March Essay Competition

March 9 — March 22, 2026,

Prompt

The average man, regardless of creed, family background, religion, personal convictions, or social, economic, or marital status, will always feel threatened or intimidated by a successful, strong, independent woman.

Competition Home Page

Essay

Score

The unsettling texture of conventions

By Efe Igbogine

March 15, 2026 · 955 words · 5 min read

⭐ 5th Place

“If convention feels wrong for you, if your skin bristles and your spirit stalls at the thought of doing something the way it is done, then stop and act.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The discourse on gender will always be a difficult one to have. It is unsettling, sour on the tongue, because by probing and poking at societal norms, we dig up years of conditioning that are incredibly difficult to unlearn—or even to confront. People are often unwilling to accept that they have been indoctrinated to see things the way they do, so they twist and contort themselves in an attempt to evade the burden of critical thinking. The patriarchy, like other adjacent systems of oppression and subjugation such as racism, maintains the status quo by constantly reiterating and positioning its rigid principles and ideologies as the norm. It does this through the seamless intersection of religious and cultural values. It is in fact a sinister method of labelling any shift away from convention as rebellion or anomaly, thereby making it increasingly difficult for people with differing opinions to voice them. In a vivid memory from my childhood, our English teacher would occasionally engage my class in a boys-versus-girls quiz on random knowledge. It was thrilling—sparring intellectually with the girls in my class, their bursts of brilliance crackling in the air between us. Each time we did this, the girls almost always emerged as the winners. My English teacher was displeased with us boys. He rambled on about how we should be ashamed for letting the girls win, yet in the few instances when we did win, he did not reprimand the girls for losing as though by losing, they had adhered with the natural order of things and all was well with the world again. The language with which we refer to gender reveals our ingrained biases. If a girl comes first in class and you tell the boys to be ashamed that they allowed a girl to come first, you are peddling a dangerous narrative. You are telling them to see women as perpetually beneath them, and to interpret not being ahead of them as some sort of personal moral failing. We raise boys and girls differently, often to the detriment of the latter. In this essay, I examine how socialization within the family unit and society at large contributes significantly to the insecurity that men experience around strong, successful women later on in life.  In many Nigerian homes where the mother is the breadwinner, she is expected to perform humility—to foot the bills silently and then beam brightly at the children, at family gatherings, and at social functions like the “good wife,” while the father postures as the one who provides for the family. Once, in a village close to my hometown, Uzere, a man reportedly committed suicide because he could not bear the shame and stigma of learning that his wife had publicly revealed she was the one feeding the family. We can draw a straight line from tragic events like this to the unrealistic standards of gender roles and expectations. Children are very impressionable. It is no wonder that boys—after observing unhealthy dynamics like this—grow into men who are intimidated at the sight of a successful woman who is uninterested in performing subservience. All their lives they have been taught to think of themselves as the superior gender, a mindset that can be likened to the heady feeling of addiction: the kind of high that ushers the entirety of your being into a dizzying rush of power. Coming down from that high can be quite jarring; you become a deflated thing, stripped of the forces that supposedly made you whole. The real world can be very humbling. As a man, you begin to realize that anybody is capable of being anything regardless of gender. You struggle with the idea of not being the major provider in your household because our paths and destinies as humans are different, and patriarchal notions are not the metric for how life is meant to be. You begin to feel emasculated when your female boss does the exact thing that her male counterpart would do and get away with. There is a scattering at this point—the sensation of something precious slipping through your fingers. How you approach this phase of disillusionment depends largely on how deep-seated your indoctrination is. Women were not created to be appendages to men or to automatically be at a stage lower than them, and right now there is an accelerating wave of conscious, progressive change—aimed at decentering and dismantling these stereotypes and expectations—that props up the grim, imposing mask of a patriarchal system that continues to prescribe how women should be rather than how they want to be. The late president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, captured the theme of this essay succinctly when he said: “In every male languishes the soul of a feudal lord, a male chauvinist which must be destroyed.” It is a quote that emphasizes the need to push back against the kind of socialization that insists on a supreme gender—a “mono-human.” Sankara foresaw the dangers of repeating the patterns through which society trains boys; it is like planting a poor seed and then expressing shock when it fails to grow properly. We need to teach boys to respect and humanize women, and not to see them as lesser beings at the very critical stages of their lives—their formative years. For the men who gradually unlearned and rebelled against convention at a young age—like little me, confused by what my English teacher had said and silently refusing to feel shame that didn't make any sense—may your bloom on the right path be steady, and may we be intentional and conscious enough to raise a better generation of men.

Final score

Average from 2 judges

82.0%

Judge 1 — 78.0%

Judge 2 — 86.0%

Average — 82.0%