Brethren, it’s the Year of Our Lord 2019 and Nigerian men have made me question yet again why I share the same gender with them. Shaming women for being autonomous with their bodies is so commonplace on Nigerian Misogyny Twitter, right down to women still unmarried and hence the usual sexist joke of saying ”Shiloh” – to imply that the root of women’s singleness is beyond the physical and that they need divine intervention.
It’s even more grating when these jokes are lobbed at women no longer in their thirties. The joke, which I find crude, foists up the idea that all women want to be married and plays into our obsessive marriage culture. As such, it bloats up the social worth of men like a priced commodity women must constantly seek out, even though men are the ones who need marriage more.
He said “is it my Shiloh?” ?? pic.twitter.com/bPnOzr2Pct
— AJ | Adonai (@mrmanhere_) March 12, 2019
The above exchange happened on Twitter and, as you can see, a man is shaming a woman with Shiloh because she insists that she can curve men till she is forty. Shiloh is a yearly, week-long Christian event organised by Winners Chapel and known for rigorous, intense praying. It’s also a place of damnation for single Nigerian women, as evidenced by how men routinely strip women of nuance and complexity. It’s 2019 and the Shiloh joke is yet to die. Maybe it is Nigerian men that need to take themselves to Shiloh, for deliverance.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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