What kind of madness is this?
Last Sunday when the global media community marked World Press Freedom Day, gender sensitivity was highlighted, including how women are portrayed in the media.
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However, sadly, currently the issue is as much what some women are doing to the image of women as how the media portrays women.
The theme for the May 3 observance was ‘Let Journalism Thrive! Towards Better reporting, Gender Equality & Media Safety in the Digital Age’.
‘Gender equality’ sandwiched between ‘better reporting’ and ‘media safety’ demonstrated the centrality of the gender issue to the initiators of the Day, UNESCO. It was also to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1995 UN Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing, China and the Beijing Platform for Action – a set of actions to promote women’s rights.
There has been campaigning for years against the negative portrayal of women in the media and now activists find that they have to contend with a most scandalous development: Some Ghanaian women are circulating, or allowing to be circulated, photos of themselves in the nude. And I’m not referring to those touting for clients.
It used to be that the undisputed indicator of someone ‘not being all right up there’ or having ‘lost their key’, was going naked in public. As a popular proverb sums up: if a mad person comes to take away your cloth while you’re having your bath, you don’t leap out of the bathroom naked to chase him to retrieve it, because then people might see both of you as mad.
However, these days it appears that some people want us to believe that displaying one’s naked body on a global viewing platform, the Internet, is the new, ultimate status symbol, and a mark of sophistication.
What kind of madness is this? Even with nudist colonies, permitted in other countries, one reads that they don’t accept outsiders in their midst unless the strangers are prepared to take off their clothes and be like them. If this Internet-fuelled nudity craze is seen as a way to achieve ‘fame’, it must be a desperate kind of attention-seeking.
The fact that mobile phones have cameras appears to be what is promoting this strange practice. Anyone with a cell phone, a smart phone, can be an instant photographer and has the means to share such photos with the world.
It’s bad enough that these days the favoured revenge of some aggrieved ex-lovers is either disfiguring their former sweetheart with acid, or posting their nude photos on the Internet, but how can one understand a woman who voluntarily circulates her nudity on the so-called social media? And, anyway, what is ‘social’ about a facility that enables people to do that so easily, with no hindrance?
Well, call me old-fashioned but I simply can’t understand this preoccupation some people seem to have with putting their nakedness on public display. What possesses them? If it is a mental condition, what is the antidote?
I guess my questions should go to psychologists and psychiatrists, but in the first place, what makes people want to be photographed nude? Secondly, what on earth makes a girl or a woman want to show others such photos? Even if they are meant for a partner who happens to be away, how does that help the couple?
And I would have thought that the danger should such photos fall into the wrong hands, or what could happen if that relationship ends, would scare people against such actions, but apparently not.
Worryingly, some of these exhibitionists are not deprived people compelled to do that for high earnings, or who might not know the full implications of such an act. Some of them are apparently from good homes, or even at the top of the educational ladder.
Yet, practising what some would view as sheer pornography doesn’t seem to bother them. Neither, it seems, are they worried about the effect on their family or the implications for their reputation.
Recently, media headlines were full of a woman radio presenter of a Takoradi radio station, known by a Nigerian name, Adaeze Onyinyechie Ayoka, or Princess Ada, and by her Ghanaian name, Naana Akosua Appiah Antwi, following the reported posting of her nude photos of her on the Internet. It began as a case of a kidnap and gang-rape victim, but later developments turned it into quite a different story, prompting many questions.
I will suspend further comment on this matter for now.
And earlier this year, nude photos of a student of the University of Cape Coast, said to be aspiring to contest election as president of the Students Representative Council, were reportedly on the Internet. Worse, shockingly, Nana Abena Korkor Addo was quoted as insisting that she had posted them there herself! And, evidently foreseeing doubts about her state of mind, she affirmed that she was mentally sound!
I hope that what a colleague told me, that circulating nude photos seems to be in fashion among tertiary students, was a joke, but maybe it’s not and so parents and guardians need to take note – and act.
As indicated, this bizarre behaviour could have serious consequences on the gender equality struggle, the campaign against women being portrayed, or seen as, sex objects.
Admittedly, it’s not all women who care about equality or who are gender sensitive. But one assumes that surely, even to those not interested in such equality issues, respect would be important. And what respect does any woman hope to gain by circulating their nudity for all to see?
I wonder if those young women ever think of the consequences. Is that the kind of ‘fame’ one would be happy to have referred to, and asked to explain, during a job interview; or an achievement one would boast of to one’s children and grandchildren?
These exhibitionists may be only a few, but even one such example has the potential of cancelling the hard-won gains of the gender agenda.
Sadly they seem to have no idea that their quest for fame by nudity, or whatever their objective, is putting at serious risk the years of campaigning to uplift the image of women as part of the equality crusade.