World Literature

“We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something.”

In her essay, “We Should All Be Feminists”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggests that in order to change the way society views gender we have to start by raising our children differently. In the above quote Adichie mentions that girls are always taught to behave in a certain manner if they want to be respected by boys. If a girl shows too much skin or behaves in a boisterous manner then she is at fault if a boy disrespects her. In other words, boys are incapable controlling themselves so we have to teach girls to protect themselves from boys. Boys are not taught that girls are worthy of respect regardless of their attire or behavior. Instead, boys are taught that it is acceptable to express their sexual desires and aggression towards girls because it makes them seem more masculine. The problem is that in teaching our children to think this way we make these children feel ashamed to be their true selves. We tend to associate masculinity and feminity with a person’s behavior but in reality these are just social constructs. Male, female, masculine, and feminine are nothing more than labels. With the exception of physical features there is no difference between male and female. Men and women are capable of exhibiting the same behaviors. Adichie suggest that we need to to teach our children to be who they want to be, not who they should be based on a label that society has created for them. A woman is not less of  a woman just because she does not like cooking, in the same way that a man does not become any less of a man just because he enjoys cooking. If we enable our children to be confident in their true self then we eliminate the pressure of having to fulfill certain roles in order to qualify as one gender or another.