By
Chika Oduah
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Chika
Oduah
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Mothers lay their daughters on
mattresses, spread their legs as wide as “Vs,” push their fingers inside their
daughters’ vaginas and measure the depth of entry into the soft mounds of
flesh. If the fingers go in too deeply, the girl is not a virgin.
The daughter did not keep her vagina clean
and fresh so she will no longer be perceived as clean and fresh.
She will be described with adjectives like spoiled and used. Her
vagina has been used. Throw it away. Throw her away.
In a society where a woman is worth the
condition of her vagina, women and girls start to believe it—that their vagina
counts. Boys and men believe it. Public officials and religious leaders believe
it. The society begins to promote a sort of consecration of the vagina.
If a father finds out that his
daughter’s vagina has been spoiled he could remove her from the
homestead. Or perhaps, the father is “progressive” and will pretend he does not
know that his daughter is spoiled until her belly begins to grow and her
movements become lethargic. Then, he cannot ignore it. Then, his desire to kick
her out, damn her, maim her, kill her or marry her to the town drunkard is
justified.
In such societies, men write books with
titles like “The Good Woman,” “The Holy Wife,” “A Woman of Destiny,” “A Woman
Under The Covering of Her Husband,” “How To Be A Virtuous Woman,” “The
Fulfillment of Womanhood.”
Girls and women read these books and
they want others to know that they are reading those books.
An adolescent girl was raped by her two
older brothers one day. When her parents found out, they agreed to kill their
little daughter to cleanse the family of shame.
They planned the assassination.
The scheme was for the sons and father to leave the house. The mother would
take care of everything.
Mother took her daughter to a bed in
the house – perhaps rubbing the girl’s soft black hair along the way – and she
laid her olive-skinned daughter down. She lifted two pillows into the air and
then pressed them down over her daughter’s face. The girl kicked and jerked all
over the place. Mother used her hands and the pillows to shove the life of her
daughter out of her neck. The girl died by asphyxiation.
This true incident happened in Iran. A
Persian university professor of mine chronicled the details to the class. The
dead girl had been her neighbor in a country where “honor killings” are a part
of life. A Google search of the phrase honor killings will yield
more than 35 million results and the practice does exist in Nigeria.
Nigeria is a society where men jail vaginas.
They control them with glee and tickle them until they become moist. Too moist
means she is not a virgin because the excessive moisture is evidence of her
enjoyment of the tickle. Moist enough means she is a good girl. You treat her
carefully so you will not “mess her up.”
In fact, an entire community, or at
least the designated decision makers, can have a stake in girls’ vaginas.
That’s why elders can charge a higher bride price if the girl is “unspoiled.”
The unspoken message conveyed is that the woman does not control her own body.
It is for society to monitor and suppress, praise and scorn.
Pastors can refuse to wed a female
church member who is having sex with a man she loves. Even the suspicion of
sexual involvement can prevent a Christian woman from getting married in the
church she attends. Let her stay outside and commit sin because that is what
Jesus would have done, they suppose.
A prevailing rule mandating that only
virgins can be married in the church really means that the lady must be a
virgin. The man, who really cares? It’s the vagina that counts.
Some seldom call upon The Virgin Mary
without including the word, “virgin” before “Mary.” Would she even be in the
Bible if she were not believed to have been a virgin? The mother of God’s son
should be “clean” so we have made her so by depicting her as an unspoiled
woman, who had a baby.
She would not have been worth anything as a childless
wife. We do not talk much about Mary’s life after Jesus because it does not
matter much. It was her virginity that captures approval. It’s the vagina that
counts and the Virgin Mary once had a holy one.
There are Nigerian women who cringe at
the suggestion of wearing a light gold wedding gown, or a champagne-tinted
wedding gown because she wants to show the world that her vagina is “pure
white,” wrapped in swaths of lace and satin, chained to God and to her future
husband.
She walks down the aisle in a pure white gown. At the reception, she
dances the night away in pure white. Not ivory, pure white. The world must know
that she is a fresh one to marvel at. The man beside her at the wedding altar
whom she will call husband from then on, he is wearing the blackest of black
suits. His bowtie is gray. His shoes are black. His socks are black, too.
In the Nigeria that I live in, men want
fresh girls, just as they like fresh fish, but the girl must be fresher than
what is in the soup. She has to be fresh as a baby. So children become brides,
plucked from age 13, expected to spawn children at age 14, scorned if she dies
in labor.
