-
So I would like to start by telling you
about one of my greatest friends,
-
Okoloma.
-
Okoloma lived on my street
-
and looked after me like a big brother.
-
If I liked a boy,
I would ask Okoloma's opinion.
-
Okoloma died in the notorious
Sosoliso plane crash
-
in Nigeria in December of 2005.
-
Almost exactly seven years ago.
-
Okoloma was a person I could argue with,
laugh with and truly talk to.
-
He was also the first person
to call me a feminist.
-
I was about fourteen,
we were at his house, arguing.
-
Both of us bristling
with half bit knowledge
-
from books that we had read.
-
I don't remember what this
particular argument was about,
-
but I remember
that as I argued and argued,
-
Okoloma looked at me and said,
"You know, you're a feminist."
-
It was not a compliment.
-
(Laughter)
-
I could tell from his tone,
-
the same tone that you would use
to say something like,
-
"You're a supporter of terrorism."
-
(Laughter)
-
I did not know exactly
what this word "feminist" meant,
-
and I did not want Okoloma
to know that I did not know.
-
So I brushed it aside,
and I continued to argue.
-
And the first thing
I planned to do when I got home
-
was to look up the word
"feminist" in the dictionary.
-
Now fast forward to some years later,
-
I wrote a novel about a man
who among other things beats his wife
-
and whose story doesn't end very well.
-
While I was promoting
the novel in Nigeria,
-
a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man,
-
told me he wanted to advise me.
-
And for the Nigerians here,
-
I'm sure we're all familiar
-
with how quick our people are
to give unsolicited advice.
-
He told me that people were saying
that my novel was feminist
-
and his advice to me --
-
and he was shaking his head
sadly as he spoke --
-
was that I should never
call myself a feminist
-
because feminists
are women who are unhappy
-
because they cannot find husbands.
-
(Laughter)
-
So I decided to call myself
"a happy feminist."
-
Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me
-
that feminism was not our culture
-
and that feminism wasn't African,
-
and that I was calling myself a feminist
-
because I had been corrupted
by "Western books."
-
Which amused me,
-
because a lot of my early readings
were decidedly unfeminist.
-
I think I must have read every single
Mills & Boon romance published
-
before I was sixteen.
-
And each time I tried to read those books
-
called "the feminist classics,"
-
I'd get bored, and I really
struggled to finish them.
-
But anyway, since feminism was un-African,
-
I decided that I would now call myself
"a happy African feminist."
-
At some point I was a happy African
feminist who does not hate men
-
and who likes lip gloss
-
and who wears high heels
for herself but not for men.
-
(Laughter)
-
Of course a lot of this
was tongue-in-cheek,
-
but that word feminist is so heavy
with baggage, negative baggage.
-
You hate men, you hate bras,
-
you hate African culture,
that sort of thing.
-
Now here's a story from my childhood.
-
When I was in primary school,
-
my teacher said at the beginning of term
that she would give the class a test
-
and whoever got the highest score
would be the class monitor.
-
Now, class monitor was a big deal.
-
If you were a class monitor,
-
you got to write down
the names of noisemakers --
-
(Laughter)
-
which was having enough power of its own.
-
But my teacher would also give you
a cane to hold in your hand
-
while you walk around
and patrol the class for noisemakers.
-
Now, of course you were not
actually allowed to use the cane.
-
But it was an exciting prospect
for the nine-year-old me.
-
I very much wanted
to be the class monitor.
-
And I got the highest score on the test.
-
Then, to my surprise, my teacher said
that the monitor had to be a boy.
-
She had forgotten
to make that clear earlier
-
because she assumed it was ... obvious.
-
(Laughter)
-
A boy had the second highest
score on the test,
-
and he would be monitor.
-
Now, what was even more
interesting about this
-
is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul
-
who had no interest
in patrolling the class with the cane,
-
while I was full of ambition to do so.
-
But I was female and he was male,
-
and so he became the class monitor.
