Fairminism.
People say Twitter has a way of coming for everyone, but I’d always thought “not me”. However in January 2017, Twitter came for me.
It was the morning of one of my seminars and I had woken up at 5 am just to prepare myself for the event. I reached out to my phone and sent a tweet about the seminar to my few thousand followers just for the last time. It wasn’t like I was expecting new signups for the event, I just wanted to create some awareness that it was the d-day.
Then I took a moment to scroll through my Twitter timeline, not exactly looking for any information. Just that random timeline scroll that we all do from time to time. While scrolling, I came across a tweet by a certain lady. She was asking for donations from Good Samaritans on Twitter. She wanted to use the money gotten from the donations to buy some essential supplies for girls at an IDP (internally displaced persons) camp in Lagos.
The idea drew my attention, so I replied “I’m willing to donate if you considered adding the boys in the IDP camps also”.
After tweeting that, I went straight to have my bath and to finalize preparations for my seminar. Having dressed up and feeling like I still had some minutes to spare, I reached out to my phone and launched the Twitter app. I actually was hoping someone had interacted with my earlier posted tweet about my seminar.
But as I opened the Twitter app, I saw a gush of tweets “@me”. No, they weren’t tweets in response to my seminar. They were in response to my comments about the IDP camp donations. A legion of responses from several ladies. (Most of these tweets are actually still online, but I’d rather not post here).
The responses differed in actual content, but they had a unifying tone and message; “Shut up, we don’t care about the boys. If you want to do anything for the boys go and start your own campaign”.
Some of the tweets were plain insults, pure curse words. One of the ladies even reminded me that she knew my dad and that my dad was a pastor. She said as a pastor’s child was I supposed to be saying such a thing? In football, you call that counter attack.
For every minute that the tweet stayed online, the replies grew. On another day, it would not have been an issue for me, but on this day I needed to be in my best mental condition. I had a seminar to deliver and people had already paid for it.
So I deleted my tweet and muted all replies, but I didn’t delete my opinion.
What happened that day was baffling beyond imagination. The incident in itself gave me a sense of concern about the brand of feminism tagged “the fourth wave feminism”. It feels quite dangerous to me, because it doesn’t seek equality or equity, but it seeks feminine superiority.
It’s a pure case of taking a simple concept to the very extreme.
Haven’t you wondered that most of the successful women in the world only start empowerment programs for women? Their strategy to give back to the society is simple — give back to only women.
As a Christian, I can’t help but wonder why almost all wives of prominent pastors have a calling by default- a calling to reach out to women (only). I’m not a against it in anyway, I’m just concerned that it’s the default, whether God called them to do it or not.
In 2014, 29 boys were killed at the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi, a secondary school in Yobe State and never did that generate a harsh tag or clamor. But when girls were abducted, we got the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign.
You can’t break the glass ceiling with a one-sided approach. If women will only look after women, then women won’t be taken seriously by men. The new generation of women ought to be inspired to make impacts in the lives of everyone, whether male or female.
You can’t break the glass ceiling with a one-sided approach. If women will only look after women, then women won’t be taken seriously by men
It’s subtle, but with this new approach to life by women, men would become quite skeptical and will form an opinion that women are only concerned about themselves. I know it sounds childish, but I hear a lot of men say; “if we vote a female president, would she not focus all the resources on women alone?”
A survey was carried out about the popularity and relevance of 10 male CEOs and 10 female CEOs. It was shown that both males and females found the 10 male Entrepreneurs directly relevant to their lives, with both business and charity efforts. While the same survey showed that most of the males didn’t know most of the female CEOs, what they did or how they gave back to the society. This includes a top female billionaire CEO. These are women of high regard and success, yet their impact isn’t really flowing through to the males.
If you only help people that look like you, that have the same body organs as you and have gone through what you’ve gone though, then we really need to revisit your capacity to love.
If you only help people that look like you, that have the same body organs as you and have gone through what you’ve gone though, then we really need to revisit your capacity to love.
Jesus didn’t die only for Jews or only for people that looked like him. Jesus died for everyone. That’s the epitome of true love. True love doesn’t know gender, race or religion.
The love that Jesus Christ showed, the one He so much talked about is not gender based, it’s a love for everyone.
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