By Pearson Mbendera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) – While chatting with a cousin of mine, she pointed out that young men today are marrying late and I pondered on it, looking back on the past patterns of men and how things have changed over the years.
In a lot of ways men have an advantage, our biological clock lasts a very long period of time, and that has given men an opportunity to take their time and look around, before finally settling down. Besides, even when they get old, men can still even go for a younger woman. An old man can walk with a much younger woman by his side and it won’t raise that many eyebrows. The opposite however, seems more of a taboo, something many are yet to come to terms with.
But as I looked back, it wasn’t just the marriage issue that had changed in men, but that in almost everything, men are sliding backwards. And its not just in comparison with men of yesteryears, but even compared to women.
Ours is a patriarchal society and it has given men a lot of power. Men’s place in the world has always been known. They always had a place at the top reserved for them, it was something obvious. They didn’t have to fight for it, or earn it, it was their heritage, something they were born into.
But with the wave of feminism going around that is proving that women deserves just as much as men do, and are just as good if not better than men, the men’s position is now threatened. And coupled by the fact that men aren’t doing much for themselves, this has resulted in men lagging behind.
Maybe the fact that men have always dominated has caused many to be complacent, taking their need to fight out of their souls. Or maybe they just got tired of fighting for success, but whatever it is, men have taken a step back.
Sometimes it takes some disadvantage to want to succeed and push the boundaries, and with women having been largely disadvantaged all through history, that disadvantage has cause a fire to burn in women, causing them to push for equality and outperforming men. The need to shutter the glass ceiling has motivated a lot of women, while for most men, high places have been reached already, there have been men sent to the moon, going there doesn’t yield the same sense of pride it did to the first man who did it.
But with the economy of Zimbabwe being as bad a it is, it seems as if men are doomed here. And if you walk around, you can see a lot of men, wandering about, aimlessly, lost, unaware of what they are supposed to be doing.
With the same responsibility still in place, there is a lot of pressure in men. Its not easy being a man, today’s man, but despite all that pressure, men are finding it hard to maintain their position at the top. Maybe the pressure is too much, or the expectations, paralysing.
And its not just Zimbabwe, its the global phenomenal now. In universities, the larger population now is female. While there is a general notion that men earn more than women, another study found out that actually, men don’t even earn more than women, its married men with children who earn more than married women with children because, after the birth of children, women are more likely to work less while men work more, hence the gap in earnings. But when both sexes are single, women are earning more.
With UK and Germany having female leaders, surely the place of a woman has moved from being that in the kitchen to just about anywhere she desires, while men haven’t improved much. I guess they are cursed by the fact that they were ahead at one point in time. And had Hilary Clinton won the US election, three of the world’s most powerful nations would be headed by women by now.
Men are lagging behind, and its not pretty. Soon enough they will need some kind of a movement, the opposite of feminism to perk themselves up again. The days of male dominance seem to be numbered, and a man’s place in this world, isn’t guaranteed to be at the top. That should be something to please the women, but of great concern to all the men out there.
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