So the furore over Priyanka and Unnao seems to have petered out
and the brouhaha aborted. As is norm. Until the next Buzkashi is thrown into
the field for the media and junta to drag around that is.
Opinions were strewn like a farmer sowing paddy and in
Priyanka’s case, they were rather over shadowed by the end meted out to the
perpetrators.
Of all the rinky-dink offered freer than condoms to sex
workers, I’d like to sum my two-cents too!
I firmly believe that we tripped over ourselves in the rush
to ‘allow’ our women privileges and forgot the poor bystander of a man holding
lauda in hand wondering WTF.
I’m borrowing heavily from the paper published by
Pennsylvania State University authored by Audra Hixson and Dr. Peggy Lorah, titled
“Power and Privilege”.
A proverbial frog in a well has no awareness that it is in
water because the water has always been there. It only notices the water when
it is taken out of it, and then what it notices is the absence of the water,
not its presence. (Spoiler alert! – the frog is the protagonist of this
narrative)
We live in an environment that is infused with power and
privilege where personal power often relates directly to levels of privilege. which
we are unconscious of really, to us it’s the norm, it’s what was always done,
what we know and is part of our DNA, pretty much like the frog! Take away the
power and privilege and voila we flounder since we’re now made aware if its
absence… it’s presence always goes unnoticed. Mais c'est comme ça.
Privilege exists when one group has something of value that
is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than
because of anything they have done or failed to do. (Johnson, 2006, p. 21)
With this privilege comes personal power (did Spiderman same
something along the same lines???) that has societal acceptance.
Power is better understood via familial and employment
structures, parents have power over their children because they can set rules
and dole out consequences and rewards regarding those rules. Like teachers over
pupils and bosses over subordinates, husbands over wives ( largely) you get the
drift.
We know that worldwide, approximately one in five women will
be the victim of rape or attempted rape (UN Millennium Project, 2005). We also
know that one in three will have been physically abused in some form, including
beatings and the coercion to have sex (Heise, 1999).
I do not have the statistics
for women in India, I’d like to believe they are way higher.
The vast majority of these assaults are committed by men, a
male in our society has power over any woman based on the reality that a woman
knows that the perpetrator is likely to be male. A man may never assault or
harm a woman, but the prevalence of violence against women by men automatically
gives him power based on his gender leaving the woman less power as she is
unable to exercise the same freedoms as
a man based on fear of being assaulted. Going out alone after dark is only one
example of this dynamic.
Only rarely will a man go beyond acknowledging that women
are disadvantaged to acknowledging that men have unearned advantage, or that
unearned privilege has not been good for men's development as human beings, or
for society's development, or that privilege systems might ever be challenged
and changed. (McIntosh, 1998, p. 95)
Women are more likely to see domestic violence, workplace
harassment, and wage discrimination as major barriers to their quality of life
than men are owing heavily to the power and privilege associated by gender.
It may well be that a man is aware of a woman’s situation
and yet might attribute it to her character rather than the environment she
lives in.
-
She wore ‘revealing’
clothes and ‘asked’ for it
-
If a woman smokes, drinks,
is gregarious: she’s giving signals that she’s game
Much of the privilege and power that men have over women in
our culture today is unearned power. It isn’t just the man, a woman herself is
the enemy of her own sex. Indian women largely support patriarchy and are
brutally judgmental about their ilk.
To draw a conclusion, Milind Soman (sigh!)… ages ago when
asked about the most definitive moment that changed the course of Indian
society cited the advent of Satellite TV into the average ‘sitting duck’ Indian’s
home that insidiously permeated and clawed into our psyche.
While I watched M.A.S.H and Remington Steele (sigh again!)…
the Mangy world was enthralled by ‘Bold & Beautiful’ and ‘Santa Barbara’ as
I imagine was, most of urban India.
Not to digress, but women of my generation began the advent
into awareness… varying from career choices to sexuality and yet had to live with
the truth that we were ‘underprivileged’ and ‘powerless’ purely based on the fact that we
had tits and a vag.
We grew daughters to whom we imparted in a convoluted and
flawed manner that ‘you could be who you want to be’… if you followed certain ‘societal’
norms. A crying shame really.
Change is not like an orgasm, quick and fleeting. It’s a
long drawn process much like foreplay.
Yes, it would be great if men recognized the ‘power and
privilege’ they were born into by virtue of the phallus and testicles so as to
enhance self-awareness of the bias.
More importantly it would be to educate the generation of
boys yet to be men to share this inheritance with their women and for women to
step away from ‘accepting their troth’ and believing that true freedom comes
when we uplift each other, underwired bra fashion and abort froggy style!
