By Oluyinka Alawode
The quick conclusion of a whole lot of people with the DNA scandals is that many women even married ones are promiscuous but we really need to take a deeper look at the matter.
Though some women married or single may have had or still have easy virtues engaging in sexual activity frequently with different men that catch their fancy, not all women do such willingly. As a matter of fact, some women are trapped into such deep intimacy - a sort of sophisticated form of sex slavery through instilling fear in them and as a result of economic challenges.
According to Wikipedia, sexual slavery is a particular form of enslavement which includes limitations on one’s autonomy, freedom of movement and power to decide matters relating to one’s sexual activity. Thus the crime also includes forced marriages (and child-bearing), domestic servitude or other forced labour that ultimately involves forced sexual activity.
I discovered some time ago that some men who want sexual involvement with a lady and got rebuffed would then try to instil fear in her through physical attacks or attack her mean(s) of income. All these are usually done indirectly or so very subtly that she would not realise what is actually going on except she is someone on very high alert due to deep sensitivity. Most of the circumstances would seem coincidental and confusing.
At a period when I was having series of physical attacks though I was doing all I possibly could to keep safe, the coincidences got too many. I was almost becoming a nervous wreck, wondering why I was constantly being attacked. I had reasons to believe my phone lines were being bugged, so my movement was being monitored. If I had succumbed to fear, I would not have been able to articulate what was happening and quite unfortunately it is at such points some ladies make marital decisions – when in fear and they may not even realise it.
Also, there would lots of societal emotional pressures especially for working class ladies. Most of the emotional pressures attempt to make unmarried women lose their self-esteem by tying a woman’s self-worth to being married and having children. There are people and places where singles or the unmarried are deliberately humiliated to shame them for not being married and/or not having children.
Some of these pressures also attempt to create fear such as what could happen to the woman in old age if she is not able to have biological children. It is so serious that even people who are supposed to be teaching the God-kind of faith subtly introduce fear around these issues.
So, for a woman making a marital decision in the midst of these subtle fears that have been rooted deep-down in her, those fears are carried into marriage such that
She marries a man who is available and not necessarily the one she is very sure she would want to have lifelong companionship/love affair with till death do them part
She and her partner do not really take out time to plan how they would fend for their children in the long-term
She is very fearful of some people with financial might and/or social/spiritual influence or some other form of authority - what they could possibly do to her if she continues to deny certain men sexual involvement even after being married because a. she knows they could harm her, her husband and/or children but she does not have any way of proving it and does not know what she could possibly do to fight them off. She may even know what they did to other ladies like her and how they got away with it, she knows she and her husband do not have means of defending themselves against such ‘powers’ b. she knows those men could obstruct or destroy her access to financial supply/income, making it difficult to fend for her children especially if the man she married is unable to provide adequately for the family – he may also be exposed to such possible challenges. She also knows those ‘powerful’ men could cause a lot of frustrations for her making life difficult for her in her parenting quest.
In the midst of all these fears she is harbouring, there’s a man offering her more security physically, financially than her husband can offer such as a nice place to live where she and her children would be safe, have financial security that would ensure that the children’s school fees and other needs are always adequately met etc. The man is even ready to channel the help through her husband who may or may not know of his amorous interest in his wife, by giving him either directly or indirectly certain opportunities.
If she agrees to such a ‘powerful’ man’s adulterous offer inadvertently to subdue her fears, she still has the prestige of being married that society requires to accord her respect. She can also start having children and deal with the fears of what could happen in old age if she does not have biological children. If the adulterous affair with the benefactor bankrolling her directly or indirectly results in pregnancy, the child would still be hers. She may reason that after all, the man is the one helping her and therefore her husband to have a stable home and have their needs met because it is as a result she or her husband has been allowed to have the means of providing for the children and she is less fearful of what could befall them.
Some people would of course be very disgusted at all these insights into reasons women succumb to adultery. Yes, indeed, no reason is good enough for any adultery whether or not it results in children being fathered by another man and not the husband. But anyone who understands the power of fear especially in a woman would realise how potent fear is in sexually enslaving women such that they agree to sexual involvement against their wishes.
The reason a lot of women do not speak out when they are under the pressures of sexual predators is because of societal backlash on her especially if a man she is not married to has succeeded even once in getting her to have inappropriate sexual relations. She would be accused of being sexually promiscuous.
When a married woman gets raped and it becomes public knowledge, her husband would be so ridiculed that their marriage may not be able to stand the pressures. Fearful of that, most women would not speak out on it to get the perpetrator punished. Worse still, that rape experience can then be used to blackmail her into repeated sexual involvement with the rapist or another man that knows especially if the woman or her husband is financially vulnerable.
I heard a woman recount how after she got wedded, a rich man who had supported her financially in her wedding plans molested her. According to her, he did not succeed in having intercourse with her. Moreover, she was already pregnant for her husband as at the time that incident happened. Since the molester was rich and socially-influential, she knew she and her husband would not be able to tackle him.
