The universality of women's experience

Kush Tandon has brilliantly and kindly (not sure which comes first!) responded to the post I wrote yesterday on my experience as a young woman in Mumbai (read the above link if you didn't click on him in the comments section on yesterdays post!)

He poses two questions - Is Mumbai really as chilled out as we think? And is the experience of women universal? I'm going to try to link the two.

To respond to the first one: I remember being immensely proud of the fact that Mumbai is the safest city in India, where a girl can walk alone at 3am. All that has changed recently - with the 'culture police' stopping canoodling couples in their cars at malabar hill, cuffe parade and God knows where else at night, pretending to save them from potential cops but actually just trying to get money out of them. I havent read Shantaram so I don't know how the author describes Mumbai. It is crazy and unplanned and headache-inducing and exasperating but also uplifting. The one trait required here is patience, oh yes, and a sense of humour. The city is resilient, and will stay so despite its people, there will always be immigrant dreamers among the jaded residents. It's humour lies in its slapstick, the humour in the obvious, which drives one away from the farce that is daily living handled by bureaucracy and some unnameable greater force that keeps this city from falling apart out of its decrepit skeleton.

Then the police rapes came along. The first one at Marine Drive and another near the Domestic Airport. How are we as women supposed to trust any man now, even those who are paid by the nation for our protection? If relations between men and women are a function of the established power dynamic between men and women, the fulcrum is already on the cop's side as he, though he is believed to be a servant of the nation, has the power to help, to resolve problems, to be 'potent'. In that role, as a helper, he already has the leverage that ordinary working men who are normally intimidated by the greater accomplishments, looks and brains of women don't have. Why would he want to upset this ordained dynamic set up with so much care for generations? It's great though that these rapes were reported and action is being taken against the cops.

These were publicised cases - among the many that go unreported. So many girls are raped by their boyfriends, spouses, friends, strangers. So many are scared to admit it and seek help because it is a universal mindset to blame the girl, for whatever reason, on the basis of her clothes, her location, her behaviour, the time. A girl is not allowed to be flirty or sexy and be comfortable in her own skin around a man; oh no! She has to be restrained at all times. Even her 'no' s go ignored because guys don't really believe it. How do guys get away so easily with the "she was asking for it'' line. That itself shows how callous these men are. Men seem to be so afraid of women's sexuality that they need an excuse to be able to handle it, to demonstrate their physical power because that's the only thing they truly have over women anymore. And even women tend to blame the women. With this mindset in all of us, how can we blame the Taliban for simply acting upon a male territorial instinct? They are only making obvious the male thought process. How many men like their wives to dress sexily? No, that is reserved for the bedroom, for themselves, for a designated space in which they can assert their authority.

Even if the girl has the courage to report a rape, she is subjected to further trauma by the medical test and skeptical policemen. Not to mention a national cultural mindset as represented by Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's Prime Minister with his dismissive comments on rape victims.

Yes, the men in general don't seem to have very much experience with or respect for women. Any girl/woman, no matter how conservatively dressed, if she is pretty or well-endowed, is subject to what may be uniquely-known in India as Eve-teasing. It may manifest in just a quick brush as one is walking past, to tasteless catcalls and jeers, to following girls around to rubbing oneself in public either through one's clothing or by taking the penis out. I'm pretty sure every girl has witnessed all of this in her life. No to mention the possibility of molestation or visual harassment at home by family members or domestic help on a young girl who doesn't know what it means, except that it feels wrong, and who is too scared to tell her mother. And what is the mother to do if the perpetrator happens to be the father or a respected male relative? How many mothers, especially the uneducated/cloistered housewives have the courage to upset their own status in the house for the protection of the hapless child? Who can she believe without offending anyone? How can she protect her child's innocence?

Brute force is being resorted to once again by men who are getting left behind in the race for power, money, education by women who don't take their newly-acquired status for granted. Rather than asserting their superiority through reasoning and knowledge, which is all a woman often wants and what men these days seem to lack, the violence they show towards the women in their lives only further demonstrates their subconsciously felt impotency, in my humble Freudian opinion, as demonstrated recently by Pratik Gupta stoning his girlfriend to death. They were both MBA students, they could have talked about it (but men and women in deteriorating relationships cannot talk rationally to each other, as I have experienced). He says he was 'relieved' she was dead, though he handed himself in. Of course his relatives said that he was such a level-headed boy; it must have been a heinous incident that made him lose his head like that - implying that it was partly the girl's fault. Jesus.

I wonder how Mr. ya Miss will be. Its a movie about a player reborn as a woman and how he has to deal with the stares, flirtation, high heels and issues of a woman. I hope it won't denigrate the status of women further like the recent movies No Entry and Garam Masala have done. Really, the representation of women is becoming too tasteless for words in Bollywood.

Are these things women go through universally? Yes. I've been hit on by men in New York as well. (I like New York better because people walk as fast as me, if not faster!). Women all over the world have to deal with the glass ceiling, with sterotype, with work environments structured on a patriarchal paradigm, with no allowance for maternal flexibility, with exoticism/fetishism based on race, class, enthnicity or physical appearance, with ignorance and disrespect, the ignorance of men on the difference between chivalry/chauvinism and courtesy, with the race to be thin, look better, work harder, manage better, be a perfect professional, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect woman.

The trope is the same. The situation, a variation on a scale of superficial differences.

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Are women less violent because they talk more? I read a theory in my Psychology of Migration class once that it is those who don't have language, who cannot express themselves, who manifest their emotions physically. Therefore there tends to be more crime among immigrants. Hmmm.