-
And I've never forgotten that incident.
-
I often make the mistake of thinking
-
that something that is obvious to me
is just as obvious to everyone else.
-
Now, take my dear friend Louis
-
for example.
-
Louis is a brilliant, progressive man,
-
and we would have conversations
and he would tell me,
-
"I don't know what you mean by things
being different or harder for women.
-
Maybe in the past, but not now."
-
And I didn't understand how Louis
could not see what seems so self-evident.
-
Then one evening, in Lagos,
Louis and I went out with friends.
-
And for people here
who are not familiar with Lagos,
-
there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture,
-
the sprinkling of energetic men
who hang around outside establishments
-
and very dramatically
"help" you park your car.
-
I was impressed
with the particular theatrics
-
of the man who found us
a parking spot that evening.
-
And so as we were leaving,
I decided to leave him a tip.
-
I opened my bag,
-
put my hand inside my bag,
-
brought out my money
that I had earned from doing my work,
-
and I gave it to the man.
-
And he, this man who was
very grateful and very happy,
-
took the money from me,
-
looked across at Louis
-
and said, "Thank you, sir!"
-
(Laughter)
-
Louis looked at me, surprised,
-
and asked, "Why is he thanking me?
I didn't give him the money."
-
Then I saw realization
dawn on Louis' face.
-
The man believed that whatever money I had
-
had ultimately come from Louis.
-
Because Louis is a man.
-
Men and women are different.
-
We have different hormones,
we have different sexual organs,
-
we have different biological abilities.
-
Women can have babies, men can't.
-
At least not yet.
-
(Laughter)
-
Men have testosterone and are
in general physically stronger than women.
-
There's slightly more women
than men in the world,
-
about 52 percent of the world's
population is female.
-
But most of the positions of power
and prestige are occupied by men.
-
The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate,
-
Wangari Maathai,
-
put it simply and well when she said:
-
"The higher you go,
the fewer women there are."
-
In the recent US elections we kept hearing
of the Lilly Ledbetter law,
-
and if we go beyond the nicely
alliterative name of that law,
-
it was really about a man and a woman
-
doing the same job,
being equally qualified,
-
and the man being paid more
because he's a man.
-
So in the literal way, men rule the world,
-
and this made sense a thousand years ago
-
because human beings lived then in a world
-
in which physical strength was
the most important attribute for survival.
-
The physically stronger person
was more likely to lead,
-
and men, in general,
are physically stronger.
-
Of course there are many exceptions.
-
(Laughter)
-
But today we live
in a vastly different world.
-
The person more likely to lead
is not the physically stronger person;
-
it is the more creative person,
the more intelligent person,
-
the more innovative person,
-
and there are no hormones
for those attributes.
-
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 had not evolved.
-
Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby
of one of the best Nigerian hotels.
-
I thought about naming the hotel,
but I thought I probably shouldn't.
-
And a guard at the entrance stopped me
and asked me annoying questions,
-
because their automatic assumption is
-
that a Nigerian female walking
into a hotel alone is a sex worker.
-
And by the way,
-
why do these hotels
focus on the ostensible supply
-
rather than the demand for sex workers?
-
In Lagos I cannot go alone
into many "reputable" bars and clubs.
-
They just don't let you in
if you're a woman alone,
-
you have to be accompanied by a man.
-
Each time I walk into
a Nigerian restaurant with a man,
-
the waiter greets the man and ignores me.
-
The waiters are products --
-
(Laughter)
-
At this some women
felt like, "Yes! I thought that!"
-
The waiters are products of a society
-
that has taught them that men
are more important than women.
-
And I know that waiters
don't intend any harm.
-
But it's one thing to know intellectually
and quite another to feel it emotionally.
-
Each time they ignore me,
I feel invisible.
-
I feel upset.
-
I want to tell them
that I am just as human as the man,
-
that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment.
-
These are little things,
-
but sometimes it's the little things
that sting the most.
