All I wanted was a math-set too. I wanted to use the protractor to draw curves and draw triangles with the sets square. When I was bored, I’d take out either the divider or the compass and punch holes into the eraser. That is all I wanted. I wonder why it is so difficult to get old people to understand the simple needs of a toddler. Better yet, I wonder why it is so impossible to see the wisdom of the elderly until you are older. I wasn’t using those instruments right anytime I laid my infant hands on them. But because my brothers had them, I felt I needed one too. The need to have what the other person has even though you don’t need it; It is called covetousness, right? My mind played back this episode from my childhood because of a picture I saw on twitter some weeks back. In the picture was a guy and a girl both top-naked and the caption suggested that if the guy’s ‘bare-chestedness’ doesn’t offend you, neither should that of the girl. Well well well, this is where we are right now with our fight for gender equality eh? You want to be bare-chested in public merely because men can do that? – Merely because men can do that? Excuse me, what is the point here? In my childhood, I wanted the math-set that my brothers got, merely because they had it. I admit that was rather childish. So seeing grown women literally making childish demands such as this is rather disturbing. You want to unstrap the bra and let those ladies loose and walk around eh? Well go on right ahead. If that will salt your soup, then by all means, knock yourself out. You see, this is everything that is wrong with gender equality; as I have already stated here, let’s fight for equity instead. Where the society gives to each what they deserve. Who knows, probably at the end of the fight, we might realize that women deserve more privileges than men (certainly they do). But this won’t happen if our dear sisters are merely fighting for everything men have. So you want to grow beards and shave too? Do you really feel nature is unfair to you because you don’t have broader shoulders and an Adam’s apple? Just realize that we are different but equal in terms of worth.

The Apostle Peter puts it in a better way  ‘… showing honor to the woman as the WEAKER vessel, since they are HEIRS with you of the grace of life…’. Let’s learn a bit of primitive fisherman wisdom here. If you look closely, you would realize that the bases for showing women honor as the weaker vessel is that we are heirs together with them. In the sense that, we have equal inheritance with women in Christ, and on that level we are equal. But physically, women are generally weaker than men. This isn’t demeaning, but a glaring fact. The bible didn’t say that women are intellectually, spiritually or economically weaker than men. It stated a fact that we all know: men are physically stronger than women. Hence, we men must honor women.  Therefore, where is the wisdom in merely wanting to have anything that a man has? You don’t see men pained because they don’t have menstrual cramps? Besides not everything the society has unduly given to men is good. I am even shocked some of these things are desirable to some women. I know it is all a ploy to prove a point, but that isn’t necessary.

I read a very interesting post recently on the ghanafeminism.wordpress.com blog (here it is). I tell you the truth; I haven’t had a goodnight’s sleep since then. The post was about a young lady who was in the news recently for all the bad reasons. She apparently rose to prominence because she slept with a few famous men and is currently dating a very rich man. All of this is alleged. Now, the post began and even well into the middle with some sound arguments. But getting to the end the writer declared boldly that she found nothing wrong with prostitution. Oh of course I washed my face with detol and read that paragraph again. This is something I wouldn’t be shocked to see in a ghanapatriarchy.wordpress.com blog post. In fact, I am sure it would be one of the main aims of the blokes behind such a blog: to glamorize prostitution, compelling as many young ladies to go into it as possible. After all, prostitution is to the benefit of men because we gain more. I heard one could sleep with a prostitute for as low as any amount under 5gh cedis *it is purely coincidental that I know this*. Therefore I conclude that men gain more from prostitution than the women involved. So when I saw that portion of the post I was in shock. These are her exact words:

‘Nevertheless, prostitution is not bad. Women have the right to control our bodies and if we see it  fit to exchange sexual services for monetary compensation in a safe manner it is our prerogative’

It will interest you to know that she stated early on in the post that a woman selling her body doesn’t amount to objectification. Excuse me again, if this isn’t objectification then what is? You mean you don’t think prostitution is objectification? Ah? I am so lost eh! O and this part is my personal favorite, ‘The ability for women to tap into the erotic and utilize it to navigate the world as we see it’.  ‘The ability to tap into the erotic…’ ha! She describes this heinous act with such beautiful language. Never would it have crossed my mind that a woman somewhere would support the idea of prostitution. You see why some men do not want to have anything to do with feminism? This point stated by our dear friend above goes a long way to justify to some extent the point that women are their own enemies (not all though). Prostitution should be treated as a human rights issue because there are pimps in the background eating off these poor girls. Do you even know the psychological trauma and physical pain their customers subject them to? The story is told of a prostitute who got so bruised from the rough beastly sex she had with her partners. She was advised – obviously by her colleagues – to put camphor in a bucket of hot steaming water. After this, she squatted over the bucket naked, for the steam to have direct contact with her nether regions. She stood up that day from the bucket with a numb organ: numb enough to insulate her from the pains of the trade. This is the kind of ordeal some women go through and some other women think it is cool to prostitute merely because society seems to have given men some level of sexual freedom? Wow! This is even deeper than I thought. You really think having freedom over your own body means sleeping around for money? See, the very moment you attain freedom and move on to engage yourself in barbaric activities, please know that you are a greater slave after freedom than before it.

