Misogynists’ anctics

Here’s something funny. There’s a man that is so anti-women that he actually spend all his time suing all the organisations that offer women concessions. Perhaps next year he’ll sue God for having priveledged women by allowing them and only them to bear children.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints

I was horrified when I read this article about a woman who had been married when she was fourteen and systematically raped by her husband after that. At least the man responsible (the head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) was convicted.

In India of course, putting a stop to the practice of child marriage still remains far off. Although most reports do talk of measures against child marriage, few seem to discuss the trauma that the child-bride must experience if she was sent off to live with (and work like a slave for) a strange family and to be raped regularly amongst the strangers. There are parts of the country where (women made scarce thanks to decades of regular female foeticide by the community) a woman who marries into a family is expected to be a sex slave for all the males of the family. Marital rape has not yet been recognised as a crime in India. Punishments for those who effect child marriages are hardly a deterrent and the marriages are usually valid in the eyes of the law.

Imagine where that leaves an Indian girl with no education or exposure to the world, who has been sent off to be raped for the rest of her life. The little that the law might offer her, she will not know about.

Update: A detailed article on how scarcity of girls has led to polyandry and desperate measures taken to procure wives. Note that this has still not led to women being treated any better. ( via Barbara Raisbeck who has also posted on the subject).

Gender Equality and Islam

I knew, I just knew , that the Quran could not have intended for women to be oppressed. Unfortunately I have never been familiar enough about the text to be able to back my conviction with facts, quotes and references.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed has done a great job of highlighting the true spirit and intention of the religion, and of explaining how much of so called shariat law is plain misinterpretation. For anyone interested in the details, she has referenced a paper which elaborates on the subject that she has explained so neatly.

Killer Reiser confesses

Here’s another very public instance of a man who murdered a woman who displeased him in cold blood. And again I ask, what is wrong with the world that it allows people like Reiser to mushroom all over the place.

As disturbing as the fact of these crimes, is that for every person that commits this kind of crime are a fair share of others who believe that it is justified, that the violence was probably provoked. There are some disturbing comments tailing the Wired article on the Raiser killing for anyone who is interested.

You could also try and talk about with people at your workplace – the last time I tried discussing heinous crimes, more specifically the Fritzl case, with my colleagues, one person commented that the incarcerated daughter probably brought it on herself and was happy to be raped, and the other suggested that the man made a good moral choice in raping his own daughter rather than someone else’s. Are all collections of people peppered with psychopath-endorsers? Is the world going nuts?

Songs about domestic violence – III

Luka, Suzanne Vega

Songs about domestic violence – II

I’ve Got to Go Now, Tony Childs

Domestic violence

“He used to beat me regularly”, she said, “he has thrown me down the stairs more than once, overturned a table on me and even tried to run me over with his motorcycle”

I heard this story years ago from a woman in prison. Her husband has sex with her sister-in-law and insisted that she watch and that she massage the sister-in-law’s feet after the act was performed. After years of violence, he had her framed for murdering his mother and (by threatening to kill each lawyer that took up the case) ensured that no one was willing to defend her.

Yesterday, I heard the story of a woman whose husband gagged her and beat her and strangled her with her entire extended family waiting in the next room for her to come out. She told her family that she had been feeding the baby.

Domestic violence. It ranges from physical murder to murder of the spirit. I have never quite understood this phenomenon. So many ‘respectable men’ are actually monsters that thrash their wives regularly, and feel very self-righteous about it too. They behave perfectly well outside. Many of them are even popular and successful. But they hate this woman – the woman that they have sworn to love and cherish – obsessively and delight in hurting, oppressing and torturing her. Where does that come from? And why does everybody skirt around it as if it’s another little lover’s quarrel?

Today, a woman on Rajat Kapoor’s talk show (which is very badly done in general) talked about how she left her husband because he beat her regularly. I was expecting the host to congratulate her on a good decision. A few minutes later though I found that they were discussing whether she had tried to change her husband and why it can anger one’s partner if one tries too hard to change him. Soon she was left looking, not like the survivor that she was, but like a loser that handled her man badly and failed to salvage the relationship. And she watched as the hero of the show, a women with five children boasted about how she put her career on hold and reformed her drunken layabout husband and worked out all problems (hit back instead of filing for divorce for example) and save her marriage.

