Creativity Quote by Sona Jobarteh

Jobarteh’s line lands like a corrective in a cultural moment that often treats “gender” as shorthand for “women”. In one clean sentence, she refuses the fashionable shortcut: you don’t get to talk about equality, violence, work, family, or freedom while pretending men are a removable variable. The phrasing matters. “We have a society” is blunt, almost impatient, a reminder that these aren’t abstract identities floating in a seminar room; they’re interlocking lives, norms, and incentives. The “we” also implicates everyone listening. No safe spectator seats.

The second clause does the real work: “can’t take men out of the equation” borrows the cool authority of math to puncture a moral fantasy. It suggests that many well-meaning reforms fail not because the goals are wrong, but because the strategy is incomplete. If men are only framed as obstacles, villains, or afterthoughts, then the mechanisms that reproduce inequality stay untouched: who holds power, who’s taught entitlement, who is socialized into silence, who benefits from old arrangements even when they don’t feel happy inside them.

Coming from a musician - and specifically Jobarteh, a West African artist who has navigated traditions, institutions, and gendered expectations - the message reads as pragmatic rather than theoretical. It’s not asking for men’s feelings to be centered; it’s insisting that accountability and change require participation from the group that often sets the defaults. The subtext is a challenge: if you want a different society, you need men to do different masculinity, not just watch women do more work.