Every time I was catcalled or I was touched inappropriately, I used to be in this numb silence, a shock ‘what just happened?’ As much I used to be raging with anger, all alert trying to avoid any ‘such’ incidence, at the end of the day in the comfort of my space, one question I always came back to ‘WHY do sexual crimes happen in the first place?’
For my generation, the easiest way to get an answer to something is to google it. There’s nothing that Google does not know, Google knows everything including things I didn’t even know I should know. So I googled this whole thing and I am flooded with all sorts of National Crime Record Bureau Data, Women representation in the workplace, and so on.
I dug in deeper, NCRB data and women representation cannot be why I was inappropriately touched in that crowded metro, that’s not a legit answer. I dig further in and I’m met with this generations-old tradition which says ‘aurat ke kandhon ka kaam hai ek mard ki zameen hai’ translating to it’s a woman’s responsibility to make sure her man stands upright further loosely translating to a woman is supposed to stay on the ground so that the man touches the height which later on as society flourished was understood as a woman should always be below men.
Google is a power. I googled more and I came across ‘Manuvad’ which is basically a set of rules and guidelines to become an ideal woman written by the saint Manu, highlight of the whole thing the key to be an ideal woman in a flourishing society is to submit herself to her husband, her family and not allow herself to get polluted by submitting herself further and every time she thinks she is being polluted the physical, sexual and all forms of abuse should be considered a form of penal fruit and not a form of abuse NOW THAT is how you become an ideal woman.
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For every abuse that happens, we end up blaming patriarchy and its roots for everything. Men want power and in order to rise to that power, they suppress the weaker parties. We talk about matriarchal societies, where essentially it is the women that have the power and where men are the weaker gender or the ones not in the power, basically. At times I wonder, women that are a part of matriarchal societies, have they never been harassed? Have they never faced any atrocities?
I went deeper further and came across one of these theories where Darwin says that it’s the need for control which takes the man through hell and back and it’s the same need for which he hunts, kills, and conquers. Makes sense.
So basically, it’s the sense of CONTROL which is why I was touched inappropriately? A man needs to feel the need to control its environments and its elements and in order to achieve that he does actions? Generations of patriarchy, abuse, and being treated worse than an animal and why because the need for control couldn’t be kept. The way Darwin defined ‘need’ and the way need came to be understood generations later, did Darwin even in the wildest of his dreams imagine that ‘needs of a man’ will be justified by keeping his theory about early man in comparison?
So the next time I was touched inappropriately or was teased for traveling alone way too much, instead of a question there was the word ‘NEED’ and every day when I come back to my space my question is, ‘how is this a need?’.
Here I go on another trivia, WHAT was that need that made him feel me this inappropriately?