-
And not long ago, I wrote an article
-
about what it means
to be young and female in Lagos,
-
and the printers told me,
-
"It was so angry."
-
Of course it was angry!
-
(Laughter)
-
I am angry.
-
Gender as it functions today
is a grave injustice.
-
We should all be angry.
-
Anger has a long history
of bringing about positive change;
-
but, in addition to being angry,
I'm also hopeful.
-
Because I believe deeply
in the ability of human beings
-
to make and remake
themselves for the better.
-
Gender matters everywhere in the world,
-
but I want to focus on Nigeria
-
and on Africa in general,
-
because it is where I know,
and because it is where my heart is.
-
And I would like today to ask
-
that we begin to dream about
and plan for a different world,
-
a fairer world,
-
a world of happier men and happier women
who are truer to themselves.
-
And this is how to start:
-
we must raise our daughters differently.
-
We must also raise our sons differently.
-
We do a great disservice to boys
on how we raise them;
-
we stifle the humanity of boys.
-
We define masculinity
in a very narrow way,
-
masculinity becomes this hard, small cage
-
and we put boys inside the cage.
-
We teach boys to be afraid of fear.
-
We teach boys to be afraid
of weakness, of vulnerability.
-
We teach them to mask their true selves,
-
because they have to be,
in Nigerian speak, "hard man!"
-
In secondary school, a boy and a girl,
both of them teenagers,
-
both of them with the same amount
of pocket money, would go out
-
and then the boy
would be expected always to pay,
-
to prove his masculinity.
-
And yet we wonder why boys are more likely
to steal money from their parents.
-
What if both boys and girls were raised
-
not to link masculinity with money?
-
What if the attitude
was not "the boy has to pay"
-
but rather "whoever has more should pay?"
-
Now, of course because
of that historical advantage,
-
it is mostly men who will have more today,
-
but if we start
raising children differently,
-
then in fifty years, in a hundred years,
-
boys will no longer have the pressure
of having to prove this masculinity.
-
But by far the worst thing we do to males,
-
by making them feel
that they have to be hard,
-
is that we leave them
with very fragile egos.
-
The more "hard man"
the man feels compelled to be,
-
the weaker his ego is.
-
And then we do a much greater
disservice to girls
-
because we raise them
to cater to the fragile egos of men.
-
We teach girls to shrink themselves,
to make themselves smaller,
-
we say to girls,
-
"You can have ambition, but not too much."
-
(Laughter)
-
"You should aim to be successful,
but not too successful,
-
otherwise you would threaten the man."
-
If you are the breadwinner
in your relationship with a man,
-
you have to pretend that you're not,
-
especially in public,
-
otherwise you will emasculate him.
-
But what if we question
the premise itself?
-
Why should a woman's success
be a threat to a man?
-
What if we decide
to simply dispose of that word,
-
and I don't think there's an English word
I dislike more than "emasculation."
-
A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me
-
if I was worried that men
would be intimidated by me.
-
I was not worried at all.
-
In fact, it had not occurred
to me to be worried
-
because a man who would
be intimidated by me
-
is exactly the kind of man
I would have no interest in.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
But still I was really struck by this.
-
Because I'm female,
I'm expected to aspire to marriage;
-
I'm expected to make my life choices
-
always keeping in mind
that marriage is the most important.
-
A marriage can be a good thing;
-
it can be a source of joy
and love and mutual support.
-
But why do we teach girls
to aspire to marriage
-
and we don't teach boys the same?
-
I know a woman
who decided to sell her house
-
because she didn't want
to intimidate a man who might marry her.
-
I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria
who, when she goes to conferences,
-
wears a wedding ring
-
because according to her,
-
she wants the other participants
in the conference to "give her respect."
-
I know young women
who are under so much pressure
-
from family, from friends,
even from work to get married
-
and they're pushed
to make terrible choices.
-
A woman at a certain age who is unmarried,
-
our society teaches her
to see it as a deep, personal failure.
