The curvy craze is an aspect of the global sexual revolution

Display. Some of the contestants of Miss Curvy pageant who turned up for auditioning at Club Ambience in Bukesa along Hoima road on March 9. Photo by Michael Kakumirizi

What you need to know:

Way to go: Our Ugandan society is subtly being more and more erotised in an artificial way. Sexuality should not be tolerated or informalised as a private function of aimless pleasure to the marauding hyper sexualised spectators, writes retired educationist, Dr Peregrine Kibuuka.

Anecdotal information of the Idi Amin era narrates that an attempt was made to introduce the curvy craze under the name “bottom up curvy”.
Amin, a devout Muslim, would not countenance such immodesty against women. He banned it and the promoters fled to Kenya where they used to operate past midnight. Amin further banned the miniskirt and decreed a modest long dress called the “maxi”.

It reached right up to the lady’s ankles and named it Amin nvaako. The curvy craze has made a second attempt to infiltrate Uganda under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and it seems to be succeeding under the youthful State Minister of Tourism, Mr Godfrey Kiwanda and Ms Annet Mungooma, who is fronting it.
The current political elites of this country initially demonstrated combative hostility to the curvy craze, but later embraced a go-along, a downplay attitude, which chose to forsake the straight and narrow path for the wide and easy way out.

It is now clear that the Global Sexual Revolution had not only soft-landed in Uganda but was also alive and well, hale and hearty!
The political elites had lost the impetus to oppose it! It is a difficult thing to stand up for what is true amid pervasive hostility.
Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites. To adhere to what is right might mean social discomfort.
In the world of politics, friends may be lost, job security may be jeopardised and status may be lowered. Many of us are actually not expected to risk our social or professional lives just to stand for an inconvenient right.

Dr Peregrine Kibuuka, former Namilyango College head teacher

Moral relativism
David Carlin, 2019, notes that the sexual revolution has been part of a much more comprehensive revolution that spearheaded that broader revolution.
That broader revolution was and still is the rejection of the old age ideas that moral values are somehow based on God; either the will of God or the reason of God or both.
Like a virus in a computer operating system, the sexual revolution inserts itself in the system and by using piece-meal tactics, capitalises on every opportunity to insert its agenda in national policy.

The acolytes of moral relativism, which considers traditions irrelevant and values are individually defined based on universal, transcendent principles.
All the indicators and hallmarks of this revolution are carefully covered by its acolytes. The political elites are not ready to oppose opinions in the courts of the above invisible secular correctness.
The former uses the mass-media to make any kind of immorality seem acceptable. People lose the spirit of discernment between good and evil.
In Uganda, they have come with the curvy craze again and put it in the hands Mr Kiwanda, not the senior elder one such as his boss, Mr Ephraim Kamuntu.

Everybody knows from experience that the urges and drives of the body need to be controlled, be it sex or food, otherwise they will control us.
What seems an insignificant incident at first can grow into grievous vices later on.
Under the façade of promoting tourism, an apparently innocent exercise of ladies showing off their curves, the acolytes of global sexual revolution are actually using the media platform to spew their deceitful poison of immorality, releasing one of its pornographic outfits into our national policy.
Through tourism, they aim to exploit our women into objectifying themselves as mere articles on sale in the market for leisure viewing by hyper sexualised males to satisfy their hedonistic hankering at a fee.

Mr Kiwanda and Ms Mungooma are asking our respectful mothers, sisters and children to banalise their sexuality as ladies of doubtful virtue by fragmenting themselves into body parts which the sexual predators choose to focus on as their hedonistic interest demand.
The focus on a body part of the target woman means the dignity of the full person is ignored as focus on the particular body is fine-tuned. That is debasing our women and the immoral venture should be abandoned.
It is also the ladies’ failure to take themselves serious that the men caricature them even as they seek their pleasure. The language they use is toy play.

Their vocabulary ranges from “having a one night stand, laying a lady and other indecent adjectives”. The Gospel of St Matthew shows Jesus reinstating binary procreative sex to its pristine dignity, not to be taken casually.
The promotion of the curvy craze is subscribing to moral relatism and playing into the hands of the global sexual Revolution at policy level.
Western civilisation has unquestionably and unmistakably been influenced by the Judeo- Christian worldview. The Judeo-Christian belief was that when Adam and Eve were in the paradisiacal garden “nudus et non erubescebant, i.e “naked, and not ashamed.” Eden was sort of a nudist camp for Adam and Eve.
But after the Fall, the original couple’s “eyes were opened” and they hid their nakedness with proper clothing, they experienced a disposition to sin primarily in those disordered movements of the passions contrary to reason, especially the more vehement ones related to food and sex.

