And then He made woman – the best of his creation and He poured into her his beauty and sensuality. We all have read this (not verbatim but the gist) from each of our ancient scriptures. It describes woman as the perfect creation of God and since she was created after man, by inference she is much superior to him. We often quote the scriptures to make gender based laws that more often than not decide what women can or cannot do in our society but me thinks this is more in awe of the super being that seems uncontrollable and unfathomable to men. So we hear, “purdah” / hijaab laws for women; we hear of lack of inheritance rights to women; we also hear of not having a choice whether to / when to conceive. I often ask myself, who are these people who made these laws and it seems to me that whoever it was, should have been a man for there is a deep misogynistic agenda in all these laws. I wish to bring to fore two disturbing trend that is bucking the evolution of men and is becoming more prevalent now than ever.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) a term that was alien to me till very recently, until it started making headlines in The Economist magazine. The details would horrify you. Apparently there is a custom in Africa of using a knife to cut a girl’s clitoris before she hits puberty (around the age 9-12) and then in extreme cases sowing the vagina shut. This is an exercise to ensure purity of a woman to her husband who then performs a sort of surgery to remove the sutures on the wedding night. Imagine the horror a girl’s body is put through because a few men back in the day thought it was impure for a woman to have sex before marriage or outside marriage. It amazes me nobody thought of sowing shut a penis or chemically castrating men until they are married to ensure they do not have sex…..but, I digress. Women in Africa have associated this procedure with Islam (being prevalent religion) and have for generations accepted this to be a ritual similar to “khatna” – where the foreskin of the penis is removed for all male children. While khatna seems to have medical backing and is in fact a ritual mentioned in the Quaran, FGM is not mentioned anywhere. There is simply a notion that the practice is linked to Islam and is blindly followed not just in Africa but even in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The consequence of FGM is terrible for women. To begin with women permanently experience pain near the vaginal area from a wound that never heals. Since FGM is performed by quacks rather than trained surgeons the scar never heals and bleeds very often. One must also understand that women who have undergone FGM never enjoy sexual relationship due to unbearable pain and women whose vaginas were sown shut suffer from infections due to unhygienic menstruation. Imagine a lifelong worth of pain for ensuring “purity” of a woman’s body. Who among us feels this was a ritual made by a woman for fellow women? It almost certainly is the thought work of a man who could not bear the fact that women are superior in sexuality and can in fact enjoy a healthier sex life than men. The best way to stop it is to destroy the genitals or mutilate them so much that sex becomes an unenjoyable task. It also ensures “loyalty” in women to their spouses. This to me is destroying beauty of nature because you cannot fathom the depth of it. Each of us has to fight these customs and rituals which harm a woman’s body so that men can feel better about themselves.
The second “ritual” I want to address can be called as marital rape for lack of a better or more suitable word. Now, I know it is not a ritual as such but we have for generations been told that sex is a duty a wife performs for her husband that we have come to think of sex as an enjoyable act that is provided by women grudgingly who in fact don’t like it at all. Movies and television serials always depict a woman as virtuous, who are incapable of liking carnal pleasures and hence are merely shown as a service provider for the husband. We celebrate these women and in many cases this depiction of woman stays in our subconscious mind. Then we try to practice the learnings in our own marriages / relationships where we force/ coerce the woman to provide the service at our beck and call. If God forbid she says “she is not in the mood” we start to feel “women are not supposed to be in mood and are supposed to do their duty to men”. Even in the movies the lady refusing sex to her husband or lover is doing to spite him rather than not being in the mood. So a woman’s mood is thought to be of no consequence to the act of physical love. This has dangerous consequences.
Very often we hear horrid stories of women having to face the brunt of insatiable male lust. Whether it is in a relationship or a marriage, she is often told that love equates sex and the only way she can prove her love for the man is to lay with him anytime he wishes. Failing to comply is often met with one of the two consequences. Either the man emotionally blackmails her to comply, which makes her feel low self-esteem and dirty about herself or the man resorts to violence and beats her up and shoves objects up her vagina to show his dominance. The horrid part of it all is that this is not a crime in the eyes of Indian law as it stands today where rape is not recognized between a husband and wife. Sure, she can press charges of cruelty but I think we can agree this is a lot more than just cruelty; it amounts to physical and emotional torture that simply is not covered enough in the definition of cruelty.
