Before and upon the release of Nollywood blockbuster movie, Wives on Strike, the movie’s female leads Omoni Oboli, Chioma Akpotha, Uche Jombo, and Ufuoma McDermott flaunted a unique friendship that was the envy of many.
They vacationed together and posted group photos together from all over the world that set the internet ablaze.
Then the pictures stopped and the women don’t post themselves together as much as they used to. It turns out, this was intentional, and no, it wasn’t just because they were done promoting the movie. It was something deeper. Speaking during the Inkblot Meet & Greet podcast, Ufuoma McDermott opened up on the real reason why she and the other women no longer really post themselves on social media anymore. Here’s what she said.
Speaking about it, Ufuoma McDermott said:
Before Wives on Strike, Chioma Akpotha, Omoni Oboli, Uche Jombo and myself were close individually but together, no. We bonded when we were filming Wives on Strike because individually I had known all of these girls but we just became closer spending time filming Wives on Strike. The conditions under which we shot that film, God! We just had to bond. Sometimes we’d want to do makeup and Omoni would say “e be like say you no know you be market woman”, I would be like “come on now, the brand”, she’ll say “Which brand? You’re a market woman. Off your cloth!” (laughs). So under all of those things – finding ourselves changing on the road, you know, we just had to bond. I don’t think there was anywhere to go from there.
But if you notice, for some time we haven’t appeared in each other’s projects. Here’s the thing: I don’t like that slogan, “women supporting women”, because I don’t hear men saying “men supporting men” unless they’re trying to diss women. I don’t like to say it because we put too much emphasis on the negative of women being together as against the positive. So what we’re invariably doing is making people focus on seeing a group of friends together and saying “oh my God, this is wonderful, women don’t do this” so we’re trying hard to break that. Before now, when we’re together, we’ll film, put on Instagram, and people would be excited. We don’t do that anymore because we feel like we might even be giving the wrong vibes. We want you to find your compatibility naturally. We want you to be able to come and say “you’re a guy, I’m a girl, we have this project together and we can run it”. It doesn’t matter what our gender is. You’re a woman, I’m a woman, we can run it together. We want you to find it not because you’re trying to prove a point that women don’t support women, we want you to prove a point that we can do things together. We think that them always seeing us together in their head is making them think “wow, these women have been friends for such a long time when women cannot (be friends)” and we don’t want you thinking that.
What do you think of this reason?
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