Source: Monster India
The world is a man’s world, a patriarchal obnoxious system of clutching power at the cost of oppression. Women are the scapegoat for this oppression.
A better space for women?
In the 21st century, when we claim to have become modern and taken leaps ahead, with women entering “mainstream spaces”, perhaps we have treated a long road, but the ingrained patriarchy within us has rooted itself so deeply that it seems almost impossible to look at women as independent individuals. A lot of what is said here might seem to be a cynical approach, a negative way of not paying heed to the good happening.
However, we need to look further into it. A woman in short clothes is deemed to be a “slut”, a woman in a high position has “slept her way up” and a woman in a relationship with a rich man is a “gold digger”. News the past month has been replete with such instances. Be it, Sushmita Sen being openly called “gold digger”, across social media for her relationship with Lalit Modi, or be it Mahua Moitra being trolled for absurd reasons like owning a Louis Vuitton bag. Patriarchy does not permit women to be in positions of happiness or power.
Patriarchal Framework
The systems want women to be docile so that they could be controlled. Men in authority in society have created setups and systems of norms and anything that stands out of that mesh seems to be abnormal and worth being controlled.
This is perhaps why a woman is taught defined lessons since childhood where the end purpose is always being a wife to a man, from daughter to a father, and eventually a mother to a son. All of these frameworks are purported at subjugating a woman to a man’s authority.
We would like to believe that today things are changing, they might slightly be, a large section of women is being educated yet the larger goal ingrained in their minds is always about “settling down” in the end, of getting jobs if they may want to and eventually getting married and having children.
Over time, there have been so many attempts in subjugating the authority that women have over their lives and themselves. A woman might hold a doctorate in a discipline but at home, her father would always be the mansplainer.
What can be done?
My grandfather brought me up reiterating, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, it now resonates with how the power that men from upper strata hold in society corrupts them. The primary change that can facilitate any betterment would only require loosening up of this power structure.
Awareness, education, and open-mindedness in my opinion are the key solutions to improving these things. Revolution comes from small changes. From women being vocative and aware about their rights and men being shareholders in revolution. More so, there is a need for stringent laws in place where larger loopholes in the system could be fixed.
It is high time we stop negating women’s achievements and associating their worth with whether they are married or not. A woman with a branded bag owes it to herself, a remuneration of her hard work herself, that doesn’t make her a bad person, a bad professional. A woman in a relationship with a “rich man” is not a gold digger, it is her choice.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, it is 2022, and a comment has to be made on the state of women. No wonder we are debating issues like women’s entry into temples and fighting over agendas of hijab. Our existences and understandings are rooted in stark categorizations. For us, it is always about what suits us well in categories, so of course, individual choices are an odd thing because not all of them fit well in one place.
The lack of respect for choices is weird for us because it not only does not find a place in mainstream categorizations but also because a choice made by a woman is a rebellion against the patriarchal authority, something that is in dissonance with the norms that they have laid and the setups and ideas that they have created.
Written by Ananya Verma
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