For what it’s worth Adichie’s Ted Talk, ‘We should All Be Feminists’, is an excellent speech. Still I thought at the time I heard it that there were quite a number of points in it which begged clarification, as otherwise they might easily emerge somewhat rash, a bit too hurriedly thought up, and as such liable to misappropriation. In this regard three propositions from that speech stand out starkly fresh in my mind: first that literally ‘men rule the world;’ second that ‘bottom power is no power at all;’ and third that ‘culture does not make people rather people make culture.’
Now about the first two I believe that thinkers like Chinweizu have argued elaborately and convincingly enough against them. For example he has argued and logically enough too that for the claim that ‘men rule the world’ to be incontestably true ‘it would need to be also true that . . . public structures (captured in Adichie’s speech as ‘positions of power and prestige’) exhaust the modes and centres of power in society.’ But these don’t. For there indeed are other more subtle, less apparent modes and centres of power, namely, as Chinweizu has articulated some of them, womb power, cradle power, kitchen power, among others.
Incidentally what Chinweizu has nominated womb power is more or less the exact same thing presented as bottom power in Adichie’s speech. With the difference of course that for the one this power is not at all a joke but terribly real and potent, whereas for the other it is ‘no power at all;’ at best it only means that the woman has a good root whereby she can tap into someone else’s power. And perhaps to buttress the shamness of this power Adichie points out that all we need do is consider where the man in question is either sick or in a bad mood or downright impotent. What she forgot however is that this said man is in reality the exception not the rule. Well perhaps one can really understand Adichie on this. It is probably only a woman who can actually say of bottom power that it is no power at all. Because what the rule-man actually is in reality is a most terrifyingly, most helplessly pathetic thing! As Chinweizu has put it, he is a ‘woman-fixated…macho’ who actually considers it ‘right and proper’ to give a woman sexual pleasure and even pay her for it into the bargain! He is the man who has the endowment or is it the handicap of a ‘deranging penis.’
Now this rule-man is not necessarily a natural phenomenon. If anything he is a cultural phenomenon. Which brings me to the third proposition from that speech which I consider worthy of elucidation, namely that ‘culture does not make people; people make culture.’ In fact for me in a way this is the most problematic if disturbing submission in that otherwise excellent talk. Particularly in the manner of its formulation. And not so much because it is downright false as that it is really only half-true. With the result that if it is not properly taken and understood it might be prone to a serious even dangerous misleading. For culture is an optical lens of sorts. And true enough the people who wear this lens probably evolved it in the first place and put it on. To that extent of initiation it would be definitely true that it is the people who make the culture. But having put this lens on, henceforth, it can no more be true that this culture does not make the people as it would be true that this lens they have on does not colour their vision. Indeed it might even turn out that culture has made people first and foremost even before they come themselves in turn to make it; for as Albert Camus once argued man begins living ever before he begins thinking. And is culture not a people’s way of life, nay their very life itself?
Now look again at the rule-man or ‘the heroic-macho’ (if you prefer Chinweizu’s terminology) who I have started arguing is a cultural phenomenon. How has he come about? In two really complementary ways basically: one, by the ‘magnification’ of the already potent enough womb/bottom power, and two, by a simultaneous ‘weaking’ of the male powers of sexual restraint. Chinweizu elaborates to us how these are worked out and there is hardly any question that they are an intensely cultural engineering. I will crave the reader’s indulgence here to quote him now at some length:
‘For the magnification of womb power, mothers primarily rely on female sexual restraint as taught through codes of modesty. Codes which teach a girl coyness; which train her to defer her gratification for as long as possible, on pain of seeing herself (and being seen!) as sexually forward, loose or even immoral—such training makes a girl more sexually restrained than she would otherwise be. In some cultures, this training is combined with clitoridectomy, an operation which reduces the sexual excitability of a woman. This restraint, regardless of how achieved, gives a woman an enormous advantage in her dealings with sexually deranged men. Mothers magnify the advantage of female restraint by not teaching boys to restrain their sexual appetites, and even by teaching them to become hopelessly addicted to the female body. Now, weaning is meant to break a child’s natural attachment to its mother’s milk-bearing and warm, comforting body. However, many mothers continue to cuddle their boy children long past weaning time. Some allow them into their beds till they are four years or more. Further training to addict boys to the female body is done quite consciously, not only by mothers, but also by aunts, [female friends] and older girls generally [who hug and kiss and penis-tickle small boys].
‘. . . a child introduced to carnal pleasures by women’s expert hands will be willing, even eager in adult life, to do anything required of him in order to get what, for him, would have become the greatest reward on earth. The subconscious memory of that addictive pleasure will drive his behavior long after he attains puberty.’
There we are. There goes the cultural making of our rule-man, the result of which is a most compulsive female body addict!
However then can bottom power be to this man no power at all? However can this man in the last analysis really be nominated the ultimate ruler of the world? Being so effectively ruled by another element constituent of that world? Indeed however can it subsist that culture does not make him? Has not made him? And for that matter the woman to whose power he has been with such subtle expertise given over?
Of course Adichie’s speech is not by any means lacking in this awareness that culture in fact does make people, or else she would not have gone on to propose a raising of children differently. It is for this reason that I have said that the problem with her statement about culture is more in the manner of the formulation than in its spirit. It is therefore so vital that the real spirit and proper sense of it be highlighted to forestall the dangerous possibility of misappropriation.
I do not by any means at all consider myself a feminist. As a matter of fact I mind the label very strongly. It’s even a sort of visceral thing for me: I find that the label is quite abrasive to my temperament. I even have an indefinable suspicion that the lot of the world’s problems in the end boils down to labels and labelling. At least initially. Which is not to say that I do not appreciate the feminist awareness and posture and argument. Actually I do. But it might be that the real feminism, the ultimately worthy and worthwhile kind the world seems to stand in dire need of, is less a question of the imputable disempowering of one half the human family by the other half than that the modes and structures and dynamics of power, and how these ought to justly and equitably operate among themselves and bear out in the interaction of the two constituent sexes of the human family have been culturally, and perhaps evolutionarily too, warped and violated by vulgar, primitively crippling denominations of gender. For we will find that several different kinds of feminisms are recognizable. Broadly the kind that really only seeks a sort of tilting of the balance so that a swap between the former exclusively male-dominant and former exclusively female-dominant modes and centres of power is enacted. This would merely amount to the kind of thing I think it’s Jauss would call a ‘quantitative’ change, with no real decisive, substantial change having taken place. Then there’s the kind which seeks real radical, ‘qualitative’ change, breaking the borders of prescriptions and definitions and labelling, ridding all the modes and centres of power of all imposed and falsely particularizing feminine and masculine shackles, restoring to the categories their original primeval undefilement. Such is the feminism of Joan D. Chittister for instance; obviously of Chimamanda Adichie; and, for all its curiosity, yes, even of Chinweizu, insofar as these all are really in the last analysis advocating a fairest, most equitable egalitarianism.