I am not very likely to watch Rajat Kapoor’s show again. I like the man as an actor but he’s is a stumbling bumbling boring awful interviewer. But I know women who watch this sort of thing. These are women that don’t read very much and that aren’t allowed to move around in the world very much. Their orbit is confined to shopping malls, cinema halls and friends like themselves. And their perceptions of the world are defined by television and shows like Big Boss and Rajat Kapoor’s Lounge.

So if they are taught that virtue lies in turning the other cheek when your husband hits you and in working things out, imagine what must result. Those that are unfortunate flounder desperately seeking to please somebody who will accept nothing short of their misery and pain. And those that are fortunate are convinced that the unfortunate have created their own hell by handling the relationships badly.

And on it goes…so many women get battered behind closed doors, and come smiling and brightly dressed to parties so you never suspect that they’re going home to be battered once more. Their parents, neighbours and friends draw back and leave them to the mercy of their respective tormentors. And he, the inexplicably violent lover, bashes on unhindered.

The Decline of the Devadasis

Devadasis were extraordinarily powerful women years ago. Meddling reformers destroyed the status, respect and place that they held in society by having them outlawed.

For centuries the women that were not obliged to marry, the women that sang and danced and made love with whoever they chose, were very powerful and rich and had rights (such as the right to inherit property) that married ‘moral’ women did not have. This did not go down very well with the Europeans that ruled India or with the Indians who having received a western (christian) education failed to recognise the Devadasi system for the unique power and independence that it conferred on women and were obsessed instead with the ‘immorality’ and ‘promiscuity’ involved. Determined to regulate the Devadasis’ sexuality, they systematically wrecked the entire system and managed to reduce the most powerful women in India to exploited sex-workers.

William Dalrymple has written a beautiful piece in the New Yorker on the Devadasis. It rises from the current day wretched state of the devadasis (who are now regarded as prostitutes) to the glory and power that they once enjoyed, and comes back again to the wretchedness and the hopelessness that these women live with and to how they try (with little success) to cling to old social position of the Devadasis.

when IAS divorces IPS

For those who are unfamiliar with the Indian government’s executive arm – the IAS is possibly the most powerful civil service…it very literally runs the country. Every years, thousands (some idealistic, many power hungry) applicants, write the civil services exams. The really fortunate make it. The less fortunate settle for the other services, such as the Indian Police service (IPS), and the unfortunate don’t make anything.

Today I read two stories about IAS officers…’lady officers’ as the media insists on describing. Both had IPS husbands…husbands who by conventional Indian standards were not as successful as them, both for whom the marriage didn’t work. Hemlata Pant was divorced twenty four years ago and is now homeless and reduced to living on the pavement. Nidhi Pandey has, with some difficulty managed to file a harassment case against her husband – she was recently thrown down the courtroom stairs. News articles suggest that the little support that Nidhi is managing to garner is solely due to the “women IAS officers” who seem to be the only people taking the issue seriously.

There we have it. My beautiful country. Where the most powerful women in the country are certified insane since they could save their marriages and are beaten and harassed for dowry. Where it isn’t even all their colleagues that are seen to be backing them but only the small minority from their own gender. Where a woman gets thrown down the stairs in court and the word ‘allegedly’ is still used in the face of her bruises.

If the most powerful women are so vulnerable, imagine what could become of the little girl next door, or of the one selling flowers round the corner…

UPDATE

An ex-policeman has denounced the action taken in the Nidhi Pandey case. While I agree that it does not seem fair to suspend anybody without an enquiry, I am afraid that I fail to concur with his stand that the “higher -ups …not meddle into the private affairs of an officer whose professional honesty in the field of service was never in question [sic]“. Since the law makers (fortunately) consider domestic violence a crime rather than ‘private affairs’, physical torture by an officer would mean that we have a police officer breaking the law. I can’t imagine how and why that should be tolerated. There is much research to be done on this and I shall be back soon with the whys, hows and wheres of it.

Phenomenal Woman

They should make make little girls recite this every day. God knows that they need it when they grow up!

Hats off to you Maya Angelou…

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I’m not cute or built to suit a model’s fashion size
But when I start to tell them
They think I’m telling lies.
I say
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my steps
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please
And to a man
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees
Then they swarm around me
A hive of honey bees.
I say
It’s the fire in my eyes
And the flash of my teeth
The swing of my waist
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can’t see.
I say
It’s in the arch of my back
The sun of my smile
The ride of my breasts
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say
It’s in the click of my heels
The bend of my hair
The palm of my hand
The need for my care.
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That’s me.