In fact, by the time of the Exodus, the Jews rebelled against Moses and had gone out of control and married more than one woman as they liked. When Jesus came, he fine-tuned the binary relationship of male and female and restored it to its pristine dignity.
It is, therefore, instructive to know what Christ has to say about banalising women’s sexuality. Using dazzling and authoritative oratory of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offered a magisterial account of the development of binary sex from the very start. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’. But I say to you that everyone who even looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

He forbade adultery in its totality, adding: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” He tells the disciples that a mere look is bad enough.
In other words, Jesus forbad men from ogling at women! He knew that it was delusory for anybody to believe that men, believed to be more sexually wired, more visual and immediate in their sexual arousal, can look at a woman’s curves and remain as cool as cucumber.
The people advocating this immorality should accept that they have abandoned the values that animated the Judeo-Christian Western Civilisation and opted for moral relativism which claims that there are no absolute moral values.

This is the sine qua non policy for the sexual revolution, with the premise that the rules of morality, having been made by humans, not by God, can be changed by humans when we think we have a better idea than our ancestors had. Marguerite Peeters (2008) notes: “The ‘freedom to choose’ of the individual, to choose even against the design of the creator, has by now become the cornerstone of the new global ethic.”
The curvy craze is, therefore, without doubt, pornography disguised as an innocent exercise in the leisure industry. Pornography is the depiction of erotic behaviour as in pictures, posture, or writing intended to cause sexual excitement. Pornography is material such as books or a photograph that depicts erotic behaviour and is intended to cause sexual excitement.

The curvy craze has made a second attempt to infiltrate Uganda under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and it seems to be succeeding under the youthful State Minister of Tourism, Mr Godfrey Kiwanda and Ms Annet Mungooma

Pornography is the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense, emotional and erotic reaction.
In discussing this topic, it must be appreciated that the women also have had a hand in aiding and abetting the sexual consumerism that objectifies them. Ordinary, women globally buy clothing designed to emphasise or expose those parts of their bodies associated with sex.
We should have some awareness of how we appear to others, given that the concupiscent inclination to sin is present in all of us and is exacerbated by all of our careless personal behaviour.

John Paul Meenan ( 2019) notes that we might find it difficult to define modesty as a virtue, but we all agree to some extent, that it should exist.
Our curvy girls lack modesty which maintains that some parts of the body should, in the main, always be covered and not just covered, but also not revealed by such apparel as skintight yoga pants. And all the worse if these parts are presented in an explicitly sexual, provocative manner.

We are now in a cultural revolution that is bent on the total overthrow of sexual morality. Virtue has been buried alive and replaced in the public square with a set of ideas parading as values though lacking any value.
To believe that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history should remain untenable and Mr Kiwanda should rather embrace a struggle between sexual licence and sexual morality.

The women’s move to liberate themselves mainly served to expose and reduce themselves to a caricature by men subjecting them to behaviours such as touching, fondling, or pinching someone inappropriately against her will, degrading sexual gestures, and sexual harassment or coercion as unwanted sexual advances, to sexist jokes, whistling, sexually insinuating stares, leering, and inappropriate sexual comments made about a woman’s body as unwanted forms of body evaluation.

Situation in Uganda
In Uganda, one notices ladies scantily dressed, donning dresses/skirts with slits up to where modesty would label as “forbidden territory”. One is left wondering if they do not have a touch of the nymphomaniac.
Even on Sundays, it is not unusual to behold some lady walking up the aisle as if bent on challenging Divine Providence Himself! Others are found in supermarkets, wearing hot pants that leave little to the imagination!

The entertainment industry has become the primary agent for promoting the values of the sexual revolution throughout the world.
Most media outlets create further scenarios that expose women to sexual objectification, especially considering that more women than men are depicted in the media in a sexually objectifying manner.
Advertisements, television shows, movies, music videos, printed media, and pornography, all rampantly depict sexually objectifying images of women.

Additionally, they often include characters who engage in sexually objectifying behaviours and include camera shots that place viewers in a sexually objectifying point of view.
Women’s physical beauty and sexual complementarity with men make them particularly desirable in a commercial economy.
Many women often also debase themselves with their speech, or by exposing themselves to media which gradually desensitises them to the proposal that women are beautiful, sexualised objects for consumption.