Men want virgins on earth and virgins in heaven – or paradise – so
they line up to bomb, kill and commit themselves to a god reckoned to enjoy the
scent of spilled blood and the sound of an unfolding massacre as long as the
dead are infidels. Some men want virgins in hell, but they will never find any
there. All virgins go to heaven.
Nigerian men sit in stuffy airplanes
for hours, coming from Belgium, London, Australia and New York, coming home to
Nigeria. And in those planes, one imagines the freshness of the unspoiled
village lady who will become his wife. He has never met her face-to-face, only
in photographs did he see her and in fleeting phone conversations, he heard her
homely voice.
The Nigerian ladies abroad have all gone wild, so Nigerian men go
to their home towns for a dewy-faced, high school graduate who cooks the best
vegetable soup in town. Best of all, she is unspoiled. The joy of
wedding an unspoiled woman can only be experienced. So the guy’s friends
request vacation time from their jobs and venture to Nigeria to experience it,
too.
The 2002 protest of Muslim youth who opposed the holding of the Miss World
pageant in Nigeria did exactly what those youth likely wanted it to
do: take those worldly girls out of Nigeria. Perhaps the presence of so many
perceived spoiled women would have brought a curse on the land and everyone’s
cows would have fallen over and died of an incurable plague.
(In some
instances, cows are more valuable than females.) That incident, which left more
than 100 people dead according to the BBC, revealed a sick truth about Nigeria
and the males who were offended over a ThisDay newspaper editorial that
made reference to the Prophet Mohammed in regards to the Miss World
contestants.
Violence against women has increased
worldwide. The stories of 14-year-old
Malala Yousufzai of Pakistan, Anene Booysen
of South Africa, the 23-year-old woman who was raped on a
bus in India are just a handful of the millions of women around the
world with a similar experience. Women equality is a cause that Malawi
President Joyce Banda and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stand
for.
“…Where violence and abuse keep women
out of the workforce and drag down communities for generations, fostering
women’s economic participation grows national GDPs and personal incomes,” Clinton
commented.
Female circumcision, domestic violence,
honor killings, acid burnings, dowry deaths…all the violence comes down to the
vagina, and the control of it. Who knew that two plump lips of skin could wreck
so much havoc and hysteria? No wonder historically, it was kept under a lock
and key in the form of chastity
belts in some societies.
The vagina has traits. It looks like
flower petals, yet smells like a servant. In societies where the vagina counts,
a female is a servant to the males around her. In the home, at the workplace,
at events, the female is expected to serve people and to be aware of that
expectation. At anytime, a guy can turn to a woman in a particular setting and
ask for a drink. She is supposed to go fetch him a drink.
In societies where the vagina counts,
no matter how well a female is packaged with luxurious clothing and jewelry, a
sound education or a philanthropic spirit, the condition of the vagina is still
considered.
So let’s consult the Vagina Oracle to see what it will tell
us. Which lady deserves to be wedded and which one may as well be left to
fornicate in a den of sin? Which one can be killed? Beaten? Raped?
In societies where the vagina counts,
the rise of a Condoleeza Rice, a Michelle Obama or a Margaret Thatcher seldom
happens. In such societies, a wife is as good as her husband. That is why the
relevance of the life of Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime minister of
Pakistan, cannot be underestimated.
In societies where little boys eat
before their little sisters, get a larger portion of meat and go to school when
their little sisters go to the market, those little boys imagine vaginas and
what they want to do with them. Control is in his hands.
That little boy will
cultivate an uncanny fascination with the thing between girls’ legs and then
assert his position over it, knowing that the society has given him the right
to do so. That little boy may become a pastor where he can stand on the pulpit
and say, “I will not wed a spoiled woman.”
Or he may become a husband who forces
his wife to do what he wants her to do at a time when she does not want to do
it because he paid her bride price.
Vaginas count. That’s why some readers
will count the number of times the word ‘vagina’ in used in this piece. And
others will fortify their position that the condition of a woman’s vagina is a
reliable assessment of her worth.
In elementary schools in the United
States, many children are taught a song with lyrics that go like this: My
body’s nobody’s body but mine. You rule your own body, let me rule mine.
But in societies where the vagina
counts, that song is a lie. Girls and women do not rule their bodies,
especially not their vaginas.
And being called “spoiled” means she is
as good as dead.
Follow Chika Oduah on Twitter@chikaoduah
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