Men are weak, women are shallow nowadays has become such an entrenched rhetoric over the last 15 or so years. Is it true? Not really. It’s a rationalization many use to make sense of a world that has changed and in many ways these changes have not been good. We individualize these changes using the aforementioned rhetoric because most of us don’t have the capacity or time to scrutinize deeply what is actually happening. The fact that media and social media are incentivized to push hot talking points for the audience exacerbates the blindness.
I’ll give you an example as I segue into the talking point. I don’t know how many remember, there was a time that Daily Nation had a lady who used to write bait articles about how men are broke or lazy or whatever other demeaning adjectives. In return, Daily Nation would get high engagement as people “debated” the opinions therein. What was actually happening at the time was that white collar job opportunities were starting to diminish and education qualifications were losing their potency but it was being read as men’s laziness. Kenyan media was giving a platform to comedians, proto-influencers, lawyers instead of people with the view like sociologists and that’s why conversation veered in the wrong direction. You don’t hear that kind of bait talk anymore because it is now much more visible that traditional career trajectory opportunities are thin. But what has stuck around is the contrived Men vs women contest. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a post about clubs now being full of women and the debates that emanated from it. Similar issues like women’s perceived success in the corporate world, single mothers, choice for lifetime partner, etc come up now and again. The common theme is that we always individualize the phenomenon. And the general complaint from each side of the divide is that men are weak and women have become shallow. Of course, if you ask the contesting parties they will see it differently. Men will say they’re smarter and women will say they’re liberated. Hehe.
Anyway, the systemic issue is that you have had Millennials live through a transition from one way of life into another. These changes lead to alienation, cognitive dissonance and rhetoric to make sense of things as you accept the new way of life. Let’s run through the popular example of picking a life partner. Prior, even as recently as the early 2000s, life used to be stable and people accepted a gradual progression in life if not just sticking to their station. This is why for example a man met a woman and they started together from zero as we put it. Millennial parents are the last generation to whom this mode of life was universal. The world became more tolerant of disruption and chaos, for reasons that I will not get into, and people’s expectations started to shift though narrative hadn’t caught up with how people were living. Today, it is expected that you must first have your “things together” before you pair up. But resistance to this change leads to the rhetoric above of weakness and shallowness. And having your career trajectory set early is continuously becoming difficult not just here but the world over. Kenyans for example have 100k as an inflection point but this is probably in the 90th percentile of income earners, I’m deducing that percentile based on an assortment of data from KRA and KNBS. It’s no surprise that the average age of marriage and first child has been going up with Europe ahead of the curve with the highest numbers. Women in particular correctly assess early marriage and motherhood as career suicide but face rhetoric of how they want to drink alcohol or something.
Individualization of these issues diverts us from the actual conversations we should be having. For instance, Kenyans should be interrogating the cost of healthcare but instead focus on which men have or not have medical cover. We can’t be saved.
Says a kipii who lives in a Kibra hovel swinging flying toilets and spreading ukimwi during disco matangas. The day we send you all back to Kondele Nairobi will have very fresh air.