Anyway, I am a Christian. In Christianity sexual immorality isn’t acceptable in one sex and unacceptable in another. The standards are high and the same for everybody. Jesus said by merely fantasizing about sleeping with a woman, I have already committed the sin. So if you want sexual freedom because society seems to have given it to men, dear feminist, you are lost. The fact that society turns a blind eye to the sexually immoral acts of men is the cause of many of society’s problems.  Let’s fight for what we deserve and not what somebody else seems to have. Be content with crayons, the math-set might be detrimental to you.

I recently discovered the importance of movies produced in the Kumawood movie industry in my life. Those films were created purely to make my journey from Accra to Kumasi seem shorter. Last week on my way to Kumasi, we watched a 3-part movie starring ‘Lil Win’. Goodness me, the supposed 4 and a half hour journey felt like a jolly ride through town on a holiday. One other outstanding feature of Kumawood movies that I like is the fact that  they are highly didactic: so pregnant with moral lessons. I remember watching one in which Agya Koo was a co-tenant with a lady in a compound house. He kept pestering the young lady with his ‘lust’ overtures. Clearly the lady had had enough and couldn’t take his lustful proposals anymore so she confronted him and made it clear that it was wrong to even fantasize about having sex with another person. In his defense, Agya Koo gladly confessed that then he had probably had a baby with the lady already. This was obviously because he must have visualized having sex with her on countless occasions.  I found his reply extremely funny but it carries so much information concerning male-sexuality. Men are visual beings. We are moved by sight. Nevertheless, what we see isn’t a good enough reason to be used to defend our actions. Usually when this issue comes up, we choose to lay the blame on external factors (eg. skimpy dresses worn by ladies). The external factors have an influence on you but what pushes the resultant action is within you. As I have already stated in  my blog post ‘Depraved Hearts Caged in Ribs 2‘ click here, those external factors are like billboards in front of a restaurant, displaying sumptuous meals. Therefore if anybody should break into a restaurant to steal food and blame it on the food on the billboard, he is giving a very silly excuse. The problem isn’t the billboard, the problem is your lack of self-control. When you see a very compelling advertisement and you happen to be very hungry, what you do is to control your hunger. Or if you can, you pay the price and wait patiently till the meal is ready for consumption.

My focus here isn’t what you saw, but rather what happens between the moment you spotted that lady and the resultant action: the time gap between those two events. That is the cause of sexual immorality in most men. I strongly believe that the eyesight of men is second to that of eagles in terms of sharpness. Eagles are able to see small rodents from beyond the clouds but the eyes of men are laser-sharp and can see through clothes. We can literally strip you naked with our eyes. It is all in the mind. Our imagination runs wild the very moment there is a cleft in your dressing that exposes the minutest detail of your naked body. That is all we need to have a full picture.

Jesus Christ said that anybody who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her. My dear brothers, how many babies have you made in your life and with how many women? Agya Koo was right bro. Some of us are probably well into parenting, if his analogy is applied here. I believe Jesus was making it clear to us how important our imagination is: the fact that imagining a thing is recorded as committing it. We need to win the battle in our minds. That is the birth place of all the sexual immorality we hear about. If we are able to dispel those episodes of unbelievable imaginative sex with whomever we deem appropriate at that moment, we would really make headway in keeping our head above water so far as sexual immorality is concerned. Undoubtedly, Solomon is one of the wisest men to walk the face of the earth. He said ‘… he who rules his spirit is mightier than he who takes a city’. This is amazing. It means self-control basically makes you more than a marvel superhero. It makes you mightier than a strongman who is able to take a whole city all by himself. We really need more men striving to be strong men per the deduction made from Solomon’s quote. To have full control over your sexuality as a man is one heck of a herculean task. The mighty have fallen. The irony here is that, Solomon himself, who even made such a profound statement couldn’t control his sexual hunger. He married 700 women (plus 300 concubines) from tribes God had warned him against. They introduced him to their gods and he turned away from God and worshiped their gods. Yes, the women were instrumental in his downfall but his hunger gave him the impetus to oblige.

