Sylvia Tamale
14 January 2003
opinion
Kampala — The story of a young girl who was arrested on Jan. 8 for indecent exposure (read, wearing a miniskirt and G-string knickers) on a New Year's street bash (The New Vision Jan. 9) is a good example of the media's role in sexualising and controlling women's bodies.
The cameraman who zoomed in on her exposed body from under the stage, the newspapers that printed the photograph and the police that arrested this young woman subjected her to a grave form of sexual violence. Then they all turned around and blamed the young woman, rather than critically reviewing their own attitudes and operations.
Can you imagine the second in command at the Criminal Investigation Department, together with the chief of Serious Crime spending two full hours quizzing a young girl about why and how she was dressed on New Year's eve? This while several crimes ranging from rape to murder are not investigated!
This case dramatically illustrates how women's sexuality is fraught with contradictions, hypocrisy, double standards and inequality. The contradiction can, for example, be seen in the fact that the rhetoric and stereotypes employed by the media (newspapers, magazines, talk-back radio shows, bill boards, TV, etc.) usually promote women as people who should primarily concern themselves with attracting and sexually satisfying men. When impressionable young girls are bombarded with such messages of their own sexuality, they tend to follow the cue, often to their peril.
Much of the oppression of Ugandan women is mediated through and constituted within sexuality - rape, defilement, incest, criminal adultery, prostitution, abortion, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, etc. If the law were genuinely concerned about morality, then we would not have the blatant double standards about male and female sexuality. For example, the penal code limits the crime of prostitution to the sellers of sex (the majority of whom are women) and not to the buyers (mostly men). Furthermore, the offence of criminal adultery is limited to wives and only applies to husbands when they have sexual intercourse with another man's wife!
In other words, our society views women as sex objects while at the same time reserve the power to control their bodies through law, religion and culture. For me, it is the height of hypocrisy for men who pay large sums of money to stare at half-naked women at beauty pageants to turn around and fly the red moral flag at a girl in a mini-skirt dancing on the streets. How come men wearing skimpy shorts that hug their crotches are never arrested? Is the whole department of criminal investigation going to storm Karamoja and arrest women who wander about bare-chest? No, because the Karimojong culture does not construct women's bodies as objects of sex.
The arrest of that young girl demonstrated the extent to which the patriarchal institutions of power in this country will go in controlling, policing and appropriating women's bodies. It is high time society put a stop to this obsessive control of women's sexuality and began to see us as human beings. The law enforcement agencies would make better use of taxpayers' money by going after perpetrators of sexual violence against girls/women. For starters, what about targeting those offensive advertisements (e.g., the tall woman in Club beer or the daughter-exchanged-for-Bell beer) that degrade and objectify women.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2003 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
