Mother’s day was just the other day and the whole world was in celebration of Mothers. It is said that Mothers’ day is the most celebrated holiday. You think people buy flowers on Valentine’s day? On Mothers’ day they make way better sales. Mothers are celebrated as the cornerstone of the society. I mean, even my mother and I have our squabbles but I love that woman to death. Hence I’m always surprised at the rate at which crimes against women occur.
A hundred percent of women have been sexually harassed let alone assaulted. Think I’m exaggerating? Pause right here and ask five ladies in your vicinity of their experience. Five out of five, no?
I always say, we tend to see things around us because of our thoughts. Like the fact that my dream car is a Land Rover discovery and these days I can’t go a day without seeing at least three. You should do something with this information😉.
Back to the matter at hand. So it was the universe directing me to Kitt Kiarie’s Instagram stories. And it broke my heart at how as much as the current generation is empowered, they seem to have lost respect for their elders especially women.
“I entered the lift that had some teenage boys. They were having a conversation about a woman’s body. Describing grossly how her boobs were and how her body looked. These are young boys! I felt so uncomfortable in that lift as a woman and a mother. Is this the type of generation we are raising?”
Kitt had brought this conversation on her stories and she posed a question whose replies broke my heart because I could relate. And not only to one incident but to a number. Has our society made light of the disrespect directed to women in the form of sexual harrassment and sexual assaults? Is sexually harassing a woman a compliment to her? How did we get here?
“Kitt,watoto wa 12yrs are spanking grown women like it’s nothing and older mamas will sit and excuse it as boyish behavior and I’m wondering when did we start raising disrespectful, irresponsible males. Who is teaching boys to disrespect females at such a young age?….. We are raising a menace…” Went one reply.
“This morning on my way to work, these two men made sure that they sandwiched me as we passed each other going to the opposite direction. One goes ahead and greets me casually though I feel violated adn trapped so I respond ‘not to aggress’ hem incase he lashes out. I felt unsafe just walking down the street”
First of all, if I count the number of times I’ve had to smiled at man or a group of men as I walked down the street so as to be nice and avoid being harassed, I’d be in the billions by now. The worst case is when being nice comes to bite you in the ass when a man takes the niceties as flirting. I mean, how fucked up can a generation be that kindness is mistaken for flirtation?
I remember in June 2020 at the beginning of my fitness journey, I used to go for morning runs. On this particular Wednesday (yes! I still remember that day to the T), as I was running down the path soaking in the fresh morning air, I felt a spank and a motorcycle drive by. I was shook, scared and disoriented. At five o’clock in the morning and a man had the audacity to spank a woman on a run. With no shame!
I felt violated. My moods dropped from a hundred to negative a hundred within those few seconds. I started asking myself those question the society asks the victim so that they can justify them being attacked. ‘Did I go for a run too early?’ ‘Was my running attire too tight?’ ‘Is there something I’d have done to change what happened?’ I couldn’t believe that that had happened to me. That is how I ended my run that morning. I couldn’t go on after that. ‘What if he comes back and does even something even worse?’
It took me a while after that to fully accept that I had done nothing wrong. The shameless man who assaulted me that morning is the abuser and he chose to assault a helpless woman running down the road. Till date, when I remember that incident I always try to think of different scenarios and how I’d have gotten instant payback. ‘Should we start carrying guns to protect ourselves as women?’ That trauma is still living with me to date.
Women as being sexually harassed or assaulted not only in Kenya, Africa but in every part of the world. It sucks that we are the majority in this world but sometimes we women are our own enemies. Tawi, Kitt’s sister, said, “They teach us to hate ourselves so that when they hate us, we don’t question it.” Ever since I read that statement I started seeing the evidence on our day to day lives. It’s when a woman tells another who had been sexually assaulted that they were calling for it because of how they had dressed or because they ‘led the man on’. Like, what the hell!
It also manifests when a woman finds out the husband had been cheating and goes to the other woman ‘as a woman’. The one who wronged you is your husband but no, the society has made you believe it’s the other woman’s fault. It’s always the woman’s fault! Women are being blamed for every evil in this world even against us. If the child is doing good, they are the fathers’ kid but the moment they do something wrong they become the mothers’ kid. We often laugh at it as a joke but is it really something to laugh about?
As women, it’s high time we started fighting for ourselves. It’s not enough to just say it, we have to act! When you see a man wanking behind a woman in a bus line, call them out. Let’s be as vocal as possible. Let’s bring shame to them! Do not be the woman that says, ‘as long as it’s not happening to me’. Let’s teach our daughters to defend themselves when need be because clearly the society won’t.
I have a question for the men, how would you feel if a man spanked you unprovoked? That is how we women feel all the damn time! And for the men who will say, ‘not all of us’ or ‘now we can’t compliment women?’. You can compliment a woman’s curvy body by saying they look good without adding, ‘I want you to be my wife’ or ‘I wonder how your ass will feel on my dick’. A compliment doesn’t have an element of danger to it. Be respectful because this is not only someone’s mother, daughter or sister but because she is a human being!
In conclusion, women having been living in fear for far too long that the revolution has begun. As women we are fighting to be stronger physically as we are mentally. We are creating a community of women who are ready to literally go to war for ourselves. Just walk into any gym today and see how the girls are training. When the revolution is ripe, I hope you will be on the safe side. As a woman, I’m done living in fear!