When I say ‘Zip it’ I am not referring to the fly in front of your trousers. That is way too easy. I am referring to your mental fly. I want you to realize that just as it is embarrassing for your fly to be open in public, so it is for you to have an untamed sexual appetite. Zip it! Take full control of yourself mentally and sexually. For greater is he that rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

References: Proverbs 16: 32 , 1Kings 11.

These are just spiders anyway; hence they do not have to grapple with gender issues like humans. If this were to happen amongst humans, it would be a media sensation. Heads would roll and laws would spring up involuntarily from the depths of legal archives to put the perpetrators away for good. Maybe we would also start our own movement. We might just call it MALELISM: a movement for the brothers. But no, in the real world, it is the other way round. Women are being treated badly. Sometimes it is not even the actions against women that worry me the most, it is the sort of condescending opinions and prejudices people hold. Those really appall me because it means deeply seated within their hearts are these perceptions which will inform every action in their dealings with women. This gave rise to Feminism. A worthy cause; and like all worthy causes, it will not stand or be successful without the active participation of both sexes. I repeat, Feminism will not stand without the active participation of both sexes; because patriarchy wouldn’t have been this successful without the active involvement of both sexes. Over the years the image of the movement has been tainted. Most men would want to have nothing to do with it or to be associated with it. It may be due to several other reasons, but I believe that paramount amongst those reasons is the attitude of feminists. The belligerence and the venom in their speech totally deter men from participating in anything related to Feminism. How do you fight negativity with negativity?

Gender equality is a myth. I wonder why I never thought about it until recently. If this remains at the core of Feminism, I would like to state emphatically that it will end up empowering men rather than women. What is the yardstick that indicates equality with men; same number of men and women in parliament? To be a man is not that pleasant anyway so I wonder why equality with men seems to be deemed so highly. Women must fight for what is theirs. We have no idea what a fair society looks like: a fair society being one that gives what women deserve to them. We may never see it if the goal of our women is to have what we have as men and neglect what is due them. For all you know, what is due women could possibly outweigh that which society seems to have given to men. Society is made up of male and female members. I see society as a giant 2-pieced jig-saw puzzle. What people do not realize is that the call for Gender Equality is like shaping the edges of the two pieces of the puzzle the same way – making them identical pieces. That seems like a fair action, but it is highly unreasonable (that is, if piecing the pieces together is our motive). When you shape the edges the same way, they won’t fit. But this is what Gender Equality is seeking to achieve. How I wish women would understand their place and value. How I wish they would realize how blessed they are and embrace their uniqueness. Men and women are equal and different. The right and left arms belong to one individual but they are different because of their location. This is it. So for the left arm to start a movement to achieve equality with the right is rather absurd, because it is already an arm too. Nevertheless, if the left realizes that it is being treated badly, it has every right to speak out and with the assistance of the right hand justice will be served. I am not the only one who holds this assertion. The bible also makes it clear that women and men are both equal and different. In 1Peter 3:7, it says:

‘Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as THE WEAKER VESSEL, SINCE THEY ARE HEIRS WITH YOU of the grace of life…’

The verse above indicates the difference between men and women by the phrase ‘…the weaker vessel’. Simply put, compared to men, women are weaker (physically) and must be treated as such. The verse states the equality of both sexes by saying ‘… since they are heirs with you…’. Meaning, in the sight of God we are equal. Paul put it better when he said ‘in Christ there is neither MALE nor FEMALE’. From this we can infer that God looks down and sees a sexless humanity. No wait, God looks down and sees a sexless humanity, except that a section is advocating equality that is already glaring in the sight of God. Gender Equity (it might not make semantic sense) would rather be appropriate. Where we understand our sameness and uniqueness hence we give each person his or her due. Especially the basics of this life: choices, good education, health, respect, fair representation at gatherings etc.

We teach little girls to be better than their male counterparts. We hide this message in the cliché ‘what a man can do a woman do better’. It is unfortunate that there are people who hold this assertion. Who said being better than the men around you is equal to success? Right away we are implying that little girls would have to fight to do better than their male counterparts in order to feel fulfilled. What if she is surrounded by poor performing male counterparts? Does she attain success in life by merely being better than them? This is the height of insecurity. We should let little girls know that being good is good enough. They need not feel like they are in a competition with boys. We should let them know the only competition is their previous performance; hence they must move heaven and earth to beat that. We live in a right-handed society. Our aim is to make it ambidextrous. Ambidexterity will not be achieved by demeaning the right hand; it can only be achieved by empowering the left hand to be strong and improve. Right-handed people can get away with things like writing and eating but when it comes to bathing or cleaning themselves they cannot do it properly without the aid of the left hand. Similarly, when it comes to washing or ridding our society of irksome patriarchy, we need both hands to play a major role. How do these two come to work together in harmony when the left is hurling abusive words in the direction of the right?

