John Ouma: Patriarchy encourages men to aspire to own women’s bodies

On the eve of this year’s International Women’s Day, a disturbing incident involving sexual assault happened on Wangari Maathai Road, one of the busiest roads in Nairobi.

A rowdy group of men believed to be motorbike taxi (boda boda) riders roughed up a female motorist who had allegedly hit one of them. It was an insufferably abhorrent incident that no human being should ever experience.

That said, while the mainstream media gave the story the gravity it deserved, it somewhat failed to look at the bigger picture. There are two issues here; a graphic case of sexual and, by extension, gender-based violence; and a rogue industry whose members frequently operate outside the law, mostly with impunity. The mainstream media chose to focus on the latter.

Time bomb

There is no doubt most boda boda riders in this country are reckless, ignorant of the traffic rules, violent and basically unaccountable.

We must come up with robust measures to rid this time bomb as a matter of urgency.

However, to contextualise the sexual assault incident on Wangari Maathai Road as solely a consequence of the unruly boda boda sector is to miss the whole point.

Sexual and gender-based violence takes place every day in different social spaces, including in the markets, offices, homes, and online. Everyone knows that women are disproportionately affected. It’s more of a question of historical social injustice – patriarchy – perpetrated against women than a question of policy failure.

Men treat women the way they do not because they don’t know it’s wrong or because they don’t understand that women are also human beings. Men disrespect, sexually abuse and treat women with contempt because it’s in the head, so to speak.

In the said video clip, the lady is seen screaming helplessly as shameless freaks rob her of her chastity and dignity. Kenya has more sexual perverts than the sand dunes of Sahara.

We have hypersexualised the female body and commercialised female nudity at the expense of national sanity. It’s time we encouraged women to use justified violence against men.

Justified violence

Writing in a law review article in 2016, University of Miami School of Law Prof Mary Anne Franks argued that society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men, and fewer men were willing to engage in unjustified violence against women.

In short, patriarchy encourages men to endeavour to own women’s bodies, determines what a woman can say or not say and defines what social behaviours are acceptable from a woman and which ones are not.

Egyptian feminist activist Mona Eltahawy observes in her essay, ‘When Football Goes Home’, that patriarchy enables and protects abusers. “It (patriarchy) socialises men to believe they are entitled to women’s time, attention, and bodies,” she writes.

Not long ago, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie called on all of us to become feminists. Through the now-famous Ted talk, she argued that feminism is simply the inherent notion that women are also human beings.

Condemning beastly acts of men against women alone isn’t enough. We have to sit down as men and fix ourselves. It doesn’t inspire enormous faith in humanity when men treat women as sub-humans and sexual objects.

Mr Ouma is a journalism student at the Multimedia University of Kenya; [email protected]