The Creative Space

I just finished two episodes of Christiane Amanpour’s “Love and Sex Around the World” on CNN and all I can say is “Wow!”
It only further reinforces my argument that we Africans need to tell our own stories and should never let any Westerner do that for us. They hardly ever get it right. For some unknown reason, they can never reach the true essence of our story and the great Amanpour was no different.
Having the chance to see the episode she shot in Shanghai, China before watching the one she filmed in Ghana allowed me to compare and contrast how she told the stories of two very different cultures regarding love and sex.
In the Shanghai episode, she started off by explaining how the conservative and rather emotionless nature of the Chinese society greatly affects love and sex. She then went on to weave her story around that central theme and a very humanistic way. She succeeded even in making the perpetuators of these rigid cultural practices look good and acceptable.
The episode from Accra followed the Shanghai one. Ms. Amanpour opened by describing Ghana as “one of the most religious countries in the world”. While that could be true, it is not the true basis of why love and sex are seen and practiced the way they are in Ghana.
However, it is from this background that she went ahead and painted Ghanaian men as hypocrites who hide behind the religion to practice infidelity and oppress their women.

A much more fitting background would have been what a friend suggested:
“A society struggling with two opposing cultures – the monogamous dictates of Christianity and our long-lived culture of polygamy”.
Based on such a background, the words of the older businesswoman she interviewed later in the show makes sense:
“Love is love. As love means in your country, love means the same thing in our country. As the man wants to be with one wife, the love has to be shared”.
Those words are almost an ode to polygamy and the old way of life.
Without that background, then Moesha’s statement at the end of her segment carries the hour and the narrative: “I don’t think true love works in Ghana”.
It is however on this latter statement by Ms. Boudong that the whole documentary comes to rest. And thus she goes on to depict Ghanaian men as selfish, hypocritical, sex-obsessed male chauvinist neanderthals!
Truth be told, some Ghanaian men may fit that bill but there are also a lot of men trying to do right by their wives.
She even throws in the Trokosi culture to further sink us into that pit of depravity.

Ghana, like most other places, has its faults as well as strengths. The way of life of the people, like most places in Africa, is subject to a culture that often is a blend of a traditional and the colonial. These cultures are frequently not complimentary and are at loggerheads with each other. Thus the dictates of a traditional polygamous culture clash with the demands of Christianity.
In telling the Ghanaian or African story, it is always important to tease out these nuances in order to give a close-to-true representation of the reality. Failure to appreciate these nuances often leads to the rather negative depiction of the African and in Ms. Amanpour’s case, the Ghanaian.

Human behavior is a very difficult thing to change. Thus the southern states in the US still struggle with the history of slavery and the Arab nations struggle to afford women equal rights. Is it any surprise that Ghanaian men struggle to get over a long history of polygamy?

Do not get me wrong. I am in no way condoning infidelity or polygamy. All I am saying is if one wants to explore sex and love in a nation with a long culture of polygamy; a country now trying to adapt to a one of monogamy, an explanation of the background helps to tell the true story. That will also allow the story to be told of the men who have successfully made the transition and respect a monogamous liaison. That will help tell the story of women who are in such marriages and relationships and how they see love and sex. After all, they are Ghanaians too.

In that, Ms. Amanpour failed. In that, like most Western journalists, she failed to appreciate the nuances of our land and ended up doing what the western media does best – portraying us in a negative light.
In Shanghai, China, she was able to do that. Why could she not do that in Accra, Ghana? Is it because she did not take the time to understand our culture and is it because she could not appreciate our humanity?
Whatever the reason, the fact remains – we need to tell our own stories!
It is time!

May I rant?

“Sex & Love Around the World” is a documentary on love and sex by the award-winning journalist, Christiane Amanpour. It premieres this coming Saturday on CNN.
Like she said in an interview, “From Berlin to Beirut, Tokyo to New Delhi, Accra to Shanghai, everywhere I looked I found people seeking — and craving — love, intimacy and sexual fulfillment. My quest took me to women and girls, who we so often dismiss as only victims of our patriarchal, misogynistic, hypersexualized culture, who were boldly seizing every opportunity for satisfaction and personal pleasure. I also found their evil downside: sexless marriages, industrial-scale infidelity, and loneliness.”