So she decided to keep away from him as much as possible because she was able to do that (not all women can keep away from such molesters immediately. Some are repeatedly coerced into sexual involvement). After she put to bed, and felt she was strong enough to discuss the issue because of the emotional trauma it caused her which she did not want to aggravate during pregnancy, she decided to tell her husband – guess his reaction?- he drove her away with the baby.
The issue was later resolved many months later and he accepted her back. But how many women have the courage to withstand accusations, even if falsely, of being promiscuous because a man molested her? In this case he did not even succeed o? Knowing his wife has been molested especially in work or faith-based situations, some husbands would not divorce or separate, but that would cause him to become jealously suspicious of her especially if she still has to relate closely with that man or other men due to work or any reason.
If the molester succeeds and it results in pregnancy, would a husband want to keep to the marriage vow of till death do them part if she tells him? The right thing would of course be for her to tell him and face whatever consequences but in a society where a woman’s self-worth is fundamentally tied to being married ‘respectably’, that fear keep a lot of women mute. It also gives such perpetrators the power to continue molesting the woman through blackmails. In this kind of blackmail, they do not ask for money but her body and can even give her financial rewards for succumbing and she could then use the money or opportunity to provide for the child or children she has through them
SO WHAT ARE THE SOLUTIONS?
Deal with fear – be alert when people are trying to instil fear in you through any means. Do not allow anyone to coerce or even entice you into anything you do not want to do or that you know is wrong.
Do not attach your self-worth to anything and don’t allow anyone define you by what has happened to you. If you are a faith person, you have the advantage of knowing you were created by the Almighty God and not by your situation or circumstances.
Speak out – if you are being pressured to do anything wrong or against your will- speak out – wrong doers hide under the cover of being hidden. They know if a woman is married, she would most likely get the blame in most societies if she is being sexually-pressured and even accused of adultery, so they would keep throwing that in her face. If we continue allowing someone else to do us wrong and we keep quiet because of fear, they are going to control our lives and push us even into worse situations. Many women could have avoided being pressured to have a child/children fathered by another man other than their husband if they had spoken out from the very onset and refused to accept sexual involvement with another man
Women concerned need to be very strong and united in their determination to deal with this issue of being coerced into sexual involvement against their wishes. Even as a single, I have been constantly harassed by men who wanted sexual involvement with me and acted as though it was their right, they also tried very hard to instil fear in me. Some of the people that wanted me to shut up when I started speaking out on it were women like me. They implied it was my fault, yet I never slept with any of those men and I was being judged. Some women even recommended that I should go and get married as the solution to being sexually-harassed and some were very nasty in pointing out that something must be wrong with me for complaining about such things – that it was normal for men to do such. – to insist on having sexual involvement with a woman against her wish and the best way to protect myself was to get married. Then I found out that when a woman gets married under those kind of circumstances or with that motivation, when faced with such sexual pressures from other men who have certain ‘powerful’ influences, she would likely shut up. As a matter of fact, some of those sex predators went out of their way to set me up into getting wedded with some men they had control over. In fact I learnt one of the men trying to set me up with a younger man under his control was not the father of the children born by the woman he was married to. So, of course he and probably some of those other men wanted to put me into that kind of a situation where I would be wedded to a man but would be so fearful that I would yield to sexual involvement with at least one of them and possibly have children with them. You know what? The fact that I was clearly unwilling to get sexually-involved with them didn’t stop them, they wanted to coerce me into it by being very harsh with me. In addition, around that period I was constantly being robbed or physically attacked. A lot of those men and also women tried to instill fear of not being married and having children into me - they clearly understood that if a woman is desperate to get married and have children, she would likely agree to do wrong things to achieve both or either.
Also on solutions to such, let us learn to make do with whatever little we have at any point in time. If you are being pressured into wrongdoing just to retain or get more financial or material benefits – it will open you up for sex-traps.
If you ever get trapped into a sexually-compromising situation, learn to pray for God’s help- you probably ignored the warning signs before then. But if you really don’t want to do it, pray to God and let the predator know that even if he harms you, he would never be free – he would be cursed!
Avoid promiscuity –inappropriate sexual expressions often cause heartaches and ensnares immediately or eventually. So let us have good guiding principles for our life – the sex organs were never meant to control the human being.
Families need to be very very determined and intentional in preparing their youngsters especially females for life- we are in a wicked world where all sorts of things happen- where people use others for selfish advantage even if the life of the person or people used are destroyed. But you may not recognise it outwardly. People who are confident will identify such wrongdoing no matter how hidden and would refuse to be pulled into it. Sexual slavery is real and it can happen in such sophisticated forms. It is closer to people than they realise and you may not know those who have been so enslaved.
If you ever miss it, realise that a mistake can be corrected by doing the right thing going forward. NNL.
