By Peter Kimani
I know important matter shave been up for debate in Parliament, but I just can’t get my mind off the picture of fair ladies in the House.
You must know, of course, about the picture made famous by one Crazy editor, who incidentally edits a publication by the same title, and the equally famous ruling made by House Speaker Kenneth Marende.
Stepping out in those colonial relics that feature wool or sheep’s skin (one must be pretty warm in such garb), Marende spoke like ten elders, which is to say he blabbered about everything and said nothing, save for that the Crazy editor would not go to jail.
But there is a deeper social meaning to the image that Marende, in the spirit of free speech, should have contemplated.
For instance, the picture was not a figment of someone’s imagination (there is an application called Photoshop for those shopping around for tools to distort others’ looks), and that the Crazy image showed actual legs.
Kilos of meat
By the same token, Marende could have done well to reassure that miniskirts are not outlawed in the House (as they are about to be in Botswana), and that honest discourse is to be encouraged even if that comes in the form of dress.
But a woman’s legs (or body parts) as Marende calls them, invoking butchery feeling where kilos of meat are stashed, are not totems of ugliness.
That would explain the revulsion to Circute and Jo-el duo’s offensive song, Manyake, which saw the female body as a chunk of meat, "all sizes."
In my youth, female legs were seen as a mark of beauty. That’s why certain clothes are worn to reveal, not to conceal them.
And the legs would be described using imageries of great use, such as stove (for the spindly ones) or sporty (to describe the rounded).
I wonder if grown women’s legs maintain such form (stove or sporty), or even whether any of the gracious ladies would fit the billing.
Whatever the case, beauty, as defined universally, lies in the eye of the beholder (or beer holder), conveying its transience nature.
Gender prejudice
So rather than castigate the Crazy snapper, who incidentally was female, Marende’s argument about gender prejudice is considerably eroded.
To return to Marende’s body parts theory, the Fourth Estate must resist any efforts to pigeonhole their perspectives by training their lenses on talking heads only because many in House rarely talk, and I’m not talking about women.
The manner of speech, by men and women alike, is often picked from their manner of dress. Restraining photographers who reflect those aspirations is akin to crushing the mirror that shows one has warts on the face.
Do the warts go away when mirror is crushed into smithereens? Hardly.