Go to the page on the CNN website that has been created for the documentary. One sees the thumbnails and can watch clips of the different episodes she shot around the world. Now compare the themes she addressed in Ghana versus other places outside the African continent.
It is rather evident that in Ghana, she chose to address negative themes like polygamy and infidelity.
In Lebanon she addresses divorce, she looks at love and intimacy among Arab refugees, she tackles transgender issues in India, in Japan she touches on the meaning of phrases like “Thank You” and “I love you”… but in Ghana, she grabs onto infidelity.

Now, why would she do that?
It is not like Ghana is the only place in the world afflicted with the scourge of infidelity or we have the most polygamous relationships. I can think of three countries in Asia and two in Africa that are way ahead of us in that category.
I have an inkling as to why.
It is the reason “National Geographic” apologized to people of color people a few weeks ago. It is the reason why we Africans are always depicted as irrational buffoons without an iota of character wallowing in the pits of our shitholes.
It is because, in her eyes, we Africans do not know love and sex for us is just a barbaric affair of taking the opposite sex. So why would she waste her time discussing things like “The rising and confident African feminists” or “Juggling sex, family and work in Ghana”.
No! That would be too human for us apes!
What do we know about love anyway?
So in Ghana, she looked for the “…evil downside: sexless marriages, industrial-scale infidelity, and loneliness.”
I do not blame her though.

I blame a continent that cannot tell its own story and has the myths and traditions of other places foisted on it.
Yet, we have such a rich story to tell – of pain, glory, defeat, perseverance, betrayal, yes, love, sex, polygamy, and death. We have it all.

Come this weekend, Ms. Amanpour is going to show the world a young Ghanaian lady telling everyone how she sleeps with married men for money. Or the older woman talking about sharing her husband. Or the man worried about keeping his wife if he goes broke.
Ms. Amanpour will paint Ghana with the colors of infidelity, polygamy, and deceit. And the world will gasp and have their misgivings about those shitholers confirmed. She may even win awards.
Through all that, no one will hear of the three young ladies who recently made it to Ivy League schools from Ghana, the young women building their own businesses, those fighting for equality for women, those dying from childbirth, those working hard to take kids through school.
No one will hear those stories. Of their love and sex lives. Then, you see, that will make us human, give us character and defeat the narrative. Now, who wants that?
Well, we do! We Ghanaians do! We Africans do!

Yet I do not despair. Such lopsided reportages will only help harden our resolve on this dark continent that is time. Time to make and tell our story with the nuances only a life nourished by a spirit birthed from pain, joy, hope and resolve allows. Nuances that are baked in the sun that burns brightly over the Equator. It is time!

“O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites”.
– William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3, Scene 2

A Ghanaian writer who does a lot of work on all aspects of relationships recently published accounts of infidelity from a group of anonymous married men and women. Reading through the rather graphic descriptions set me thinking. It made me want to explore the topic and so I started doing some searching.
The issue of infidelity in marriages, its causes and ramifications can fill a book of thousand pages. When I sat down to write my thoughts on the topic, I resolved to let a yet unknown line of thinking guide me. Let’s see what I can tease out.

There are events in life that can incite a lot of emotional turmoil – the death of a loved one comes to mind. Another is infidelity or adultery for married folks. If you do not believe me, find a quiet corner, close your eyes and imagine your wife or husband making love to another. See?
The chaos that ensues in the life of the cheated almost mirrors that seen in patients after trauma and has garnered the description, “Post Infidelity Stress Disorder”, PISD.
Even though compared to married women married men are more prone to cheat (by a factor of about 2:1), both sexes do stray. Cultural stipulations may dampen the infidelity of women but it still does occur.

To understand why we stray, one has to look back at human ancestry.
The man historically was concerned about sowing seed and propagating his genes. His involvement in conception lasted minutes to maybe an hour so multiple sexual partners were possible and thus that sexual appetite.
Women, on the other hand, could get pregnant only twice a year, irrespective of how many sexual partners they had. Since the woman was more concerned about her offspring and their well-being, her craving for sex was not as incessant and rabid.
Yet throughout history, men’s appetite for casual sex has found some reciprocation for it to last through the ages. This means that there were women throughout history until today who have shared the desire for casual sex too.
Sexual jealousy in men, stories of infidelity from all cultures and the controversial theory of sperm competition (this occurs when the sperm from two different men inhabit a woman’s reproductive tract at the same time) may point to the fact that women are also connoisseurs of casual sex.

