With the advent of the Feminism and Woman's Rights movements, old gender norms and stereotypes began to fall by the wayside as women asserted themselves in what was once a formerly male-dominated world.
I currently live in an area where the English culture that I was raised in is now in the minority. The culture where a woman was seen as completely equal to a man and empowered to make her own choices in life without a man leading her around by the nose as depicted in the TV series Mad Men.
Those days were gone, or at least I thought they were before my city was inundated by what seems like cave men from a "macho" culture regressed back to a time from more than a century ago when women "knew their place."
We were raised by a single mom, and I could not imagine a man hitting this very independent woman (without having his member cut off in his sleep that is!) It seemed we had left those days behind long ago when a man had the temerity to think that he could put his hands on a female in a violent way and get away with it.
Our region started changing roughly 30 years ago with the arrival of newcomers from other nations that seemed not to have gotten the memo that women are to be respected, and not treated like a walking pinata.
Many of the women seem trapped in what can only be described as a sort of cultural Stockholm Syndrome, where they are regularly beaten by their "men" but profess their "love" for them when the police arrive.
In these cultures, the societal norms are that the women are treated as second-class citizens undeserving of the mutual respect shown by the men in the English culture that I was raised in. (you're going to see me use the word "culture" a lot in this article, as that seems to be the heartbeat of what's behind this utter lack of respect that the men have for the woman in their lives).
I've shared about how our neighbors who were from this society, shocked us when the husband started beating his wife (and their young kids when they tried to stop him), yet she refused to press charges when the police arrived.
Instead she professed her love for this beast, making us look bad in front of the police for calling them at her request.
After the second such request in as many weeks, we neighbors got together and after being admonished by the police for wasting their time, decided not to call them anymore for her. This led to the final encounter where the husband attacked his young son for trying to defend his mother leaving him unconscious on the floor, at which point his mother finally took action against their abuser.
It took seeing her child (who was still in single digits), unresponsive at the hands of the husband, in order for her to break out of the long-term trance he had her in and take action.
He'd hit the kids many times before, but had never knocked one of them out cold until now...
That's what it took to snap her out of her reverie.
Toxic Masculinity is Learned Behavior
After much inquiry, I learned that this feeling of treating women as 'live-in-maids' or possessions, was something the men picked up from watching the way their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers treated their women.
I have lost count of the times that I've heard men from other cultures actually say "that's my wife, that's my property." It shocked those of us that heard it, but even more surprising was how meekly the foreign females seemed to accept this regressive behavior from the illiterate cave-men in their lives.
You kept wanting them to break out of those shackles, but they couldn't, or wouldn't, (and it was hard at times to tell which of those was truer).
We got a little taste of that in our family when a relative began dating a man from one of those "it's macho to hit a woman" countries. We warned her at the outset that he was from a culture where the sexes were NOT seen as equal, but she was head-over-heels in love with this Neanderthal, and refused to listen to us.
Some of the males in my family ended up having to go over there after her neighbors alerted us that he was working his way up the 'violence escalation ladder' and was at the throwing things and punching-the-walls-next-to-her-head phase.
We stepped in and were like "nah bro, you might do this crap to women from YOUR country, but we're not having this done to the females in OUR family. He was "persuaded" to leave, and she was told that this would be the one and only time we'd step in and save her, and that if she ignored the warnings again, she was on her own. We were not going to continue doing this over and over again.
I'm happy to report that she ended up finding a wonderful man who treats her with respect, and we were happy to have him join our family.
I'll never forget the first time I heard about "genital cutting" or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). I was shocked when it was explained to us by an associate from Nigeria, as it sounded like something out of the medieval Dark Ages back when they were still burning witches.
FGM is where they hold a woman or young girl down and slice off a part of her female anatomy. "You have got to be kidding!" I responded. "This is still going on?" We were all astounded to hear the confirmation of this abhorrent fact.
From FGM/C in Abuja
FGM/C “involve[s] partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons,” according to the WHO. It is not a topic you hear about in everyday conversations in the politics-saturated capital. But it shadows many who have experienced the practice in their hometowns and now live in Abuja.
Culture, again...
I read accounts of the men in this country forcing this "operation" on the women against their wishes, leading to a lifetime of pain and even death.
Such "men" should have their testicles removed with a rusty blade so that they can experience something similar to what these women and girls are forced to go through. Such monsters should be stopped at the airport and have their asses shipped right back where they came from. We don't want that nonsense here. Let's hope that this barbaric practice ends soon
It points to the issue of seeing women as possessions to be owned and done with as they please, instead of as the strong, independent and sovereign human beings that they are.
They are our mothers, sisters and daughters. Our aunts and grandmothers who nurtured us and helped us grow into the fully-developed beings that we all are today.
We owe the same respect and devotion to them.
I encourage women to break free of the chains that bind you and shine like the diamond that you are.