of club wielders and sexy red suits..

men and women are made differently. so the behaviour is different, isn’t it?

take ancient times, our caveman/cavewoman ancestors never had a problem of sexual harassment did they? being dragged by the hair to the cave seemed like a compliment from the club wielding caveman.

let us for a moment believe that there were no boundaries, and men and women were the same, that thought would change this world into some kind of futuristic arnie movie, with everything being stereotype. so logically, we’d be living perfectly, following an existing dictated system. eating healthy meals, not swearing at the traffic jam, calling our bosses our gods, never getting stressed out over anything, and go to bed each night with a prayer on our lips and a song in our hearts. our behaviour and our living would be ideal. i would think such a system would be a felony in itself. because it kills a hopeful spirit. now that would be harassment for me!

so what happens to the aberrations of this system? nothing in nature is stereotypical. is such a system well equipped to manage testosterone levels of all the inmates of a prison, at precisely the same moment when a good looking prison nurse walks by? it would look unnatural to look away.

it is in human nature to eve/adam tease. it is a primal instinct. it’s a long lost derivative of the mating ritual ,still carried out by animals, birds and tribes in africa! its nothing but the y/xchromosome ‘being’. we study the human race over an evolutionary period of time, which technically would mean take off our masks of sophistication and we will still be wielding clubs. we would be prudish to think a woman does not like looking sexy in a red suit at work and get noticed, or a man wearing axe and running around with a girl-counter in his pocket. but does the animal always act on this instinct?

where does a person draw the line? if humankind is the one with the most evolved brain, why the vestige of animal behaviour? excluding of course cases with severe hormonal traffic jams. combating that animal behaviour requires strength, not just the physical kind, but that of the mind. it requires an awareness of your own boundaries and that of the other. more important the ability to respect it.

all animals have boundaries they follow.. including humankind.

that boundary is set in the mind.

~ she said.

by respect or by fear

one reason why i appreciate what blanknoiseproject is doing, is that, unlike corporate sexual harassment incidents, it is raising awareness about an issue. it is participative. asking, eliciting. when more people know about how eve teasing affects women, there may be some awareness and it may help the cause that bnp has initiated. the next step, ideally, would be towards a concept of respect – rather than fear – like the fear of sexual harassment in the workplace. highly over-rated because of the million dollar suits – i doubt if the issue has gained any respect. the fear exists not for a wrongdoing – but for fear of mistaken identity, or action perhaps. if at all, it has distanced the men and the women in the workplace – to good effect some may say.

in eleven minutes paulo coelho makes an interesting statement:

“…who were all afraid of being arrested for ‘sexual harassment’ – a concept invented to make women everywhere feel worse about themselves.”

the recent bnp campaign against eve-teasing – what it calls street sexual harassment is an interesting initiative to say the least. at least there is awareness being built what eve-teasing means to the eves and how the adams respond and react. there is, probably (and hopefully) more to it, however.

on a very long term – but much lesser than it took the dinosaurs to extinct themselves – i believe that if fear is the only tool of managing the abuse, then the tables will only turn, a few years from now we will be fighting adam teasing. thanks to a few ‘angry women’, sorry amitabh for corrupting your title. unless man is able to respect a woman for being a woman (and the fact that she is everything else later), i don’t see any kind of sexual harassment going away. one kind goes; another will spawn. fear may stop that accidental brush of a hand and that lewd remark from the local train going south. that’s misdirected fear. fear of prosecution by the world and persecution by the women. it doesn’t affect the mind set. can you change the constituent of a man’s mind or control it just by fear? if yes, how? if not, what is the fight against?

where does this respect come from? what makes man respect a woman, any woman, on the street – and not judge her by her clothes, color, size, skin, walk, gait, smile or whatever? is it the way they see their fathers and brothers treat their mothers and sisters? i saw a few posts (by women) about castration, death sentences, and the types. fair enough. the anger is well-directed. but not towards the real purpose; castrate every organism that has a trace of testosterone, yet you may not be able to change how they think. deep down, would women be able to live with that? i don’t know. if eyes speak volumes, then does the limpness make you feel secure, safe and respected? do eyes and thoughts do more damage than that apparently unintentional intentional brush of a hand? my personal ethos and values not withstanding, do i need to run scared of lifting a hand to wipe the sweat off my brow, lest it might brush against your backside? will you know the difference?