So how do we tackle marital rape? Surely a first step is to recognize it as an offense. But then the immediate question is how you say “consent for sex was given”. Well, if there is love in a relationship and not merely the transaction between a subscriber and a service provider the consent thing will take care of itself. Educating men on female sexuality is a second important task. Men should be able to wrap in around their heads that women are human and are capable of enjoying sex much more than men and even without the help of men. If we all learn to recognize and respect the woman as a superior being we would not have to resort to disgusting rituals and practices to control her body and sexuality.
So long..
Female genital mutilation (FGM) a term that was alien to me till very recently, until it started making headlines in The Economist magazine. The details would horrify you. Apparently there is a custom in Africa of using a knife to cut a girl’s clitoris before she hits puberty (around the age 9-12) and then in extreme cases sowing the vagina shut. This is an exercise to ensure purity of a woman to her husband who then performs a sort of surgery to remove the sutures on the wedding night. Imagine the horror a girl’s body is put through because a few men back in the day thought it was impure for a woman to have sex before marriage or outside marriage. It amazes me nobody thought of sowing shut a penis or chemically castrating men until they are married to ensure they do not have sex…..but, I digress. Women in Africa have associated this procedure with Islam (being prevalent religion) and have for generations accepted this to be a ritual similar to “khatna” – where the foreskin of the penis is removed for all male children. While khatna seems to have medical backing and is in fact a ritual mentioned in the Quaran, FGM is not mentioned anywhere. There is simply a notion that the practice is linked to Islam and is blindly followed not just in Africa but even in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The consequence of FGM is terrible for women. To begin with women permanently experience pain near the vaginal area from a wound that never heals. Since FGM is performed by quacks rather than trained surgeons the scar never heals and bleeds very often. One must also understand that women who have undergone FGM never enjoy sexual relationship due to unbearable pain and women whose vaginas were sown shut suffer from infections due to unhygienic menstruation. Imagine a lifelong worth of pain for ensuring “purity” of a woman’s body. Who among us feels this was a ritual made by a woman for fellow women? It almost certainly is the thought work of a man who could not bear the fact that women are superior in sexuality and can in fact enjoy a healthier sex life than men. The best way to stop it is to destroy the genitals or mutilate them so much that sex becomes an unenjoyable task. It also ensures “loyalty” in women to their spouses. This to me is destroying beauty of nature because you cannot fathom the depth of it. Each of us has to fight these customs and rituals which harm a woman’s body so that men can feel better about themselves.
The second “ritual” I want to address can be called as marital rape for lack of a better or more suitable word. Now, I know it is not a ritual as such but we have for generations been told that sex is a duty a wife performs for her husband that we have come to think of sex as an enjoyable act that is provided by women grudgingly who in fact don’t like it at all. Movies and television serials always depict a woman as virtuous, who are incapable of liking carnal pleasures and hence are merely shown as a service provider for the husband. We celebrate these women and in many cases this depiction of woman stays in our subconscious mind. Then we try to practice the learnings in our own marriages / relationships where we force/ coerce the woman to provide the service at our beck and call. If God forbid she says “she is not in the mood” we start to feel “women are not supposed to be in mood and are supposed to do their duty to men”. Even in the movies the lady refusing sex to her husband or lover is doing to spite him rather than not being in the mood. So a woman’s mood is thought to be of no consequence to the act of physical love. This has dangerous consequences.
Very often we hear horrid stories of women having to face the brunt of insatiable male lust. Whether it is in a relationship or a marriage, she is often told that love equates sex and the only way she can prove her love for the man is to lay with him anytime he wishes. Failing to comply is often met with one of the two consequences. Either the man emotionally blackmails her to comply, which makes her feel low self-esteem and dirty about herself or the man resorts to violence and beats her up and shoves objects up her vagina to show his dominance. The horrid part of it all is that this is not a crime in the eyes of Indian law as it stands today where rape is not recognized between a husband and wife. Sure, she can press charges of cruelty but I think we can agree this is a lot more than just cruelty; it amounts to physical and emotional torture that simply is not covered enough in the definition of cruelty.
So how do we tackle marital rape? Surely a first step is to recognize it as an offense. But then the immediate question is how you say “consent for sex was given”. Well, if there is love in a relationship and not merely the transaction between a subscriber and a service provider the consent thing will take care of itself. Educating men on female sexuality is a second important task. Men should be able to wrap in around their heads that women are human and are capable of enjoying sex much more than men and even without the help of men. If we all learn to recognize and respect the woman as a superior being we would not have to resort to disgusting rituals and practices to control her body and sexuality.
So long..
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