I know you would love to hear a story of a 10-year-old girl child who has just lost her mother. Oh wait, she was not even told about that. Gah!
She could not have begun to understand the loss of a mother at that age. Shouldn’t life have shown a little mercy?
I remember those hands that slipped under my frock when I was asleep, all calm and steady (yes, that very night my mother died). I woke up as he started pressing my boobs (or should I call it “breasts”, eh? I laugh.) But I stayed quiet and pretended to be asleep because what else could I do? I was a child for God’s sake.
I did not even know what was happening until I started growing up, until I realized the hands that I thought were caressing me as my guardian were actually molesting me throughout.
I realized how my womanhood was a curse because my tits are merely toys to be played with.
To all the anti-feminists of this age that I have happened to come across and have expressed how they are afraid of feminists: Would you understand the fear that I undergo every time I come across a male doctor? No, you wouldn’t.
Because I was the one who was laid down on the hospital bed at the age of 13 and my boobs were touched when I was just too naïve to comprehend how his touch could tear my flesh into pieces, that I am still trying to fix, till this moment of existence.
Would you understand how I kept this to myself for years because I believed that I was wrong since I had gone to the hospital all alone?
Well, would you understand how it feels when we are tagged “sluts” simply when we do something that is termed a “man’s thing”?
I bet every female individual understands how it feels when a man feels up and down his dick in front of us in a public bus, when we are humiliated in a workplace and touched inappropriately in public spaces which are “meant” to be equally harmonious for both women and men.
Do you know we still have women who think selling their bodies is a ritual, a custom or a tradition who say “we’re not forced into prostitution”?
Well, when we go beyond this, we find out how culture has been the institution of power that has always forced women to think of their bodies as nothing but the source of money and subjugation by men.
From back in the day, when wars were fought and women were mass raped and the number of women you could rape depicted your army’s strength; till today, when it’s the fault of the rape victim anyways, when spousal rape is not a crime, when if a woman enjoys sex she is referred to as a “whore”, “characterless” and what not, when masturbation is a guy’s thing because a woman has got no right to pleasure herself, when menstruation shall not be an open topic to discuss and blah blah blah…
With every passing day of my life, every moment I am made to realize my existence as a female (yes, the social distinction based on gender) in many ways such as ‘mountaineering is not “your thing”’, “women should not be hit” (which shows nothing but a woman’s weakness) etc., I am forced to go back to my childhood when I was harassed only because one part of my body has a ball of fat that is ought to do just one job: seduce my opposite sex.
Because I was born with a vagina: the symbol of subjugation, weakness, sacrifice and reproduction and not with a penis: the symbol of strength, money and pride.
Do you realize how women have been, since time immemorial, described only as mothers, sisters, daughters and wives? (Especially visible on International Women’s Day).
When do you think a woman could mean more than what relationships she was born with or she’s made?
When are you going to believe that women can do a lot more than they are doing even today?
No job has been gendered by nature. It is society.
Lastly, if you noted the number of housewives in our country, had housework been a paid job, you would respect women a lot more than you do now (and I bet that respect today persists only because that woman is your mother). Dear anti-feminists, I pity you.