By Oyunga Pala
The newspaper caption read ‘What do you do, as a wife, when your man is not performing his God-given duties?’
Well, a thoroughly frustrated wife from Nyondia village in Naivasha decided to humiliate her husband, by parading him in public in front of her jeering friends and castigated him for not performing his manly duties.
I found this highly depressing. The series of pictures that made the paper showed an extremely embarrassed man taunted and jeered by wo men who were probably saying things that would make the average man to snap.
They tagged at his T-shirt, swatted him with twigs and hissed at him.
chuckle
In my book, that was straight out sexual harass ment in total contravention of Chapter 4 in the Bill of Rights. That man’s dignity was trampled in a manner that only an older, once-virile man would understand.
It is unfortunate that this sort of male bashing is presented as humour in mainstream media. When violence against men makes the news, whether physical or verbal, it is always delivered with a muffled chuckle.
Despite efforts towards establishing gender parity in this country, underneath it all, wo men still expect men to be men, meaning to primarily function as conduits for pleasure, comfort and protection.
Men who do not live up to the expectation these days are openly ridiculed. In the past though, when a man failed to deliver in bed, discrete arrange ments were made to compensate for cases of neglect. Private affairs were never settled in public.
In the contemporary era of reality TV and live radio, problems are subjected to an opinion poll and when things get thick at home, just pick the phone and talk to Maina Kageni.
I find this need to drag a guy out by his shirt collar for a verbal flogging out in public greatly disturbing when the man could be an innocent victim caught in a vicious cycle of frustration and alcoholism.
