The right to be stupid

Put efforts where it matters...By the time you are asking for Cheryl Kitongas face to be concealed, you have lost the fight on women dignity. Stop the next Cheryl from being taken advantage of by a so called sponsor. Stop the next Cheryl from being a rich man’s play toy. Stop the next Cheryl Kitonga from a sponsor mentality. And telling them that is what the 20s are there for is not helping them either.—Maggie Marrikah

The most unforgiving of humans, I believe, hate the thing that they fear becoming because they are weak. The kept woman, and more recently the kept man, remains a popular target for the self-declared protectors of our moral values. I have a feeling that Moha's Jicho Pevu, deep down, is a moralising crusader out to cleanse the public commons not just of odious politicians and political operatives but also of the women who are kept by them.

We must be wary when any man or woman arrogates unto themselves the task of determining what is and what is not morally upright, and what must be done to ensure that he body politic is purified of the immoral and the moral relativism that is the slippery slope to moral decadence.More often than not, it is founded on a Victorian-era application of sexual mores, that deny that even young women could have sexual agency un-tethered from what their fathers, brothers, elder sisters, religious or social thought-leaders determine to be the right kind of sexual behaviour.

It is not, however, enough to declare that "no one was injured;" after all, no one wants their child to be pointed at as the type that makes a living on their back or bent over while satisfying the proclivities of the ones with fat wallets. It is important, though, to remind ourselves that where especially moral and religious values have been declared to supersede individual agency, the result has more often than not been great sins against the individual.

Ms Marrikah writes from the United States. She would do well to acquaint herself with the justifications that the Moral Majority have relied on to persecute minorities, including racial and sexual minorities, in the name of upholding "family" and Judeao-Christian values. Segregation, even long after Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, remains the watchword of many Christian groups in the USA, and their poisonous interpretation of scripture, devoutly believed by hundreds of thousands, has led to violent crimes such as the brutal murder of 9 churchgoers, who happened to be Black, in Charleston, South Carolina.

It isn't just Christian fundamentalists who are a threat to the peace and safety of people; Islamic State has become the latest terror organisation to base its acts of great inhumanity on a fundamentalist, racist and erroneous reading of scripture, just as almost a century ago Roman Catholics and Protestants butchered one another in Northern Ireland, partly because of where each group went to church.

But back to sexual politics of the here and now. Women have always been made to feel ashamed for their choices, even seemingly wholesome ones, if these choices threatened the "stability" of the family unit. No pun intended, but women come second. Ms Marrikah is a proud perpetrator of this culture, and deserves to be called out for it. It may yet take a decade or so, but eventually it will dawn on the likes of Ms Marrikah that women are the equal of men. Men and women have different attributes and different capacities, but neither is superior to the other, no matter what St Paul says in his epistles to the Apostles, and because of this equality, whom they choose to sleep with or whom they allow to "sponsor" them is not a Scarlet Letter, but a reaffirmation of the right of both men and women to be equally stupid when it comes to sex.