Shakti rupenu sansthita
Feb. 18th, 2010 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toujours_nigelLast year, I took up a Human Rights course. I attended perhaps five classes, including tests. In one of those, the woman teaching us informed us that it's okay if a man hits his wife once. This led, inevitably, to outrage among those of us who were from English--and, no doubt, among the others, but it was a pass course, and I don't really know. She has subsequently commited suicide. I don't know whether any cause has been pinpointed, but a contributing factor was certainly her marriage dissolving--another was her job.
Was she standing in class, telling 19-21 year old boys and girls that some domestic violence is okay because she regretted leaving her husband--conjecture, entirely, but they were separated--or because her case had gone beyond some? Impossible to know, and it isn't that I want to, not that particular woman's life.
But. But I have spoken to a girl who said in light conversation that her mother had tried infanticide, I've been friends with a girl whose family treated her like so much trash and her male cousin like their saviour, nevermind that he didn't have their name and wasn't, technically, theirs. I know a woman whose mother-in-law tried starving her for some small error by the simple expedient of not having enough rice cooked--because, of course, she had to wait till everyone else was served. There are others, whose lives are circumscribed by the simple fact that they are women, and so their food, their clothes, their education, carreer, marriage, are all chosen by others, and they are so very many in number that I cannot remember them.
They are a fact not only of their lives, but of mine, and I am so used to it that I feel no trace of shame or sorrow or survivor's guilt, that I have the freedom of screaming at my father and choosing my own clothes, and reading what books I choose, and cropping my hair short, and taking a drink or having a joint, when so many others not only cannot, but cannot think of doing so. I think I should, sometimes, but what price a woman's sorrow? Cheapest commodity around, that.
Better to straighten your spine and lift your head and raise your voice and live. Besides, I don't deal well with responsibilities, they bore me.
Was she standing in class, telling 19-21 year old boys and girls that some domestic violence is okay because she regretted leaving her husband--conjecture, entirely, but they were separated--or because her case had gone beyond some? Impossible to know, and it isn't that I want to, not that particular woman's life.
But. But I have spoken to a girl who said in light conversation that her mother had tried infanticide, I've been friends with a girl whose family treated her like so much trash and her male cousin like their saviour, nevermind that he didn't have their name and wasn't, technically, theirs. I know a woman whose mother-in-law tried starving her for some small error by the simple expedient of not having enough rice cooked--because, of course, she had to wait till everyone else was served. There are others, whose lives are circumscribed by the simple fact that they are women, and so their food, their clothes, their education, carreer, marriage, are all chosen by others, and they are so very many in number that I cannot remember them.
They are a fact not only of their lives, but of mine, and I am so used to it that I feel no trace of shame or sorrow or survivor's guilt, that I have the freedom of screaming at my father and choosing my own clothes, and reading what books I choose, and cropping my hair short, and taking a drink or having a joint, when so many others not only cannot, but cannot think of doing so. I think I should, sometimes, but what price a woman's sorrow? Cheapest commodity around, that.
Better to straighten your spine and lift your head and raise your voice and live. Besides, I don't deal well with responsibilities, they bore me.
