men’s role as traditional breadwinners simply untenable.

If you listened to the arguments during the Men’s Conference, you will appreciate the fact that men are struggling to get back the lives they once had, where they were made to feel powerful while performing their duties as slaves, but that era is over.

Society has experienced what you could call a seismic shift. Both sexes have to adjust to an entirely new way of relating, working, living and even falling in love.

Instead of the men strategising on how to fit in the new dispensation, they are busy mourning and yearning for an era long dead. That is why the Men’s Conference did not generate any new knowledge.

Things started going wrong in the 1980s and 1990s with the structural adjustment programmes.

There were massive retrenchments and men had to adjust and do what were traditionally women’s roles in towns and in rural Kenya. In essence, they had to change their ways of exercising their masculinities.

CRISIS

I wish the organisers of the Men’s Conference had invited speakers who would go deeper rather than scratch the surface.

Many scholars have outlined the source of our crisis. Hanna Rosin, in her famous book The End of Men and the Rise of Women, details the social upheavals that have rendered most men hopeless in society today.

We are living in a brave new world that makes a mockery of Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “the world has always belonged to males”. Do not be cheated. The truth is that the world now belongs to women.

Both Vallar and Rosin portray man for what he has become: a pathetic creature; some kind of Sisyphus. Men have to accept their station in life. They should work, father children and be women’s slave.

A man who opts not to get married and be a woman’s slave is considered abnormal by the matriarchal society. Indeed, the man living for himself, working only for himself, sleeping where he likes, is rejected by society!

Vallar argues that when a woman says “I love you”, she simply means you are an excellent workhorse! When she says, “I don’t believe in women liberation”, she simply means I am not such a fool.

WEALTHY

I would rather let you do the work for me. More outrageous is the assertion that a woman will marry a man simply because he is wealthy. Sex is a reward that she is ready to provide.

Well, Kenyan men should take heart. These upheavals are happening to all men in the world. The recent census report says it all. Like other parts of the world, the balance of the workforce has tipped towards women.

In the US, women occupy around half of the jobs. The situation is the same in the UK. The middle class is the one that is most vulnerable. That is why a new trend is emerging now.

Men are absent in families and are increasingly absent from the workforce.

In traditional societies, men derived their advantage largely from size and strength, but the digital economy is indifferent to physical strength. Interestingly, a service and information economy rewards the qualities that cannot be easily replaced by machines.

These attributes, which include social intelligence, open communication, the ability to be focused, are not predominantly the province of men, but women.

AGGRESSIVE

In Brazil, church-based groups known as “Men of Tears” have emerged to console the growing number of men whose wives make more money than they do. In Kenya, women are openly vowing that they will mutilate the private parts of their husbands because they are of no use! This is serious.

All over the world, women behave in aggressive ways that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago. The ground has simply shifted. Men can only pretend to cling to traditional ideals of being providers, but they are far from being able to live by them.

They lost the old traditional “manliness” but they have not replaced it with any new one. They have become hopeless accessories. This is what Susan Faludi has called “ornamental masculinity”. Women have accomplished a coup d’état that has redefined our society forever. Men have to adjust to this new reality.

Kabaji is a professor of literature at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology and president of the Creative Writers Association of Kenya (C-WAK). [email protected]