Questioning

You know they say all men are created equal? There's a reason they forgot to leave out the women. Since the beginning of civilization, or maybe in the way it came to be - with men being characterised as the mind, the soul, as science, and women as nature, as spirit, as art, that women stopped being revered and started being feared. And since animals tend to attack that which they fear, and men are no more evolved in their territorial instincts, women were reviled, made the subjects of shocking acts and words of violence, and subdued till now, centuries later, the image of women is reduced to a simple theoretical evocation of the Goddesses she is supposed to embody. Reduced to the convenient functionalities of Juno/Hestia/Demeter - Goddess of hearth, home and fertility. Unwelcome are her avatars of Athena/Aphrodite and Durga, as they inconvenience men as they go about their business of being men.

After that rather controversial intro paragraph, which I quite enjoyed writing, slanderous as it may be for many of you (not very many if you're truthful - Athena and Aphrodite are only welcome in your bedroom as long as there is a reward later, hai na?), I'm quite stumped as to how to go about saying what I want to say, because my feelings about the inequality inherent in a man-woman relationship are not evolved enough to be expressed articulately. I guess Ive been wondering about feminism and the intellectual/emotional/mnemonic property rights of individuals in relationships - about where one is being unreasonable and where one is striving for equality, where one is being a hypocrite about social norms and where one is being honest.

Since someone told me a few months ago about a couple in an arranged marriage who engaged in anal sex, but decided to save the vaginal sex till their wedding night, Ive been utterly confused. Like HUH? Were they thinking in terms of pleasure or social norms? I imagine anal may be more pleasurable for the guy than vaginal, consistently, so wouldnt you want to sav ethe more pleasurable options for later on, rather than starting on top and continuing downhill? But this is my innocent guess - Im unable at this time to confirm the veracity of my speculation. However, if he was dying to stick his ass into her, but wanted to save the blood for the hotel sheets for the next morning, Im sorry, that's just LAME. Or maybe they felt that anal sex had a more impersonal connotation to it, and that the REAL consummation would happen after their formal wedding. *shrug* its their decision, but I cant help being curious about the logic behind it. (I feel that this has a connection to my post, but maybe it's visceral).

In a relationship where functions are segregated - a traditional one such that the man is the breadwinner and the woman the homemaker, with their roles rarely merging except in the case of grocery shopping or child-rearing (and in that also the roles are somewhat segregated), where does the equality come in? Does 'separate but equal' in any equation truly hold? Does that mean the woman has FULL control over all household matters, and the man in terms of outside. In such a case, a man should have no control of anything whatsoever except the finances. Yet much of the running of the household revolves around the man's preference, should he care to intervene in these matters. If a woman is working, that makes matters more complicated. In that case, should a man step in to help with the housework? Obviously the correct answer is ideally "yes", but is that the real answer? The equation is easier to negotiate if a couple is living alone, for practical reasons, but becomes far more complex in a joint family, of any race.

But still, where does one person's power over another stop in a relationship, when they are negotiating the sharing of their beds, bodies, minds, memories, dreams and fears? Does either of them have the right to demand anything of the other, upon whim, be it sex, a confession, a sacrifice, a prohibition? Is a relationship truly equal? Does one have the right to ask the other to give up a habit or a practice that may not be harmful for either but is simply offensive for one (and not in a pornographic way), or contrary to his own principles. Eating meat for instance. Does one have the right to ask the other to destroy pictorial, written, or mnemonic evidence of past relationships? I remember when we were in college, all of us wanted to preserve all the roses, love letters, cards and presents we had ever received in a little box at the bottom of our closet for our daughters and granddaughters, much in the romantic way of female bildungsromans, where the child finds these traces of her ancestor's past loves and is able to form a 3-dimensional picture of her. What are the limits of a person's discomfiture with a partner's past? Is there a prescription or a formula, or must the couple tread this rocky path on its own? What is the compromise? What happens when only one person demands this of the other? What is the standard, the threshold for tolerance? When is a demand sadistic and when is it out of a sincere need for self-preservation? When is it cushioned by stubbornness and when out of a principle? Is there a way to then equalise the power between the two or does it stay bent in the favour of the demander? Women know all too well that demanding doesnt get them much. Is that not inherently different for men? Dont they get what they demand once they are in a relationship? How much of the giving in women do (be it small things like what to cook for dinner, or large things like a career, clothing, freedom of speech and intellect), is born out of love, and how much out a a sense of duty, or survival skills stemming from an instinctive and intimate knowledge of the unequal power dynamics? How much of routine and habit is mistaken for attachment and love? And do we convince ourselves of this just to keep the peace? Can we reconcile our natures to anything? Women are trained to be adaptable, to accommodate and compromise and sacrifice, at what cost and to what end? Who decides? Yet their resilience is also sometimes offensive and scary to men. Why do women work within the system and the men change the system? Is it only due to the difference in physical strength that millenia of complications have arisen? Why are we different?

Why dont some people marry or their marriages fail? Is it because they dont try hard enough or that theyre not compatible or they are acutely aware of the differences in power and their sense of justice cant stand the imbalance? Or theyre selfish or egoistic? Why are feminists considered selfish, scary, ugly, offensively sexualised, loud, angry, vulgar? Because theyre everything men are when theyre demanding something in the only language men know and that scares men? Do these women not have the capacity to love enough? When so many women are in marriages that are usually unequal in these terms, and still love (God bless them), why do Buddha and others say that women are incapable of salvation when their qualities transcend the coldness of detachment? Where do men get off agreeing that women are much stronger than men and still continue to abuse their tolerance?

Very generalised, big questions. Scary answers that many of us may not want to face up to. But maybe nonexistent also. *shrug*