By Ogundowole Tolulope
Parents behave differently towards their sons and their daughters. The different behaviour begins soon after the baby is born. The way parents and other members of the immediate community behave towards the child and the different expectations they have of the child, depending on the child’s sex, imprints a distinct pattern of behavior in the first three years of the child’s life. This imprinting induces the child to behave in a feminine or in a masculine way. Once the child’s brain is conditioned in this way, it is difficult to reverse it.
A child’s masculine or feminine behaviour, depending on its sex has two components. The first is its sex typing or its gender role. This is the way a person behaves to others to demonstrate he or she is a male or female.
The second is even more important. This is the person’s own awareness that he or she is a male or female – their gender identity. Until a child has developed a gender identity, it is confused about its sexuality, and about its gender role. The gender role of the child is fostered so assiduously by parents that the girl is expected to behave in a certain way in society. When she behaves this way, she has developed a gender identity. This means that she knows that she is a girl, and knows that she should behave in a specific feminine manner.
At adolescence, when imaginations are easily fired, the male adolescents are encouraged by the society (parents, uncles and aunties) to thinks of their future careers. They are thus encouraged to be ambitious. They receive all the support of the society, which acts as catalyst for the achievement of their desires. In this regard, ambitions and aiming high secures preoccupies the male children. They are encouraged, advised, supported and even forced to pursue their dream and ambitions with vigour.
What happens with the female adolescent? First, the men, old and young, begin to look at her with hunger, thirst and lust in their eyes. She is daily harassed, distracted and bombarded with flattery on the account of her beauty. A sense of unhealthy pride in her sexuality is awakened because men force their attention upon her and bombard her with vain flattery until she cannot think of any other thing but her beauty, because she is left alone. She begins to spend more time in front of the mirror and expects more flattery.
While the male child is using his mental energies to establish a solid economic, social and political foundation for the future, the female child is experiencing euphoria occasioned by vain flattery from the men folk. Her mental energy is expended thinking of and imagining a prince charming of a husband with whom she will live happily ever after.
Her individuality and personality are lost or subsumed in that of the man in her thoughts. She is indoctrinated into the religion of women-for- the-home and men-for-the-public, women to serve men, women to cook and men to eat.
Some religious leaders don’t help matters as they ingrain into society’s consciousness that the woman is ultimately subservient and inferior to the man. And so, female subjugation becomes a fact, both in the secular and religious spheres.
Each girl child who passes through this world, at one point of her life or the other, remembers the exact time she began to wonder if anything was wrong with being a FEMALE. That is the point of the rude conscious awakening that as a girl you are regarded as less valuable than your male siblings. Think about it, when it’s all-female children, in-laws grumble. But when it’s all males, they rejoice. That’s our society.
But this will pass. It will certainly change. And it is indeed changing. Slowly, but surely. Of this I am confident, with what I see in our schools, in the professions, industry and even politics.
OgundowoleTolulope,
Department of Mass Communication,
Ibrahim BadamasiBabangida University, Lapai, Niger state
