By Shazia Majale,
NAIROBI, Kenya- We’ve all come across the term women are their own worst enemies and while it’s safe to say jealousy is the root cause of women not supporting each other, maybe we should explore deeper where the ‘ jealousy’ stems from.
The modern woman tends to believe she’s free from shackles that held down her predecessors.
She’s empowered, independent and literate. Literate or illiterate though, some factors that influence how a woman behaves are rooted in the culture she grew up in and/or her foremothers grew up in.
Say a girl who grew up in a slum is so focused on making it out of there.Some first hand experiences dictate how she behaves as an adult.
She’s aware of her surroundings’ at all times, how she dresses and her life choices. It’s next to impossible to convince such a girl to slow down in her quest for success and she’s forever judging everyone from her point of struggles while the struggles and point of view of a girl from an affluent society are different altogether.
In the same way, a girl in a community that practices child marriages has walls so high up.For this girl it’s paramount not to dress in anything ‘suggestive’ out of fear of the ‘message’ it sends out there.
For her covering up is a protective measure and anything of the contrary is attracting too much attention to oneself.
For women here, it may be frowned upon to not engage in their practices and one may be isolated for choosing not to and thus more people will practice the culture from fear of not having companionship.
For a community that engages in FGM; the fear is even worse and to be known to be publicly against it, then why not support even though you’d rather not? For some moms, they know they need to be very strict to protect their daughters because that’s all they know.
For the older generation, they believe in privacy and some ideals carried on from from that generation. To them, the younger generation is living out too loud and public in the social media.
What the current generation considers fashionable is too crass and too much skin bearing in their eyes. They’re judgmental towards anything less of what they consider ideal and often this is interpreted as hatred.
The women empowerment agenda has done so much to empower a woman but somehow forgot that therein empowerment lies prejudice.
Whatever is thought as acceptable by the standards of the society aren’t necessarily every woman’s choices.
To have more than 3 children, dress very modest, be a housewife/stay at home mom, cook for the in-laws during Christmas, etc are simply choices one might enjoy.
A good number of us enjoy privileges’ that some from humble backgrounds do not even know is possible. It’s so easy to assume everyone enjoys such privileges and judge from those perspectives and vice versa.
We are all judgmental people. Hating on people we’ve never met, talking behind our friends backs. Its also human nature to behave according to what our environments have put forward to us and while we want to brand everyone jealous, it’s easy to point fingers than look at ourselves as mirrors from which those around us learn and emulate.
Understanding that we’re all complex beings and we act differently because of who we are is a start to knowing why we can’t have the same point of views as women.