So whereas men are driven by a burning desire to pass on their genes, leading them to stray, women cheat for more solid reasons. These are all reasons that came about from our days as hunter-gatherers.
First is the economic benefit of liaising with a man wealthier and more powerful than one’s partner. In olden times, this could mean more meat and yams in the dry season. Today, we see this driving infidelity in poor countries and families in the lower socioeconomic bracket. Another reason is the genetic benefit. Women picked men who had traits a partner might not have. Lastly is the need for a woman to have a form of backup in case her partner was no more. Life then was short. An affair provided “partner insurance”.
Thus we see that both men and women have a propensity to stray.

That is why over the ages, the human has developed a rather powerful mechanism to protect against this insult.
This phenomenon is jealousy. Even though jealousy can ruin relationships and even lead to men battering or killing women, in its benign form, it is the one thing that helps us fight for our partners and ward off potential sexual challengers.
Interestingly, the behavior in women that evokes jealousy in men is totally different from that in men that makes women green.
Now due to internal fertilization in humans, a woman is always sure that the baby that pops out after nine months is hers. The man though cannot be sure. How can he tell that that baby was not sired by another man?
The woman, on the other hand, has a different set of worries. For her, a man’s emotional involvement is the surest sign that he is still committed. If he starts showing emotional involvement with another woman, that is a dangerous sign.
So for the woman, it is not so much the one night stand but that threatening emotional attachment to another female that is dangerous.
For the man, the thought of his wife involved in the physical sexual act with another man evokes the most jealousy. It births the fear that he could be a cuckold – a man raising a child sired by another man or even the husband of an adulteress. Being a cuckold can also be a fetish but that is a discussion for another day. For now, let’s stick with adultery.

The term “cuckold” comes from the cuckoo bird, a bird that lays its egg in the nests of other birds so they incubate, hatch, and raise the young cuckoo. It is a behavior termed “brood parasitism”.
Hence adulterous women risk turning their men into the bird that “breeds the young cuckoo”. It is this innate fear that drives the sexual jealousy in men. It is this innate fear that through the ages caused men to make female adultery a crime, sometimes punishable by death.
The plight of the cuckold is depicted beautifully in the hilarious Miller’s Tale from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”.
So how rampant is cuckolding really? A UK study from 2009 puts it at about 1 in 25 children. However, could this higher in other countries. I have a feeling it might be.

In most western societies, adulterous behavior can have dire economic consequences for the cheater or even the whole family including the kids, especially when it leads to divorce. This may act as a deterrent in some instances against adultery.
In societies where divorces do not carry such an economic burden for the man, it is not uncommon to see the rampant male adulterous behavior. I call this the “Sidechick Culture”, where a “sidechick” is whichever woman a man may be having an affair with at any particular time.
Besides the risk of disease, the emotional toll on the women and the neglect of the family, such behavior makes men in such cultures oblivious to the biggest fear of any man — to be a cuckold.
As an adulterous man is busy sowing his wild oats all over town, his wife may just well be finding solace in the arms of another man. Women, as we discussed earlier, are wont to do that too. The interesting bit is, an adulterous woman has the most desire to sleep with the other man when she is ovulating and with her husband at the other times.
In an interesting Uk study from 2007, strippers were asked to keep a tally of their tips for two months. They also reported the beginning and the start of their menses so the investigators could calculate their ovulation time. The strippers received an average of £42 per hour when they were near ovulation, but only £33 at all other times.
So guess who will impregnate the wife of that adulterous man who is having an affair too? And if she does get pregnant, guess who will raise that child if she stays married to the husband?
I think an active adulterous life prevents a man from picking up cues that his wife might be straying, a feat that under normal circumstances is nigh impossible.
There are several reasons given for why the Akans of Ghana have maternal inheritance. The one I subscribe to the most is because of cuckolding — a man can be sure of the fact that his sister’s son is his kin but can never be sure that his own wife’s son is really his.

So to all married men who prance around enabled by a “sidechick culture” to tick off their amorous conquests like Cassanova; to all the married men who ascribe to the belief of Verus, that “Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis”, (a wife is for honor, not for pleasure)…to all of you I have this old saying:
“Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe”.

References:

Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love or Sex. Bloomsbury, 2001.

