Though there is no official International Women’s month, we like to call March that. So far this month we have had International Women’s Day, as well as the ever transient (it does not have a fixed date, rather it is the 4th Sunday in Lent) Mothering Sunday, aka UK Mother’s Day.
So why my controversial choice of words today? Well they say it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and we all know what a female dog is called, don’t we? Today’s title is borrowed from a story I wrote for the book I am writing. It occurred to me recently that this subject actually needs talking about.
As women we are already up against a lot. I personally have lived and thrived in several societies.
In Europe as a young black woman I learned that when Dutch people told me that they were more tolerant toward foreigners than Germans, it was only if I let them objectify and sexualise me. There I learned to radiate what the French call amour propre as a shield against the demeaning attitude that came from a society who is proud to put women in shop windows for sale.
Ironically, the French were only nice to me if I agreed to be a muse or a minion, or if they could in some way feed off me, but they struggled with my intellect, my eloquence and my sense of style and self. The couldn’t bear my egalité.
In America I learned that I might not actually be black, though nor was I white, but that in any case I deserved a begrudging morsel of respect because I was a registered broker on the New York Stock Exchange, though I should not feel that this would protect me from rough treatment in that male-dominated space. There I found my big girl pants, and I put them on, never to take them off again.
In the UK I learned that smiles and handshakes more than likely meant a knife in the back if you turned around unguardedly. Less so in London than anywhere else because unlike New York, where diversity is cluttered at the bottom of the social hierarchy, London’s diversity ran through the entire spectrum, from the very bottom to the very top.
In the Caribbean I learned the value of my language, my culture and my ‘home training’. I learned the value of my dress sense and grooming, and painfully also, of the value of my experience living on large landmasses, as that juxtaposed narrowish small-mindedness that. Was also extended to those of their own who had dared to leave the island and come back with experience, knowledge and worldliness.
In Africa I learned that I was a woman and that I am to shut up and put up. In Igboland, I learned that at birth I was immediately devalued because I didn’t have a penis, therefore my father was never going to bequeath me any of his wealth or property, because my lack of testicles deemed me the chattel of another man.
The best and the absolute worst experiences have come in my interaction with groups of women. We women are always bleating about chauvinism, misogyny and the patriarchy, about equal rights and equal pay and the like…but we hold each other down and mutilate each others genitals. Yes, we regularly gang up to vilify and punish fellow women who do not comply with the quality control of the patriarchy.
Let me state emphatically that I have some wonderful sisters out there, both biological and otherwise. But experience and decades of observing life have taught me that when women come together in groups, the resulting dynamics are too often quite ugly to behold.
I was always a tomboy. As a young girl I loved athletic activities and reading, as well as exploratory forays into forests and mountains and bodies of water, basically anything that was nature. In primary school I would play with the boys during break because they did fun things like races, whereas the best you could get out of the girls was hopscotch or clapping games, and if you were really lucky, skipping. Outside of school, the girls played with dolls, and loved to dress up in princessy dresses, and do their hair. Boringggggg….I thought, and went and did physical things outside with the boys. And if I couldn’t do that, I engrossed myself in reading.
Later, my father sent me to an all girls boarding school. I did not think like a typical girl, and not naturally being a herd animal, and never being one for cliques, the only clique I was ever part of was one of six girls, for a very brief time. The other five girls, now women maintain that clique till this day.
The alumnus platform that has come from my time at that school has mostly brought to the fore and consolidated those personalities we all had as school girls, except back then we had innocence on our side, albeit already waning with puberty. Come to the present day, throw in the materialism, cynicism and bitterness that come with age and time, and you have a hotbed of malice, chicanery and jostling for positions of control or accolade. Old Girls’ Association, they call it, I believe. In reality it Is just batch of female dog-eat-dogs.
I was once convinced to join a chapter of the BPW, a nearly one hundred-year-old network of professional women that has chapters in over a hundred countries. I had thought it might be good to network and to participate in collaborations that gave back to society. Unfortunately what I found reminded me uncannily of boarding school, with petty jealousies and rivalries, and pretentious gatherings in which member addressed each other by title, rather than by name, and in which women expended more energy in trying to exceed each other’s bourgeoisie than anything else. The meetings were excruciatingly dull and pointless, lacking in imagination, dynamism or real direction. Those in power would not let the talented ones contribute their gifts to the betterment of either the group or of society, but hogged the executive positions and b*tched about each other behind each others backs.
I have also had the curious experience of observing that a family of many daughters often has the same dynamics, with the advantage that one could put some reliance on the blood-is-thicker-than-water insurance, to pre-empt, or to mitigate the worst of feminine sibling rivalry, at least in theory.
On two occasions in my life, I have had the misfortune of working at companies with mostly female employees. Quelle dommage! Where one would think women would get together and get the job done, you know, do that thing they say we do to hold society together, you find especially the lowliest of them proudly displaying their PhD credentials. Letting another woman thrive in her strength was beyond them. They just had to Pull Her Down. Or Put Her Down was the other PhD.
The thing about it is that none of them could take me on, woman to woman. When it came to a face-off, in which they were invariably being petty, or spiteful or – the big favourite – passive aggressive, the minute they found that they could not hold their own in a logical argument, they turned cold, and gave me the silent treatment. Which quite suited me, tbh, sigh.
Truly the best bitches are honed in batches. They are just common gangs of female bullies, whose alignment with each other is often a common envy, self-esteem issue toward certain other women, those who are comfortable in their skin, who happily pay the price for the life decisions they take, and who ultimately learn to thrive on the silly juvenile rancorous antics of the batches of b*tches.
In Abuja I had the misfortune of being the a member of FEAAN, the Female Artiists’ Association of Nigeria. Time and again I was deliberately kept away from opportunities, which I would find out about only after the event. I remember one year flying myself down to attend Prof Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Harmattan Workshop in Delta State, only to find all my sister-members had got themselves sponsored under the banner of FEAAN. I had not been even told about it! There were so many such incidents with FEAAN, that I finally left that particular batch of females in disgust. When they had needed me to moderate a high level round table with speakers who included the former Vice President of Spain, then I was desperately called on to represent FEAAN, without so much as a fee for the service. I showed them I was the bigger woman. I did it, and I did it damn well.
There was a similar experience during the earliest days of. Bring Back Our Girls, We would gather at Unity Fountain in Abuja, but certain women hogged the conversation in their shameless hustle for limelight. It was not so much that they were there because they really cared, really felt even a twinge of compassion for the abducted girls or their families. This was an opportunity for them to be in the media, and they would use their PhD powers on any other female who dared to try to contribute. I ask you…where are they now?
So anyway, for what. It’s worth, happy end of Women’s month. Lord knows our lives are fragmented into months, each bringing with it a particularly b*tchy week. I guess that’s our excuse, right?