Two years ago I was assigning seminar tasks to a group of graduate students in Gender Studies. One of the articles on my agenda bore a provocative title Whose pussy is this? A feminist comment from Hooks’ book entitled Talking hack,—Think — ingfeminist, thinking black (1989). The article as I had anticipated stimulated a lot of controversy. A male student whom I asked to make a presentation based on the article said he simply could not do it. In his opinion, the title sounded vulgar, and according to his cultural norms, he simply did not want to work on an essay which deal with the ‘female genitalia’.
To provide a brief summary of this article, Bell Hooks makes a feminist comment on Spike Lee’s film She’s Gotta Have It. Her analysis focuses on whether the film depicts a radically new image of female sexuality. Nola Darling, the main character in the film, is depicted as the perfect embodiment of woman as desiring subject—a representation that does challenge sexist notions of female passivity. Ironically and unfortunately Nola Darling’s sexual desire is not depicted as an autonomous gesture, as an independent longing for sexual expression, satisfaction and fulfilment. Instead her assertive sexuality is most often portrayed as though her body, her sexually aroused being, is a reward or gift she bestows on the deserving male. Nola believes in ‘pussy power’—while this character is not sexually passive, her primary concern is pleasing each of her partners. Though Spike Lee leads the viewer to believe that Nola enjoys sex, her sexual fulfilment is never the central concern. She is pleased only to the extent that she is able to please. Then Bell Hooks drives the point home. As Jaime (one of the male characters) rapes Nola and aggressively demands that she answer the question, “Whose pussy is this?”—this is supposed to be the moment of truth—the moment when she can declare herself independent, sexually liberated, the moment when she can proudly assert through resistance her sexual autonomy (for the film has highlighted her determination to be sexually active, to choose many partners, to belong to no one). Ironically she does not resist the physical violence; when Nola responds to the question “Whose pussy is this?” by saying “yours” it is difficult for anyone
Arnfred Page 166 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM
Mumbi Machera
who has fallen for the image of her as sexually liberated not to feel let down, disappointed both in her character and in the film (Hooks 1989:139).
My urging that students must discard their cultural inhibitions if they are to engage in useful discussion dissolves most of the social cultural eccentricity among them. So this male student did the presentation. The discussion was rich and it led us into analyzing our own African cultures and how the female body is located in the social milieu. Some of the conclusions we arrived at explicate that the female body is owned, it belongs to the social entity mainly for reproductive purposes and Man has been commissioned to oversee this ‘noble function’ by subjecting the female to close scrutiny throughout her lifetime. Thus childhood and adolescent socialization in most African communities do not embrace the pleasurable aspects of sex. Girls are told that sex is only good in marriage, that a woman should not have sex with any other man except the husband, one should not deny the husband his right to sexual intercourse and most importantly one should preserve one’s virginity and look forward to bearing many children for the husband. Such societal expectations show the extent to which women are detached from their sexuality. Like Nola Darling most women (some female students supported this) have sex to please their partners with total disregard for their own pleasure. This to a certain extent explains why women fail to resist harmful practices such as FGM and sexual violence in marriage simply because sexual fulfilment is not their central concern. On the other hand, men go to such extremes in a bid to control women’s sexuality.
In a research report entitled “Domestic Violence in Kenya” I cite a not-so-un — common case of a man who “… dismembered a month-old baby before chopping off the wife’s arm with an axe following a bitter quarrel over the paternity of the child” (Machera 1997:47). These are issues, which I hope to explore in later works on the social construction of the female sexuality and the reproduction of gender violence in African communities.