The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male...?

One of the pet peeves of people living in Africa is when ignoramuses from abroad ask if we have lions, elephants and other wild fauna walking in our streets. How silly, we think, we live in built up cities; what the heck would the animals eat? They don't even have any money to roll up at Mickey D's for a Big Mac or anything. Tsk! Or we might ask the ignoramuses if they have coyotes, moose or grizzly bears in their streets, a question which causes them to look at us like we are unbelievably dim-witted, following which they realize that we have been looking at them with that same look and thinking those same thoughts, then all is understood.

I must say though that in the quaint little town of Victoria Falls wild animals prance up and down the streets like they run the place and there is for the most part a resigned acceptance of this by the human community. It is very common to see little families comprising mommy warthogs and five or six baby warthogs hanging out on your lawn and foraging for grubs or whatever, or trotting around in single file with all their tails sticking straight up. It's the cutest thing. Then there are the baboons. Not cute. Some of them are almost as tall as humans and having found myself on many occasions crossing a street alongside one or window shopping only to notice a baboon next to me gazing curiously through the same shop window, I suspect they think they are people. Very hairy, naked people. Awkward. The thing with baboons that prompted me to mention this anecdote as the introduction to my post on women's rights is that they are incredibly mischievous and have been known to pick people's pockets or throw rocks at people and run away. Here's the thing though. Local lore has it that baboons don't attack any old Joe on the street. They are able to discern the weakest and least enfranchised among us and as a result, in a town crawling with people of all shapes, sizes and nationalities, baboons apparently almost exclusively attack black women or children. o_O

I have recently had an awakening about the status of women in the world and about the rights of girls and women. In the interests of full disclosure I must state that I previously had an aversion to the very idea of women's rights and I must shamefully admit, even children's rights. Eeek! I know, I know, what kind of monster am I, right? Let me explain myself. My problem with women/children's rights was in the fact that I did not understand the need for a distinction between human rights as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and women's rights and children's rights. I thought to myself, 

Why do women and children need their own set of rights? Why does striving to achieve the basic human rights not translate to the needs of women and children being met, given that they are human beings?

I found it bizarre. It made me angry because I felt that defining a set of protections for women and children was discriminatory and set them apart as being lesser beings. Children are human beings in the early stages of development and so I could understand how they would need protection and how they would need a hand up in getting by in the world but women? Adult women? To agree to a convention that articulated their needs over and above the basic human needs would be to acknowledge that they were not the equals of men and I simply could not abide by this. I also viewed feminists and the few advocates for women's rights that I had come across as unfeminine male bashers and there was no way I was going to sign up to their ideologies. It was my sentiment that as higher mammals with such advanced brain function we should be able to do right by each other and respect each other in both directions: male to female and vice versa.

I do not appreciate male bashing. I consider it retrogressive and very unhelpful to the building of healthy societies and I definitely believe we should be doing everything in our power to reinforce positive masculinities. However, it is an unfortunate FACT that there is an extreme, excessive and alarmingly high amount of female bashing - oppression, abuse, discrimination, neglect and other forms of straight up misogyny - on planet Earth. I have always known how strong and powerful and capable women are, even in the face of the very worst circumstances but only now am I finding out just how bad those circumstances are today, right now, all over the world. It's shocking. My awakening to the real life experiences of women around the globe has been a long time coming and at this stage my understanding of the issues is quite tenuous and fragile but I am getting there. I intend to post a review of the stats on women and girls and and a brief review of the book I am currently reading entitled Half the Sky.  I love statistics. They have their limitations but they really help to make things  clear in terms of the big picture. I will also continue this series by featuring a few outstanding women and telling their stories. I also love personal stories because they make things more real and really bring home the issues. I hope to discover if indeed the female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

Woman and Girl | Diong

P.S The title of this post is taken from a poem by Rudyard Kipling which knowing myself I will probably have a good rant about one of these days.