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Bongiwe Nkomazana
You have to love social media. It brings together people from all over the world to talk about anything and everything under the sun. I have been a part of a variety of conversations, whose subjects range from grammar to heartbreaks all the way to Zimbabwe’s economy.
Mind you this is with people whom I do not know but that is the beauty of it, I think. However, as much as it is beautiful for strangers to converse, there is a side to social media that will shock you if you are not careful about what you post.
This brings us to the muse of this week’s topic, a certain fellow on Twitter who shared a tweet that insinuated that women are not supposed to consume alcoholic drinks because it makes them less of wife material. Boy, did the Twitter fellow trend. He got a hashtag and everything and I do not think he will ever forget how Twitter blasted him for his backward, chauvinistic thoughts.
Just so we are clear, I totally agree with the Twitter community on this one. In these times, where we have come so far with women’s emancipation, who dare tries to convince us that they even have the smallest ounce of authority over a woman’s choices?
Okay, let us start with this question. What is wife material? I know some of you are already thinking that it is a woman that cooks, wears long skirts and goes to church every Sabbath. This could be true for one man but completely false for the next one.
“Wife material is very subjective”.
The urban dictionary explains it as the description of a girl whom one feels possesses certain qualities that qualify her to be a model wife for them.
I absolutely agree. Hence, for one man to come out on a public platform on which so many diverse women and men are present and imply that we should all conform to his standards of wife material is absolutely ridiculous. If his wife does not drink, congratulations to him but that’s where it ends sir.
Unfortunately we deal with males like this outside of Twitter as well. A thousand truckloads of women will tell you that when they met their partners, they wore pants, were outgoing or enjoyed a glass of red wine occasionally etc but were commanded to change this by their partners if they wanted to be “wifed” up or intended to retain the “wifey” title.
This type of pressure is pure evil. This same pressure is what makes so many women feel accomplished for bagging a husband yet they are the real prize. It is this pressure that will make them clinch on to that man for dear life despite how they are treated because they have lost so much of who they are and have no idea of whom they would be without their partner.
This is probably why I am still unmarried but I cannot and will not conform to be something I am not just to be accepted by a man.
I have an opinion, I wear jeans, I wear makeup, I hate cooking, I love to travel and dance, I want to make loads of money and I am a whole individual and if that is not appealing to you move right along. Besides, is it not so much easier to approach a woman who naturally is what you want in a wife than having to teach an old dog new tricks?
The second question I would like to pose is what is the relationship between a woman’s value and an alcoholic drink? The answer is that the two are not related at all. This is just another way to debilitate women and make them feel like they have to meet insane standards just so they are valuable.
You cannot attach a woman’s value to their appearance, their past or net worth and especially not to alcohol. This angers me because these standards are set by flawed societies that just like to bully females.
According to society and this fellow on Twitter, a woman should do nothing else but work and be available for a man to be worthy. Where is the fun in that? Everything fun is for men and women are stuck with the miserable things. This scam has gone on for too long.
Studies carried out by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute address the elephant in the room by showing that women who drink are dehumanised due to pre-existing stereotypes and false presumptions that alcohol and sexual promiscuity go hand-in-hand.
Also, misinterpreted social interactions, such as men viewing women who drink alcohol to be more sexually available add on to this. This is the root of the Twitter fellow’s mindset. The problem is not women’s drinking, rather, it’s the perverted assumptions that men have when they see women drinking. This issue should be nipped in the bud instead of trying to protect the real source of the issue.
A woman’s value is exactly the same as a man’s as far as both being human beings and both should be aware of the effects of excessive alcohol consumption.
I want women to have the ability to choose the drink of their liking freely but I also want them to know that too much of it will in fact deteriorate their health and that of men. Alcohol can affect your body. It can damage the heart; take a toll on the liver, cause the pancreas to produce toxic substances and weaken the immune system.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism came up with real reasons to why women should be cautious when taking alcohol. For example, they reported that where women and men drink at the same rate, women continue to be at higher risk than men for certain serious medical consequences of alcohol use like the ones I mentioned above.
Women reach higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood and become more impaired than men after drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol.
They go on to state that some of this risk is due to gender differences in metabolism and could also quite possibly be because of gender-related differences in brain chemistry and genetic risk factors. If the Twitter fellow had come at us from this angle, we would have appreciated his views more.
That being said ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when a grown woman wants to enjoy a drink, that act does not take away from her worthiness. She should be able to have a drink if she wants to have a drink without the fingers of self appointed judges pointing at her. Case closed.
Online Reporter