-
And a man at a certain age
who is unmarried,
-
we just think he hasn't come around
to making his pick.
-
(Laughter)
-
It's easy for us to say,
-
"Oh, but women can
just say no to all of this."
-
But the reality is more difficult
and more complex.
-
We're all social beings.
-
We internalize ideas
from our socialization.
-
Even the language we use
-
in talking about marriage
and relationships illustrates this.
-
The language of marriage
is often the language of ownership
-
rather than the language of partnership.
-
We use the word "respect"
-
to mean something a woman shows a man
-
but often not something
a man shows a woman.
-
Both men and women in Nigeria will say --
-
this is an expression
I'm very amused by --
-
"I did it for peace in my marriage."
-
Now, when men say it,
-
it is usually about something
that they should not be doing anyway.
-
(Laughter)
-
Sometimes they say it to their friends,
-
it's something to say to their friends
in a kind of fondly exasperated way,
-
you know, something that ultimately
proves how masculine they are,
-
how needed, how loved.
-
"Oh, my wife said
I can't go to the club every night,
-
so for peace in my marriage,
I do it only on weekends."
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, when a woman says,
"I did it for peace in my marriage,"
-
she's usually talking
about giving up a job,
-
a dream,
-
a career.
-
We teach females that in relationships,
-
compromise is what women do.
-
We raise girls to see
each other as competitors --
-
not for jobs or for accomplishments,
which I think could be a good thing,
-
but for attention of men.
-
We teach girls that they
cannot be sexual beings
-
in the way that boys are.
-
If we have sons, we don't mind
knowing about our sons' girlfriends.
-
But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid.
-
(Laughter)
-
But of course when the time is right,
-
we expect those girls to bring back
the perfect man to be their husbands.
-
We police girls,
we praise girls for virginity,
-
but we don't praise boys for virginity,
-
and it's always made me wonder how exactly
this is supposed to work out because ...
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
I mean, the loss of virginity
is usually a process that involves ...
-
Recently a young woman
was gang raped in a university in Nigeria,
-
I think some of us know about that.
-
And the response of many young Nigerians,
both male and female,
-
was something along the lines of this:
-
"Yes, rape is wrong.
-
But what is a girl doing
in a room with four boys?"
-
Now, if we can forget
the horrible inhumanity of that response,
-
these Nigerians have been raised
to think of women as inherently guilty,
-
and have been raised
to expect so little of men
-
that the idea of men as savage beings
without any control
-
is somehow acceptable.
-
We teach girls shame.
-
"Close your legs", "Cover yourself."
-
We make them feel
as though by being born female
-
they're already guilty of something.
-
And so, girls grow up to be women
-
who cannot see they have desire.
-
They grow up to be women
who silence themselves.
-
They grow up to be women
who cannot see what they truly think,
-
and they grow up --
-
and this is the worst thing
we did to girls --
-
they grow up to be women
who have turned pretense into an art form.
-
(Applause)
-
I know a woman who hates domestic work,
-
she just hates it,
-
but she pretends that she likes it,
-
because she's been taught
that to be "good wife material"
-
she has to be --
to use that Nigerian word --
-
very "homely."
-
And then she got married,
-
and after a while her husband's family
began to complain that she had changed.
-
(Laughter)
-
Actually, she had not changed,
-
she just got tired of pretending.
-
The problem with gender,
-
is that it prescribes how we should be
-
rather than recognizing how we are.
-
Now imagine how much happier we would be,
-
how much freer to be
our true individual selves,
-
if we didn't have the weight
of gender expectations.
-
Boys and girls are
undeniably different biologically,
-
but socialization
exaggerates the differences
-
and then it becomes
a self-fulfilling process.
-
Now, take cooking for example.
-
Today women in general are more likely
to do the housework than men,
-
the cooking and cleaning.
-
But why is that?
-
Is it because women
are born with a cooking gene?
-
(Laughter)
-
Or because over years they have been
socialized to see cooking as their role?
