Defiling the temple of God

The body is the temple of God – THE HOLY BIBLE

WHEN it comes to this time of year, there is often great sexual excitement and people appear to be on heat. They start dreaming about female thighs, hot pairs of buttocks, slim sexy waists and voluptuous sensual bodies. When they sleep, they have wet dreams, and in the mornings they thank the gods of Larteh that when it comes to matters of the waist, they can also be counted.

The excitement is not for nothing. It is engendered by the wild expectation of another round of beauty contests from the regional level to the national level in order to separate the vultures from the crows. By the time it is all over rapists are super-charged because they have a low sexual boiling point; born-agains backslide and general male libido heightens.

Kofi Kokotako was just telling me that if a sexual temperature test is conducted at the next grand finale of the Miss Ghana contest for all males in the audience including the judges, it would be seen with much effort that 95 per cent or more of them would fail the test and be found with real stiffness between their thighs. It would all go to confirm the fact that the contest is not a decent one.

Kokotako who is now a man of God, once confessed to me that he got excited when the show was getting to fever-pitch with the girls showing their fleshly wares in bikini and swimsuits. Today, he is a Reverend and if he is fasting, you’ll think he is rather on hunger strike.

“The body is the temple of the Lord,” Kokotako preached to me last weekend. “People have since the beginning of time desecrated this temple of the Lord. Today moral degeneration is at an all-time low comparable to the days of Sodom and Gomorrah. People are indeed defiling the temple of the Lord. Women use their private parts to smuggle cocaine and weed; women expose their thighs and buttocks in the full glare of lustful males in the name of beauty contests or material gain, and some women actually hawk their bodies for cash. The Lord is aggrieved.”

I have never seen Kofi so emotional. When he told me he was going to be a Reverend, I laughed aloud. I thought it must be for the financial gain. But the man has really transformed, breaking his friendship with mahogany bitters, gin-and-lime, and preaching the word with vim and power.

Yet, if 30 per cent of Sikaman natives could change completely and become like Reverend Kofi Kokotako, Sikaman will turn to be the abode of angels.

And if all young girls could engage in a measure of reflection and contemplate issues concerning womanhood and refuse to be exploited, used, paraded semi-naked and virtually made fools just because of material gain, the world would be blessed and free from calamities. We are sinning too much with our bodies!

Some see beauty contests and people see it as entertainment. In another sense, it is a subtle form of societal officially endorsing and confirming that women are nothing more than sex objects and have been created just for the fun and pleasure of men. To prove this, they must be conned and paraded almost naked and in the process applauded or booed.

Those adjudged beautiful get weighty prizes and the ‘money no fine’ get pittance and told better luck next time. And they grin like baboons unknowing that they have been exploited, debased, cheapened and laughed at.

At the Beijing Conference, a group of hot-headed Japanese women demonstrated and organised press conferences to protest the exploitation of women under the guise of beauty contests during which they are portrayed as sex objects with no value apart from being ideal to be lusted after. Those who attended the conference came back with a different view about beauty pageants.

They should rise up against this idea of yearly beauty pageants which have debased womanhood to the extent that the beauty of a woman is no longer seen as sacred but a thing of no value.

And if this has been the case, why wouldn’t rapists also seek to claim their fair share since the whole human female is being cheaply advertised, under-invoiced and can literally be had at a discount?

I don’t really know, but I have the feeling that this beauty contest idea is fast losing popularity anyway. At the last Greater Accra regional contest, it was difficult getting contestants to participate. There was only one willing contestant and girls in the audience had to be cajoled, begged and virtually forced to participate when they didn’t want to.

Although the eventual beauty queen came from Greater Accra, I guess it was wrong for the organisers to have compelled people in the audience to participate. They must realise by the disinterest being shown that their annual programme is becoming unpopular and must be scraped, leaving the dance competition.

It is tragic that although it is becoming unpopular at the national level, it is catching on fast at the local level, though. Beauty contests are organized at end-of-year parties, funerals, graduation ceremonies, outdooring, KVIP commissioning ceremonies and birthday parties.

Some of these are organised decently with no buttocks palaver. If the organisers cannot organise the national contests in a similar way then, they better stop wasting the time of the girls, and desecrating their beauty and parading them as only good for sex and nothing else.

Are we tired of categorising God’s wonderful creation into sheep and goats, vultures and crows, the beautiful and the ugly?

Females should not allow themselves to be used in such indecent ways. They must have pride in womanhood and think first and foremost of their bodies as the holy temple of God which should not be defiled as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

This article was first published on Saturday April 20, 1996