Female Dreamliner Pilot – Feminism is Dead!

Captain Koki Mutungi is the first black female Dreamliner pilot. Now there are not many pilots out there and even fewer of these are the women. Being a pilot is a male dominated profession – yet few female pilots manage to break stereotypes and traditional conception of gender roles. While there are many men out there praising Captain Mutungi, you can be sure many more are feeling threatened and diminished.

Yet these men feeling threatened and diminished, need not worry at all. There are a growing number of women, who are opposed to what they call “radical feminism.” The anti-feminist women say “equal does not mean similar” and that men and women are different and this difference should be respected. 

These women call themselves post-feminist women – which essentially mean women who live after the end of feminism.  They are opposed to feminism because in its quest for gender equality, it seemed to have called for the abrogation of femininity –the essential aspects of being a woman.

So for the modern woman, the ideal female role model is not the “woman who has made it to the top” or as Captain Mutungi says a woman who inspires other women “especially African women that anything is possible…” but rather one who makes it to the top and also juggles with the traditional gender roles.

To make it to the cut of a role-model for the Post-feminists, Captain Mutungi would have to demonstrate how she manages to cook for and clean after her husband. She is even more to be admired if she does that after a grueling 15+ hour flight from Beijing to Nairobi. 

Would it surprise you that the “Polygamous Marriage Law” – the marriage law that allows for Kenyan men to marry as many women as they would like but not a similar provision for women, was actually authored by an erstwhile “radical” feminist organization? To their credit, FIDA Kenya had a proviso that required men to seek their wives permission before adding on to their number - a proviso that was deleted by the male dominated parliament. 

To contextualize this discourse in an area of my work – HIV and AIDS, the seriousness of the post-feminist agenda in rolling back on the gains of feminism becomes even starker. According to the recently released Kenya AIDS Indicator Survey – KAIS 2012, women in polygamous relationships had a HIV prevalence of 8.8% while their male counterparts had a prevalence of 12.!%. It may seem counter-intuitive to assert that women are worse of in this situation given that they seem to have a lesser prevalence than men – but one needs to realize that this is a ratio, and for women the denominator grows at least by a rate of 2.  Detailed analysis of what this really means is not possible in this space – but any woman with half the mathematical knowledge of Captain Mutungi will tell you this is a very bad situation for women.

White male power certifying death of feminism?

Unfortunately the Post-Feminist will hear none of this. To their credit, they have managed to enlist the support of a social movement that advocates for “Family values.” It is ironical that for the family values to be truly family values they have to be traditional. I will not belabor this point, but I will point out another ironical fact that the bedrock of their support comes from the Catholic Church – their hegemonic masculinity orientation notwithstanding. 

Indeed for the Catholic Church (and I should know, because I served them from age of 13 – 27), the “elevated place of women” is in service not in leadership. If God had ever wanted a woman to be a leader – then he would have appointed one of them among the 12 disciples.  

Perhaps I just need to come out and honestly say I have beef with the post-feminists – and on so many levels. On the one hand, I feel like they are trashing my mum’s sacrifice and the sacrifice of so many women of her generation. They struggled against entrenched masculinity and sacrificed so much – well aware that they would not live to benefit from the fruits of their struggle; only for another generation to come and say such struggle and sacrifice is overrated.  At another level as a gay rights activist, I fear that for all the sacrifice of my generation, another will come and trash it as being overrated.