-
Actually, I was going to say that maybe
women are born with a cooking gene,
-
until I remember that the majority
of the famous cooks in the world,
-
whom we give the fancy title of "chefs,"
-
are men.
-
I used to look up to my grandmother
-
who was a brilliant, brilliant woman,
-
and wonder how she would have been
-
if she had the same opportunities
as men when she was growing up.
-
Now today, there are
many more opportunities for women
-
than there were
during my grandmother's time
-
because of changes in policy,
changes in law,
-
all of which are very important.
-
But what matters even more
is our attitude, our mindset,
-
what we believe
and what we value about gender.
-
What if in raising children
-
we focus on ability instead of gender?
-
What if in raising children
we focus on interest instead of gender?
-
I know a family
who have a son and a daughter,
-
both of whom are brilliant at school,
-
who are wonderful, lovely children.
-
When the boy is hungry,
the parents say to the girl,
-
"Go and cook Indomie noodles
for your brother."
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, the daughter doesn't
particularly like to cook Indomie noodles,
-
but she's a girl, and so she has to.
-
Now, what if the parents,
-
from the beginning,
-
taught both the boy and the girl
to cook Indomie?
-
Cooking, by the way,
is a very useful skill for boys to have.
-
I've never thought it made sense
to leave such a crucial thing,
-
the ability to nourish oneself --
-
(Laughter)
-
in the hands of others.
-
(Applause)
-
I know a woman who has the same degree
and the same job as her husband.
-
When they get back from work,
she does most of the housework,
-
which I think is true for many marriages.
-
But what struck me about them
-
was that whenever her husband
changed the baby's diaper,
-
she said "thank you" to him.
-
Now, what if she saw this
as perfectly normal and natural
-
that he should, in fact,
care for his child?
-
(Laughter)
-
I'm trying to unlearn
many of the lessons of gender
-
that I internalized when I was growing up.
-
But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable
in the face of gender expectations.
-
The first time I taught
a writing class in graduate school
-
I was worried.
-
I wasn't worried
about the material I would teach
-
because I was well-prepared
-
and I was going to teach
what I enjoy teaching.
-
Instead, I was worried about what to wear.
-
I wanted to be taken seriously.
-
I knew that because I was female
-
I will automatically
have to prove my worth.
-
And I was worried
that if I looked too feminine,
-
I would not be taken seriously.
-
I really wanted to wear
my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt,
-
but I decided not to.
-
Instead, I wore a very serious,
-
very manly and very ugly suit.
-
(Laughter)
-
Because the sad truth is
that when it comes to appearance
-
we start off with men
as the standard, as the norm.
-
If a man is getting ready
for a business meeting,
-
he doesn't worry
about looking too masculine
-
and therefore not being taken for granted.
-
If a woman has to get ready
for business meeting,
-
she has to worry
about looking too feminine,
-
and what it says and whether or not
she will be taken seriously.
-
I wish I had not worn
that ugly suit that day.
-
I've actually banished it
from my closet, by the way.
-
Had I then the confidence
that I have now to be myself,
-
my students would have benefited
even more from my teaching,
-
because I would have been more comfortable
-
and more fully and more truly myself.
-
I have chosen to no longer
be apologetic for my femaleness
-
and for my femininity.
-
(Applause)
-
And I want to be respected
in all of my femaleness
-
because I deserve to be.
-
Gender is not an easy
conversation to have.
-
For both men and women,
-
to bring up gender, sometimes
encounters almost immediate resistance.
-
I can imagine some people here
are actually thinking,
-
"Women, true to selves?"
-
Some of the men here might be thinking,
-
"OK, all of this is interesting,
-
but I don't think like that."
-
And that is part of the problem.
-
That many men do not
actively think about gender
-
or notice gender
-
is part of the problem of gender.
-
That many men, say, like my friend Louis,
-
that everything is fine now.
-
And that many men do nothing to change it.