~he said

silence of the lambs

time and again, we hear about and even face the 'woman', (irrespective of her designation -mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, etc) being lost in translation, so to speak. the humble woman being put through hell by the people around her, and she silently, like some mute and defenceless lamb, taking it all in. her husband is seen as the aggressor, his family some kind of secret society of satan working on her 'to-do-list' for life!

expectations are a common anomaly of a system which refuses to think any different from what has been, because to think different requires change, and one little change can ensure imbalance of the whole system, hence its downfall. since we live in a society that refuses to tweak the system once in a while, why not do it for yourself since you are on the receiving end of the whole ball game?

we talk of atrocities, and the first word that comes to mind is 'women', which i believe is one of the biggest gender bias/sexual discrimination of all time! we make films about suffering women, tortured women, and then give awards to the actresses, where the men in the film are mere disposable props. we conveniently labelled the male of the species, aggressive and dominating - the evil-doer, while the woman 'played' the lamb.

what we refuse to acknowledge is that men have faced the same kind of pressure of expectations, from people all around them, and the pressure of performance from the board meeting to the bed. men too have had to sacrifice their cherished ‘fighter-pilot’ dreams to be able to ‘fit’ into a pre-approved, society-dictated, appropriate role play and do it with the label of being insensitive, unemotional, heartless and ‘irrational’.

so, who is the mute lamb really?

please tell me when people refer to women as the fairer sex, they are not talking merely about the skin colour, but about 'being fair'.

it never was about chauvinism/ feminism. i believe oppression of any kind is faced by both the sexes, and it has nothing to do with the genetic make-up. it is about the individual and his/her response to a certain situation. it is always the individual who chooses the role to play. as for the mute suffering lambs of the society, i have something to say to such individuals … stop being a wuss and stand up for yourself!

~ she said

great expectations

because she was treated in a particularly recurring way for a very long time, she forgot what it ever meant to have an opinion of her own – to experience from her surroundings – to make meaning and sift the right and wrong from the events that were marking her journey through this life and role-play. so often and so unrelenting was her suffering she eventually believed it to be true. mind games, of sorts. the sharp pain became dull thudding after a few years and a few more years later that pain became a part of her life. she forgot about it – it was second nature, probably even first nature. the daughter-in-law was now the dame of the house, holding the keys – to much more than the family vault. she was on her way to become a mother-in-law – a spitting image of her own mother-in-law. she would be soon at the familial battlefield to quell a rebellion that she had started long ago and given up recently by embracing the ways of the enemy. the rerun will soon begin.

when the mother-in-law behaves in the manner that she does with the daughter-in-law, she is beyond help. after years of conditioning that is the only way she knows. woman is woman’s worst enemy? yes, but a generalization to say the least, and there are enough soaps and movies to document this theory (if you can call it that). the dynamics of this war for supremacy are well known and experienced. times change, people’s attitudes change too – somehow their belief systems haven’t. but the vicious circle is being broken – one small bit at a time. there are ways out in these modern emancipated times – separate out – break the joint family tradition. these are pain killers of sorts; they aren’t the medicine. the only thing you do is hate long-distance.

and the struggle to match expectations continues – though there is more freedom than before to weigh those expectations, sift through, and become your own person. become a woman rather than a daughter-in-law, a mother or a wife and unwittingly contribute to a silent and slow social change that allows us to become a person – beyond role-playing.

~he said

we - then and now

how different can we be, we sprung from the same tree-swinging ancestor. but something changed one day, probably the branch broke making mutation possible. but u and i are still the same, with all our differences, of course! (except for the bump on ur head!!).

this should be fun.

~ she said

us and them

because we are different. and we are the same. we are humans. so this blog. because we believe in each other, and respect each other. we will explore who we are. irrespective of the laws of a social structure. let's just talk abt it. to know - who we are.

~he said