Falling down. and getting up again
IT’S been hard going for feminism these last few weeks, hasn’t it? According to some of its more outspoken critics and detractors, this movement is to blame for poor Britney Spears flashing her pantyless, deforested crotch to paparazzi before losing her damn mind and shaving her surprisingly weird-shaped head completely bald, finally Anna Nicole Smith out of her misery and propelling that hapless, diaper-clad NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak 900 miles to show her boyfriend’s love interest the true meaning of the phrase ‘love kills’.
Yeah, blame it all on feminism, that relentless, destructive bitch, why don’t you? Never mind that there could be other reasons behind these very public displays of crashing and burning, like-clichéd though it may be – plain old childhood trauma. But, okay.
Blame feminism. It’s not as if the Big F hasn’t been given a bad name before. Before Nowak, Anna Nicole and Baldilocks, feminism was unfairly blamed for the phenomenon that was Sex and the City: Four single women swinging and sinning in the city, going to hell in a hand basket in Blahniks and Jimmy Choos.
Whatever.
Fortunately there’s Sara Lawrence, our own Miss Jamaica World and Miss World Regional (Caribbean), to do damage control to the black eye feminism has been nursing lately. The truth is that, in an age when feminism as a concept has come to be equated not only with women behaving erratically and irresponsibly, but women making career advancement their default position.
Sara Lawrence, by choosing her unborn baby over the title and the crown, did the opposite. Which is not to say she did not take a feminist stand. She did. Feminism was never supposed to be about always choosing the unconventional path.
Feminism was supposed to be about a woman’s right to decide the best social, political, spiritual and economic paths best for her, in much the same manner that a man has, for centuries, always been able to decide on those best suited for him.
First, the idea that her pregnancy is even being discussed here, in this public a medium, is simply horrid. It’s difficult enough having to privately experience the emotional, physical and psychological changes pregnancy brings without the entire country offering their two cents and putting her under the microscope.
But she is a public figure – it comes with the territory.
Still, there are some people who need to shut the hell up. The shriekbots, for one – those so-called feminists who feel she should have had an abortion. Well, they and their male feminist counterparts who think the young lady erred when she put an embarrassing dent into the Safe Sex condom campaign. Let’s get this straight.
A woman has the right to choose, one way or the other, the course that’s best for her with regards to reproduction. Sara Lawrence is not a callow teenage girl. She is a woman, an educated one at that, capable of making measured decisions.
And for those currently engaging in the preposterous argument that with the pregnancy announcement, she has somehow been made to become less than what a Miss Jamaica should be, why? I may be just your garden variety conspiracy theorist, but isn’t this simply another attack on feminism, modern womanhood here? I mean, why does it seem that it’s mainly our women who are held up on impossible pedestals and labelled ‘role models’?
Our male ambassadors don’t come under this intense speculation for their decisions to, say, father as many children as they want to outside of wedlock, do they? Well, do they?
Bob Marley – I love him dearly – notoriously sired many love children outside of his marriage. One ironically with one of our very own former Miss Jamaica Worlds, Cindy Breakespeare, Miss World 1976. But does that in any way negate his being our country’s most influential ambassador? Does it in any way change how we view him?
As I noted before, maybe I’m just being a conspiracy theorist, my seeing the attacks on Sara Lawrence as another attack on women being penalised for possessing ovaries, but it sure seems suspect to me. Why is her decision to have a baby ‘an error of judgment’? When an unmarried male celebrity, however, can boast that he has fathered over 20 children, with different women, he is secretly admired – lionised if you want to know the truth – for his abilities in the area of sex.
Why does he not become a negative role model for our young boys?
Maybe an issue for consideration here is how we view our so-called role models. I think Sara Lawrence was right to abdicate the crown. It was the responsible thing to do. But there is no shame in her reasons for stepping down. The truth is: there isn’t one among us who’s perfect. Not one. While there may be people we admire, there must always be an understanding that nobody’s perfect.
This is why I don’t subscribe wholesale to the idea of earthly role models. Listen, I was a great admirer of my mother, but I knew she had faults. That never once stopped me from thinking of her as my hero, and even now, the kind of woman I most want to become.
Sara Lawrence ought not to be made to feel the weight of responsibility for corrupting the ideals of a generation of young girls looking up to her. The lesson here for our girls is that saints belong in heaven. The lesson here is that the true meaning of being a woman, indeed, of being a valuable human being, is having the courage to admit to a mistake, and more importantly, having the mettle to fix it.