-
If you are a man and you walk
into a restaurant with a woman
-
and the waiter greets only you,
-
does it occur to you to ask the waiter,
-
"Why haven't you greeted her?"
-
Because gender can be --
-
(Laughter)
-
Actually, we may repose
part of a longer version of this talk.
-
So, because gender can be
a very uncomfortable conversation to have,
-
there are very easy ways to close it,
to close the conversation.
-
So some people will bring up
evolutionary biology and apes,
-
how, you know, female apes
bow down to male apes
-
and that sort of thing.
-
But the point is we're not apes.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
Apes also live on trees
and have earth worms for breakfast
-
but we don't.
-
Some people will say,
"Well, poor men also have a hard time."
-
And this is true.
-
But that is not what this --
-
(Laughter)
-
But this is not
what this conversation is about.
-
Gender and class
are different forms of oppression.
-
I actually learned quite a bit
about systems of oppression
-
and how they can be blind to one another
-
by talking to black men.
-
I was once talking
to a black man about gender
-
and he said to me,
-
"Why do you have to say
'my experience as a woman'?
-
Why can't it be
-
'your experience as a human being'?"
-
Now, this was the same man
-
who would often talk
about his experience as a black man.
-
Gender matters.
-
Men and women
experience the world differently.
-
Gender colors the way
we experience the world.
-
But we can change that.
-
Some people will say,
-
"Oh, but women have the real power,
-
bottom power."
-
And for non-Nigerians,
bottom power is an expression which --
-
I suppose means something like a woman
-
who uses her sexuality
to get favors from men.
-
But bottom power is not power at all.
-
Bottom power means that a woman
-
simply has a good root to tap into,
from time to time --
-
somebody else's power.
-
And then, of course, we have to wonder
-
what happens when
that somebody else is in a bad mood,
-
or sick,
-
or impotent.
-
(Laughter)
-
Some people will say that a woman
being subordinate to a man is our culture.
-
But culture is constantly changing.
-
I have beautiful twin nieces
who are fifteen and live in Lagos.
-
If they had been born a hundred years ago
-
they would have been
taken away and killed.
-
Because it was our culture,
it was our culture to kill twins.
-
So what is the point of culture?
-
I mean there's the decorative,
-
the dancing ...
-
but also, culture really is about
preservation and continuity of a people.
-
In my family,
-
I am the child who is most interested
in the story of who we are,
-
in our traditions,
-
in the knowledge about ancestral lands.
-
My brothers are not as interested as I am.
-
But I cannot participate,
-
I cannot go to their meetings,
-
I cannot have a say.
-
Because I'm female.
-
Culture does not make people,
-
people make culture.
-
So if it is in fact true --
-
(Applause)
-
So if it is in fact true
-
that the full humanity of women
is not our culture,
-
then we must make it our culture.
-
I think very often
of my dear friend Okoloma.
-
May he and all the others
who passed away in that Sosoliso crash
-
continue to rest in peace.
-
He will always be remembered
by those of us who loved him.
-
And he was right that day many years ago
when he called me a feminist.
-
I am a feminist.
-
And when I looked up the word
in the dictionary that day,
-
this is what it said:
-
"Feminist, a person
who believes in the social, political
-
and economic equality of the sexes.
-
My great grandmother,
from the stories I've heard,
-
was a feminist.
-
She ran away from the house of the man
she did not want to marry
-
and ended up marrying
the man of her choice.
-
She refused, she protested, she spoke up
-
whenever she felt she was being deprived
of access, of land, that sort of thing.
-
My great grandmother
did not know that word "feminist,"
-
but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one.
-
More of us should reclaim that word.
-
My own definition of feminist is:
-
"A feminist is a man or a woman
-
who says --
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
A feminist is a man or a woman who says,
-
"Yes, there's a problem
with gender as it is today
-
and we must fix it.
-
We must do better."
-
The best feminist I know
-
is my brother Kene.
-
He's also a kind,
good-looking, lovely man,
-
and he's very masculine.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)