Victoria Hammah, former Deputy Minister of Communication
The hypocritical moral narratives being thrown at actress and socialite Moesha Boduong for her candid and brutish honesty on Christiane Amanpour’s “Sex and Love’ across the world only reflect the ignorant reactionary elements of our society.
Did I see Christine Amanpour expressed surprise at Moesha Boduong’s position? This is even more hypocritical?
The US society is rooted in inequalities of not just gender but racial and even economic. The US has the largest pornography industry in the [ads1]world contributing more than half to the global porn industry. It is undeniable that the porn industry does not only commodifies and commercializes the woman’s body but reinforces historical stereotypes of women as sex objects.
Sex for financial security is the result of an uneven distribution of resources. Sex for money is the consequence of poverty and nothing else.
The above raises the realities of inequalities in our societies steeped in the social divisions of labour underscored by “capitalist economic governance”.
This issue should be looked at from a purely historical and materialist positons.
Being a woman in itself is a historical challenge and especially being a woman in a society such as Ghana with staggering poverty will obviously perpetuate an asymmetrical sexual power relations.
The debate should be about how governments should create enabling environment and opportunities to eradicate poverty!
We should broaden the debate to include even more devastating social inequitable issues such as child prostitution, rising teenage pregnancies, rising youth unemployment, maternal mortality, lack of access to adequate health care etc.
Even more importantly, we must eliminate social and cultural discriminatory practices and institutions that mitigate against women and other marginalized groups.
As well as implement affirmative policies across all socioeconomic structures of our society as an effective way to address inequalities.
In this case our collective enemy is Poverty not bold Moesha Boduong and the many ordinary Ghanaian women and men who have to subject themselves to indignity just to survive
