Gender Equality

A lot of guys say they don’t like girls who pretend, but our society has taught women to pretend for the most of their lives. Women were raised in such a way that they feel guilty for just being female. We bark at girls when they get sexually assaulted and say stuffs like, “What was she doing in the guy’s room?”, “She’s a very bad girl, and she was not properly trained” and there is this stigma on her that would never be on the guy. She is taught to not dress too astonishing because guys will look at her waywardly, she is taught to close up and be quiet and show respect, but these same things are not taught to our male children. We worry a lot about our girls’ virginity, but don’t worry as much about our boys’. The reason given by our parents was, “...because you’re a girl”.
There was a time I paid a visit to my aunt who has a son and a daughter, and it happened to be in the heat season, the boy child was allowed to pull off his shirt, but the girl child was restricted from doing the same, she had to stay in the heat with (probably) double clothes on, no matter the intensity of the heat, all for the same reason that she’s a girl child.
My parents were always like “Do this and this right, because one day you’ll have to do it right in your husbands’ house”. We were raised with the type of mentally which we had to look up to our wedding as the ultimate experience in life and probably the best thing that could ever happen to us. We were rarely dreamed of living in homes that would be referred to as ours (personally), or riding in cars that we would purchase with our own (personal) money.
I remember coming home one day from my Industrial Training and I told my mum that my bosses asked for when I would graduate from the university, because they wanted to retain me, and I was so shocked by her reply, which was this,”Thank God, you’ll eventually work at the place, marry there and live in their staff quarters”. Though, I was not too surprised that such reply could come from my mother. I didn’t blame her because I know it’s what the society taught her.
When I was in the 2nd year of my undergraduate study, I was taught an electrical engineering course by a lady, (so I had a lady as my lecturer then) and I would remember my mates (mostly the males anyway) say, that though she is rich and has a job, she is still incapacitated, because she is way too successful to find a man to measure up to her high standards. In essence, he was trying to say that girls shouldn’t aspire to be too successful, because they will drive the men away! I still didn’t blame him, because I understood that it was the kind of society we live in, where we were trained to think that it was a man’s world and we should be second place. And many of us who are tired of being second place just have to pretend to suit the society’s yearnings & expectations. Then at the end we say that these ladies are pretenders? What an Irony! Yes, I totally agree. It’s true that we are pretenders, because it was the way we were taught to live!
In some places, when women reported to the authorities that their husbands beat them up, the first question that would come up would be, “What did you do wrong?” Painting a picture that a woman deserves to be beaten by her husband, if she does something wrong. THIS IS A REALLY WRONG MENTALITY!
The purpose of this article is not just to criticize the society or men, but to give everyone a rethink. We need to stand up for these things and make the world a better place!