By Aniruddh Naik:
Many western civilization promoters give us examples of how women are treated equally in all spheres of life. Any sane Indian also detests the discrimination against women and wants fair policies reinstating their rights as given by the constitution.
A very recent incident on abusing a sportswoman has taken place in Britain. Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith set a British women’s record in the weight-lifting sport event. Well, the enthralling part of this is that she’s only 18-years-old and is said to have a promising future in this sport event.
Earlier in the month of July 2012, BBC made a documentary on Zoe and her weight-lifting team mates, whose subject was the journey to Olympics. This documentary was uploaded on twitter which fetched them great appreciation for their efforts except few miscreants, who abused them, just for being women and indulging themselves in a sport, which according to them is only suited for men. They crudely called her too manly and now have nicely hidden themselves behind social media, only to display their cowardice. You have to admire her sheer ability to riposte through her blog where she openly opposed the miscreants by calling them ‘closed-minded and ignorant’.
She went on further by saying, “This may be shocking to you, but we actually would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. Crazy, eh?! We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble”
To me, this is the most placid and dignified way to combat the rants against you, which she did astutely.
There are two main points for which we need to contemplate with seriousness: The treatment of women and the brand new way of abusing, twitter troll. After the advent of twitter many people, mostly celebs have faced tremendous derogatory remarks through tweets.
Weight-lifting has long remained men’s sport. No rewards for guessing why. Women, with sheer will and dedication, have shown that even physically they can be strong enough to be a part of, not just weight lifting, but also many other sport events which were purportedly considered to be men’s forte. It’s saddening that many men and women aren’t ready to accept this and rather would have a woman ‘maintain’ her society-approved femininity than develop ‘unseemly’ muscles.
Women like Zoe should be applauded for achieving such a huge record. She has done this in her teens, when many girls are conditioned to never even realizing that they have a dream and thus not even making a weak effort to explore their talents.
The twitter troll should also be thoroughly checked and the miscreants should be dealt with apt measures. The number of abusers is increasing day by day, even in India. We should not misuse the freedom of speech through any form of social media. If we disagree, then we should stand against them by putting forth valid points and not by displaying mere fascism.