We’re Here for the Comments, Never the Solutions
Has it occurred to you that men are not as rabid as they used to be toward a woman they considered improperly dressed? Make no mistakes about it, this still happens but something has tamed their temperament not only toward women but life in general.
What do you think happened to those boys that catcalled women and tore off their clothes in Cairo Road? Did they grow up and become fathers and husbands to women themselves? Did they suddenly become liberal in their views?
It’s hard to pin it on any specific shift in society but I’d argue that men got exposed.
See, it’s not unusual now for a bus conductor to have a smartphone where he watches videos and scrolls saucy photos of beautiful women. The internet has given the Zambian man a false sense of reality. Social media is the mental fast food of our generation.
Today’s man is happy to live online because the alternative is too much work. Too much responsibility and accountability. It’s safer and simpler to hide behind the veil of a digital world.
You simply need to scroll below any photo or video of a woman, man, politician, news story or wild animal to know that we migrated our mob mentality from the streets to the comments section. And with worse vitriol.
Man will make infantile comments on social media but struggles, even fails, to express the same things in person. We are cowards now.
It’s not that passing hurtful remarks about a woman online is any better than harassing her in public, all because you don’t like the outfit she picked that day.
It’s that the internet has democratized mindlessness. It’s become too easy to be an idiot. But this, too, applies to being a better man for yourself, home or community. It has given us a false sense of action and agency.
We’re more likely to e-protest a harsh policy or political climate than walk the streets in resistance. We’re happy to save a quote on the internet, post it and say something without saying it. We don’t even own our words anymore.
The likes, laughs and quick validation we get from posting our breakfast or lunch tastes better than the actual food itself. Bible verses are easier to post than to live by. Posturing as a good, honourable man is literally a screenshot away.
Men stopped what they were doing to help road accident victims, not film them. Threw eggs at incompetent politicians, not post memes on their Facebook profile. We pulled apart two men from fighting, not pour gasoline on their differences. We are a diluted lot with zero concentration. Everything distracts us.
The decline is palpable. We’ve taken the bait and now we’re digital street kids, with the reward being social media and smartphones retreating us from reality and making us antisocial and daft.
