- Making a change means changing boys’ attitudes
In the pathologically corrupt milieu of gender hierarchy, a woman is a man’s proclaimed honour. In the avarice for power, she is his innate slave. She is defined by a man and defiled by a man. She is the object of his lust and the recipient of his ire– a tamed muliebrity suffocating amidst the feral virility of patriarchy. For a man to be born into patriarchy equates an inherent sense of superiority where men are conditioned to exercise a delusional birthright over almost anything and everything. At the receiving end of their enforced right is, more often than not, a woman.
Patriarchy, institutionalised through customs, religions, family structures, economics and law, is a system condoning oppression. In the male-dominant society, a man is promoted as an epitome of power, entitlement and authority, whereas a woman is positioned as a paragon of vulnerability from the day the nurse declares, It’s a girl”. Since nonage, males acquire and practice a sense of ownership: as sons, as brothers, as husbands and even as complete strangers. Regardless of its acceptability, they are taught to exert their authority. A complete stranger can stalk a woman, harass her and somehow the woman is denounced for stepping out of the vicinity of the walled precinct, conveniently labelled as a safe abode (for her) by the patriarchal society. Now the walls spoken of have often witnessed greater terrors than the world without.
From the prime perception of time, under the dictates of patriarchal heritage, women have been subjected to countless atrocities at the hands of men, ad infinitum. From verbal harassment to domestic violence to sexual assaults to honour killing, women have endured abuse of colossal magnitude. Why women? Why not the other way around? Practically, it can be deemed as an abuse of ‘physical’ strength. The only shortcoming of a woman understandably is the corporal fragility of the extra X chromosome.
Patriarchy is not just men oppressing women, but also women conforming to the inveterate practices of this unjust system
Priding selves as ‘protectors’ of women, men, no offense, are the reason women need protection in the first place. The objectification of women has blindfolded the world to the dilemmas of this gender. Her rights are denied, her consent is disregarded, her ease overlooked and more of all, her existence reduced to a constant trial for the appeasement of men. She stays home to please a man; she steps out and it too becomes about a man.
The plight of the century is that the injustices to which women are subjected are often not deemed injustices at all. Verbal harassment, a tool to undermine a woman’s self-respect, drowning her in an unfathomable pit of inferiority and insecurity, fails to be registered as an actual threat to a woman in the reigning male dominancy. This, in my opinion, is the very seed, the very beginning of an endless chain of gender crimes. The very iniquity of impunity is a man’s pass to unaccountable crimes against women.
Moreover, the house demarcated as a safe zone for women too is not safe. At the current stage of human development, it is unfortunate to still witness incidences of domestic violence. Men abuse women to “tame and train”. Failure to acquiesce, anything short of an affirmative and she has entitled herself to a beating. Inculcating a sense of slavery and accountability (to men) even in the most basic decisions of her life, a woman’s status is unfortunately reduced, within those very walls, to the level of a domesticated biped.
Likewise stands the issue of sexual assaults. Deemed as sexual objects, women are expected to “guard” their chastity against the ever-molesting gaze of men. The “she asked for it by stepping out in public” mentality as justification has always escalated the debate of who the actual victim is. From the woman’s dressing, to her choice of taking a job, countless excuses are drafted to exempt a man from the guilt of sexual exploitations against a woman. By the end of it, a woman is always to blame for the “no” a man refused to understand.
In essence, patriarchy states a man to be nonpareil. It feasts on the axiom of male superiority based on physical sturdiness and only pays lip service to women’s rights. It stands a hurdle in the way of women’s emancipation, development and progress, and no law can ensure the protection of women’s rights until and unless their status rises in the minds of the human race. The patriarchal heritage is passed from generation to generation and to break the impasse of this system calls for a paradigm shift– instead of conditioning the daughters to acquiescence, the sons need to be taught to treat their counterparts as equals.
In time, one might wonder why the schism of power and prestige when we are all humans. As ashraf-ul-makhluqat, “the best of creations”, there perhaps arose an irrepressible desire fuelled by the alpha ego to be the best amongst the best. Hence, a system of oppression came into play. The unmistakable sense of grandiosity in a man is not the man’s fault but the system in general. And women portrayed as weaklings are in a true sense perceived as a threat by the very system that promotes the need to oppress and intimidate. Patriarchy, to conclude, is not just men oppressing women, but also women conforming to the inveterate practices of this unjust system.
