NEXT TURN: Turning women into commodities

Have you ever noticed the morbid excitement on the faces of men onlookers whenever two young women are fighting and stripping themselves naked in public? The brightened eyes, the uncontrolled hyperactivity and shameless grin stretching from molar to molar. It might well have been the same morbid excitement that prompted PM News to carry on its news page, a fortnight ago, the nude picture of a lady arrested by the Lagos State task force on environmental sanitation.

Since mid October when PM News gave that insider report of nude clubs dotting the state capital Ikeja, government officials and journalists have feasted on the news worthiness of strip dancers.

However, I wonder whether the sanitation exercise had less to do with morality than with payment of taxes, and other unexplained motives of government officials. I reckon that this clampdown on nude clubs has more subterranean cravings than meet the eyes.

According to the news reports, officials were busy asking the arrested nude ladies to pose for some shots! I find this ridiculous and an abuse of the rights of these young women. It is a shameless exercise in commodification - an instance of turning these ladies into commodities. True, for the sake of public decency, running and even patronising nude clubs may be questionable moral acts; after all, we are quick to revert to our traditional values and religious doctrines as standards for matters of right and wrong, good and bad, character and conduct.

But also immoral is the blatant disregard for the person as demonstrated by the public humiliation of helpless nude women. Strip dancers, who are earning a living, are not more dishonourable than a government official who consciously pillages state funds and whose deliberate political action or inaction leads to rights abuse, poverty and even death.

But beyond the issue of taxes and state legislation, what is writ large by all this is the display of male supremacist tendencies, which civilisation has been too slow to eradicate in our society.

We may have as many unemployed ladies as young men, but I doubt if a similar business where young men would be employed in some nefarious activity would be owned and organized by women.

That is the way it has always been.

As a matter of fact, scholars have argued that civilisation thrives on the commodification of the woman. One scholar who has fascinated me with his unpopular views about culture is the American cultural anthropologist,

Marvin Harris. In his Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures, Harris suggests that the chief factor responsible for the male supremacist tendency, which is the forerunner of gender discrimination, is warfare, which he describes as the primitive cultural activity of the management of public space. He writes: “Male supremacist institutions arose as a by-product of warfare, of the male monopoly over weapons, and of the use of sex for the nurturance of aggressive male personalities”.

That atavistic craving for public space and monopoly of the instruments of warfare is everywhere present in today’s world. Today’s wars are not intertribal or internecine skirmishes; they are battles over control of peoples’ economic relationships, and their domestic space.

Thus, the woman is fashioned by popular culture to be a marketer for banks and companies, and to use her “God-given assets” to rake in money. Where power is visible, as in traditional religions, the woman is given roles defined by historical prejudices. In churches she is the usher, the silent champion of fundraising, and the caregiver of the minister. But that is not enough.

The advances in pharmacology see “viagrification”, and the revolution in cosmetic surgery, have prepared the woman as the partner to be laid and ‘killed’.

Sex performance enhancers of varied descriptions and efficacies abound to unleash on her the masculine terror, for she is that commodity, whose conquest must proclaim the triumph of the phallus.

As a father of three super girls, I just worry for the woman. Is the man genetically wired to regard the woman as a commodity? Why are there far more industries built around the female anatomy than male’s?

Yet, as the history of feminism suggests, the solution to this commodification of the woman lies with women themselves. Women as a collective can put an end to any obnoxious culture or tradition they want to see abolished. If such practices against women still exist, it is because women permit it.