Shame, a socially agreed-upon weapon fashioned against women in Nigeria. ‘I will naked you. I have your nudes. I will embarrass you on the internet.’ I just spent a brief period of time with the Nigerian feminist technology organization, TechHer, where we talked about the insidiousness of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and the commonness and coordinated execution of threats like these.

Our resident internet Aunty and Nollywood icon Kate Henshaw wasted no time in preaching a sanctimonious sermon of shame for Nigerian women: ‘I always advocate for ladies to wear good, supportive bra… You never know when a situation like this might occur!!’ I was initially gobsmacked by the cruelty of her statement, the sheer mental capacity to see a situation of dehumanization and respond with a comment that shames and passes judgment in the self-serving manner of anecdotal Nigerian Aunties.

But then I realize Aunty Henshaw was right! Nigeria is cruel to its women. There is no one worthy woman, unless you are constantly folding yourself into privilege and power. And so, she is right, we never know when a situation like this might happen to us, because Emmanson is a rehearsal of our own public humiliation and punishment.

We do not only teach girls to shrink themselves and make themselves smaller. We also teach older women to shame younger women, to make them smaller, less than adequate. We see in real time how power shifts: the air hostess enabling violence against Emmanson in ways similar to how femocrats (first ladies, women ministers, directors) and apathetic upwardly-mobile women enable patriarchal and class violence.

Why are women, you may ask, bending over backwards to sentimentalize an ‘err’ or land a self-serving preaching moment in an ersatz-misogynist banger boy manner? Because for women like Henshaw and Dabiri-Erewa, the status of women in the real sense of Nigeria’s cruelty to its women eludes them, at least at the moment. They are women only so far as gender identity, but they do not share the containment. They are worthy women, and so they must participate in the very structures that render women like Emmanson as the bodies of vitriol and punishment.

After all, as African feminists Hope Chigudu and Rudo Chigudu aptly put it, patriarchy is a system of male authority that legitimizes the oppression of women through economic, political, social, legal, cultural, religious and military institutions. Patriarchal power also intersects with other systems of power, such as class, in contexts of popular culture, political and economic life and more. This creates varied layers of experiences for women, such that, as counternarrative as it sounds, gender is not the only factor determining women’s lives in Nigeria. It is an odd and ever-evolving and expanding mix of gender, class, religion, tradition, internalized misogyny, (neo)colonialism and so on.

It is these very nuances that trouble feminist solidarity. As the current Nigerian Twitter discourse calls it, the status differences between the elite and the local ‘bottom barrel’ (yes, I am still shocked by this particular phrase) poke holes in our solidarity politics.