60% of the Women in Guinea believe that it is OK for their spouses to beat them for saying no to sex! In slightly more developed India, Non-consensual sex within marriage not rape. All around the world, women still get paid less in wages to do the same job as men and despite being a ‘supposedly liberated’ woman of the 21st century, my blood curls from fear each time I am catcalled on the streets!
And so, you understand when I say that I BELIEVE Women’s Day is a load of ****! Because, over the years, we have been so accustomed to taking hits to your physical and emotional needs that even we – the supposed crusaders of women, don’t see that bright shining light of equality in the horizon.
Let’s take a quick look at the numbers, shall we? 510 million women alive today will be abused by their partner in their lifetime. Women in developing countries die in childbirth every 1.5 minutes and the number of sex selective abortions amount to some 3.9 million annually. Women produce 80% of the developing world’s food, but they own less than 1% of the Earth’s land. In over a 100 countries women STILL don’t have the same legal rights as their male counterparts and almost everywhere on earth we are STILL not perceived as equals.
My country, of course is special. India has the dubious distinction of being the worst country to be born a woman. In 2011, 24,206 rapes were reported in India, a 4-year high, ironical is it not – for a country which claims to be ruled by a woman’s iron fist. “Reported rapes’ aside, dowry, and sati, female infanticide … the list is endless and no it is not just in the villages, in a family you would never associate with! No, I am talking about every one of us, who in our own way is a silent victim of inequality – in our homes, educational institutions, workplaces. Sometimes it is blatant, sometimes it is subtle but most often and we don’t even recognize it because we are so hardened by the fact that – we are ‘just’ women!
3 Months ago, all everyone could speak about was the Delhi brave heart who was raped so brutally.. that she died! Today, despite rapes across the country every single day and no action from the government for better security for women, we grin at each other and smile and say Happy Women’s Day. Ah! The Irony!
But even today is not Women’s Day. As I write this, an unborn girl child is being aborted in India, a women is being raped and a female professional is being passed up on a promotion because ‘management’ fells she won’t be able to ‘handle’ the job with an infant at home. But there is something we can do – We can get stronger both physically and mentally. We can learn to respect ourselves and we can try and drag ourselves out of the ‘we are just women’ mind frame.
So today, let us get rid of that “old man in our head “ (Courtesy Meera Vijayan) , the man who keeps telling us that we cannot succeed. Let us put a rest to believing that “Oh! A woman cannot have a successful career and a good personal life!” Let us stop asking every married young girl “When are you going to have a child?” as if child-bearing was the sole reason we were put on this earth. Let us stop discussing a girl’s skin color and talk about her personality instead. Let us, in our own way, shut that narrow-minded old man who lives inside each of us. Let us be kind to women who sometimes in a few ways are better and more successful than us!
What we need is not Women’s Day, what we need is Women’s Equality every day. The road to this is long and hard but it is us, the so-called liberated generation which needs to pave the way. Much like Martin Luther King, I have a dream – that someday my children will live in a world where are judged not by their gender but by their personalities, talent and spirit.
Musings of a Pygmy Hippo 