Edwin Okolo: Sometimes levelling up means stepping down [NEW VOICES]

by Edwin Okolo

Let me tell you about my bestie Deola (yes I have several, so shush). I have known her for half a decade and we’ve been best friends the entire time, starting our careers in fashion together, skulking in the corner of the swirl of parties that came with the job, celebrating milestones. But our friendship is more than that. In late 2013, Deola went in for a check-up at her gynaecologist for amenorrhea and came out irrevocably changed. She had Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) a reproductive condition. PCOS meant long droughts where she didn’t have a period because her ovaries wouldn’t ovulate, painful periods when she did, mood swings, depression and as an annoying bonus, hairiness. I only speak about this now, because Deola has chosen repeatedly to speak on her condition on her blog and through vlogs on her Youtube channel.

She regulates her hormones and takes care of her physical health but the thing neither of us could anticipate was the mental toll it would have on her. You see PCOS means a lowered possibility of getting pregnant ‘organically’. And until her ability to get pregnant went from a given to something that would probably involve doctors, needles and medicine Deola says she never really gave thought to motherhood and companionship. Over the last three years, she has found out that a lot of men place a woman’s worth squarely around her ability to get pregnant at the drop of the hat. She sees it in the Nollywood films her mother watches, and the time the doctor called her aside after a check up and told her while she still has time and is in good health, she should freeze her eggs ‘just in case’. Or the time she was advised to get pregnant immediately and worry about the consequences and financial implications of raising a child as a single mother, stating that at least she would have a child. All of these micro and macro-aggressions made her more vocal, and incidentally more feminist. 

It has also made me reevaluate my stand on feminism.

For now, I decline from referring to myself as a feminist. If anyone feels they need to categorise me by my pro-feminist leanings, then they can call me a feminist ally. I say this for one reason.

I will never truly understand what it means to live as a woman, why feminism is for many women a fight for survival. I will never understand what it meant for the first women to gain the right to vote, or own property or travel without their father or husband’s consent. I will never understand what it means for you to have to second guess every man around you, to live in a constant state of vigilance because you have always experienced sexual harassment or rape from childhood. I will never understand it feels like to walk into a consultation room and leave with the knowledge that you have a chronic, incurable illness, and then have everyone dismiss this and insist that you be ‘selfless’ and get pregnant, ‘just so people will know that you have one’. Nobody tells a diabetic to have some ice-cream cake or someone with hypertension to get piss drunk on alcohol, just so everyone knows they can still ‘do it’.

Oppression works by trivialising or universalizing the experiences of the oppressed group. We saw it in the 2016 US elections where the media insisted women voted Donald Trump into power, instead of specifying that it was educated, upper-middle-class white women. Hillary’s achievements were trivialised, one of the most powerful women in the world was pressured by hillbillies hiding behind egg avatars to ‘smile more’. 

I understand feminism theoretically,  and have one or two experiences that stripped away my privilege as a man and helped me see how marginalized women’s lives are, how constricted my friend Deola’s life is, but I will never truly grasp the terrifying scope, the numbness and despair that comes from never having a moment of reprieve. So I choose to be an ally to feminists, to listen when they explain their lived experiences, to accept that when you have lived your entire life on the defensive, something as innocuous as being called ‘a female’ instead of a woman will not pass unaddressed. I choose to lend my voice to theirs, to speak in support of them but never for them (unless it is to other men, who are socialised to never listen to women anyways), to understand feminism is different for every woman and is often contradictory and messy. 

Because of PCOS a big part of Deola’s feminism will be deeply personal and God willing, I  will be her biggest ally and cheerleader. Because she is an amazing person and will be a pretty awesome mother.

Sometimes levelling up means stepping down from the soap box and cheering in the stands. 


Edwin writes to explore concepts that he seeks to understand but cannot directly experience because of gender and genetics. He used to run the experimental fiction column ‘The Alchemist’s Corner’ and created the YA series Seams at The Naked Convos and serves as a fiction editor at Stories NG. He has written for Thelonelycrowd, Sable Lit Mag, Omenana and the Kalahari Review and was longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize. He is obsessed with children, cats and Paternak, exactly in that order.

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