Lecky, W.E.H. History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. 1 [1869]. E-Book

Anna Hodgekiss For The Daily Mail, 31 October 2016: Why the time of the month makes you TWICE as likely to CHEAT: Periods make women smarter, sexier and more tempted to stray

Wikipedia. Cuckold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold

Wikipedia. Adultery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery

“See I believe in money, power, and respect. First You get the money. Then you get the (expletive), power. After you get the (expletive) power (expletive) will respect you.”
– From “Money, Power, Respect” by the Lox, 1998

Those on the right say liberal-leaning folks are not outraged enough. Those on the left tell those on the right to not cast the first stone as they live in a glass house. African-Americans bemoan the fact that Cosby was treated differently and Christians attribute all that to the moral decay in Hollywood.

All because of one man – Harvey Weinstein.

Well, to the right I say, “Remember ‘Grab them by the p****’!” To the left, well, he gave you guys a lot of money and championed your causes. Could it be you looked the other way too long? To my fellow blacks, “Have you listened to the misogyny in hip hop music lately?” To those holier-than-thou Christians, “Remember the priests and the boys?”

So if it is not a right or left, black or white, moral or immoral issue, what is it then?
Let’s go all the way back to 1887 and read an opinion in a letter the historian and moralist, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, expressed in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

That is it folks – POWER!

The issue of the powerful preying on the helpless for sex is as old as humanity itself.
Genetically, the primary goal of every organism is to propagate itself. It is no different with humans. For this primary purpose, males are hardwired to donate sperm at every and any opportunity whereas females have the ability to pick the best mate. Just as with animals who prefer the stronger type who can protect the female and her offspring, so is it with women too. They tend to go for the powerful who can protect them. It follows then that the more powerful men in society are going to have access to more women and sex.
As stated earlier, power tends to corrupt those who wield it. This is through the growing of an ego that tells them they are irresistible and sexy. They develop the notion that they can have all they want, when they want and how they want it – a condition what one author calls “Sexual Hubris”. Could it be a function of people who never had now having access to all or is it an inbuilt issue of character? Is it an issue of opportunity like Bill Clinton famously explained, “…Because I could!’?
Whatever the cause, if one then combines the budding ego, the access to women and the fact that power is a rather potent aphrodisiac, we have all the makings of predatory behavior.

Yet this behavior is not confined to only men, even though they make up most of the culprits. Women have also been shown to become power-drunk and predatory.
Remember the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Zuleika? To borrow an expression from Michael Che of SNL, “…she tried to weinstein Joseph for a piece of his harvey”.
When he fled, she got him jailed. This was around 2000 BC!
A survey by Professor Joris Lammers, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands,of more than 1,500 readers of a business magazine found that powerful women also tend to prey.

A psychologist, Larry Josephs describes a measure that is used to rate this pathology – “ the dark side”. He finds it in both sexes.
“It is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy,” he once wrote.
It explains quite well the behavior of men like Caligula who had sex with his sisters while his wife watched, Elagabalus who set up a brothel in the palace in Rome and pimped himself or the 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail who fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines. King Solomon is said to have had a 1000 wives and concubines and in 8 BC China, the emperor had one queen, three consorts, nine wives of second rank, 27 wives of third rank, and 81 concubines. My own maternal great-grandfather had 8 wives!
In modern times we have our Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Tiger Woods, the FOX News executives and Harvey Weinstein.

Yet not all powerful men are dogs. The missing link is self-restraint, a quality one learns growing up. Some never do and if they do become powerful men, all hell breaks loose. So it’s a question of character as well as sexual make-up. Then is the empathy factor as well as a respect for those weaker than, especially women. In a place like Hollywood, this is especially precarious. Like a former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, Janice Min, once wrote:
“The fundamental predatory nature of Hollywood is young, attractive people — largely females — putting themselves in front of men to be judged and appraised and chosen. All this calls for a certain level of character in powerful men that may be hard to find.”
And it is not only in Hollywood.
We turn a blind eye to the indiscretions of our young athletes, call them “jocks” and excuse it as locker room behavior. Sometimes coaches even get these young men strippers and prostitutes! In all industries across the US, there are powerful men and some women, abusing their power and preying on young men and women who need their favor to get ahead in their careers. I bet this is the same story all over the world to varying degrees.

No decree from Congress or executive order form 1600 Pensylavania Avenue can outlaw this behavior. No amount of outrage can stem it. The only things that will save us from this scourge are things that we need for everyday life – character, self-restraint and empathy. It will behove all powerful men and women to acquire these traits then something interesting happens when that power flees. All those women and men flee too!