I believe feminism is a worthy cause that men need to play an active role in. Gender Equality on the other hand stems from insecurity. There is no need to be equal when you are uniquely designed to fit together. Society is a giant 2-pieced jig-saw puzzle; society is supposed to be ambidextrous; one hand down-playing the importance of the other will do it no good.

I had a rude awakening concerning this particular topic a few weeks ago. I chanced upon a retweet on my timeline and followed up to  a  lady’s timeline on twitter. Oh boy! I spent two hours that morning, on my ride to work, just soaking in every single story told on her  timeline. I believe the conversation began because of her reaction to another person’s tweet which suggested that women who wear skimpy dresses invite rape to themselves. For some reasons I would like to withhold the lady’s twitter handle. She went on to ask the ladies on her timeline, who had been sexually abused before, to tweet how it happened and what they wore on that day. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Most of them were almost dressed like nuns when it happened. What laid a heavier weight on my heart that day was the fact that some of them began by saying ‘well, the first time was …’ meaning they had been raped more than once in their lifetime. That, I couldn’t handle. There was one who had been raped just a few weeks before the said conversation on twitter. Now, this is not a post that will promote indecent dressing in women – totally far from that. This post is meant to extend the issue of sexual abuse to an area where most people have turned a blind eye on. I just want to draw our attention to the fact that there is a force within us, that is stronger than any external factor that one may attribute to the cause of rape. The bible calls it the ‘flesh’. Not literally the human flesh, (the meat and the blood). No, it refers more emphatically to our emotions, our thoughts, our desires, and many other things that bring us joy in our physical beings.

In recent times, one of my favorite gospel rap songs has been ‘Temptations’ BY 116 CLIQUE. Particularly because I can really relate with the theme of the song. And my favorite verse in that song was that of Derek Minor. He starts by saying this :

 ‘Lord, can I be real with you? /

They say that women want attention, and that’s the real issue /

And if they only wore dresses just a little bit longer/

Then the FLESH that I’ve been feeding, wouldn’t burn like a sauna/

WAIT!! Is that the reason why your brain isn’t changed, and you are home by yourself in front of Computer screens? /

Or, is that the REASON WHY SICK MEN PREY ON /

LITTLE GIRLS, WHO ARE IN SCHOOL STILL PLAYING WITH CRAYONS?’

Now this totally captures what I have been trying to communicate with this present post and the previous one. You can’t blame your addiction to pornography on the way women dress. Neither can you blame the fact that some fathers molest their own babies because they saw a woman in town wear a skimpy dress. Maybe, and just maybe, it could be that those men were attracted by the baby’s diapers. Whatever the case is, I don’t know. But I doubt the cause is the mini-skirt they saw barely clothing a woman in town. You see, what an indecently dressed woman does to a man is, she whets his appetite for sex that very instant. And if the man isn’t one who has self-control, then he is left with the options of either convincing the woman in question or applying force. If you would permit me to use the food analogy again, I would say the hunger for sex can be likened to hunger for food and indecently dressed women could be likened to a very tempting food advertisement. If someone breaks into a restaurant and steals food and his only justification is that, the advertisement on the billboard was too tempting, will you deem it a wise reason? I believe the most sensible advice worth giving to such a person, is that he needs to tame his hungers. Same applies to sexuality in men. You should know, that you cannot  have the food because it is displayed on the billboard *if you know what I mean*. You should deal with the hunger inside you and don’t think by uprooting those billboards, you have dealt with the issue at hand. Deal with what’s inside you, when that is well dealt with, you will realize it becomes rather difficult to notice those enticing and tempting features of women who proudly expose it.

To the ladies, dress like you want to be addressed. You don’t judge a book by its cover alright, but the cover of a book sure tells a lot about its content. When I pick a book and see a math equation written on it, it is wrong to assume that the book is based only on that equation. What is even more wrong and absurd is to assume that the book is a history book. To the brothers, I feel your pain, but take pains in putting the flesh under subjection. The bible says walk in the spirit so that you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. So please, go on your knees and pray for strength, read about Jesus, fast etc. It is worth it.