Masculinity
and femininity are topics that are discussed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
talk. A particular point that stood out to me was when she said that “we do a
great disservice to boys in how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys.”
Vulnerability, weakness, she says, are things that boys are taught to fear. She
says if we start raising our boys differently, in 50 or 100 years we will begin
to see the inequality between men and women begin to disappear. “We teach girls
to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” Adichie says. This is true
in two ways- girls are taught to be meek and body size is directly related to
femininity. A girl who is not petite and frail is perceived as non-feminine and
a girl that speaks out is also regarded as non-feminine. She also talks about how
reality is more complex than just not participating in the oppression. Sure,
you can try to avoid sexism but its effects will still dominate your life.
“The problem
of gender is it prescribes how we should be rather than how we are,” Adichie
says. Whatever women do, cooking, sewing, men master and are given the title of
chef or designer. Still, a boy is shunned for practicing these activities
growing up. The gender dichotomy is a double-edged sword, and though girls can
play sports without reprimand (as long as they are feminine sports), boys are
not allowed under any circumstance to pursue things perceived as “girly.” Only
when boys display some glimmer of talent or passion, they are allowed to pursue
their true wishes. Similarly, girls have to worry about looking too feminine
and not being taken seriously. They have to be true to themselves, but also not
too masculine, but not too mannish.
Adichie says “a man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be
creative, to be innovative. We have evolved but it seems to me that our ideas
of gender have not evolved.” She talks about how as a society, our qualifiers
for positions of power have shifted but somehow we haven’t been able to realize
that they apply to both women and men. Somewhere along the lines, something
went wrong. The plight of inequality often goes unnoticed or is invisible
altogether, with only reactions to the inequality showing rather than the
inequality itself. As Adichie says,“these are just little things but sometimes it’s the little
things that sting the most."
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