TOXIC ENEMY OF PROGRESS

Sir,

It is through reading that we discover new ideas and gain knowledge in order to make meaningful contributions in any engagement in our daily lives. When in high school, we are taught that any kind of reading is good for you.

I suppose that kind of mentality is true for the early stages of reading, when one is still trying to learn to read. But as we grow older, we do not just read for entertainment or to ‘kill time’, we read to learn so that we can enrich ourselves.
We read so that we find both the good and bad ideas, and expose the bad before they bring destruction. But most importantly, we read to learn about culture in order to pass it from one generation to the other.

Reading with a purpose helps one scrutinise and analyze everything that one reads. However, I keep noting a practice that could discourage any woman from reading; a majority of the authors almost intentionally make males stronger, more intelligent, more interesting characters and they flesh them out more.
The fact that few books have female characters kind of shows this to you. And more often you find that as a woman you can rarely connect with these females in the book.

There are books where women are portrayed as helpless and weak, locked up somewhere and waiting for prince charming to come and rescue them. Even though the main characters in the story are the women, but the real ‘heroes’ are the men who fight their way to their hearts.

As a potential mother, I would never encourage my future children to read such books. Books that teach them that things will come easy for them as long as they are pretty. Such books teach girls that they are weak, cannot help themselves and all they have to do is look pretty and one day Prince Charming will come knocking and they’ll live happily ever after. 

Unfortunately, even as adults, the novels that we read do nothing to teach us otherwise. Even history books are plagued with stories of heroes and not enough heroines.
The gendered division of reading is the most toxic enemy of progress. I believe that the power of the written word is to convey ideas, inspire empathy and compassion, and suggest ways to conduct our lives and our relationships. Let us adopt a culture of reading books by and about women and men, because they are not simply telling half the story, they are telling a distorted one.

Mbuli N

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