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toujours_nigel) wrote2010-02-18 05:25 pm
toujours_nigel) wrote2010-02-18 05:25 pm
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Shakti rupenu sansthita
Last 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.
no subject
And then, when the chips are down, raising it for the woman on the bus next to you, the maid in your kitchen, the sister-in-law...
On a separate note, I think the "hitting once is ok" is a concept rooting in survivor pragmatism. Because sometimes you have to think that the stuff that you can live with is ok, because if it isn't, then what business do you have to be alive, and surviving, and still, mostly, ok?
(also, I see this isn't locked... consider linking or crossposting to the adda and intranationalities?)
no subject
And then there's always the nagging thought of whether you're actually helping, or if, by pulling someone out of their protective shell, you're rendering them even more vulnerable.
As to the other, yes, I see what you mean, but while it only annoyed us when we were told it, it's horrifying to know the woman who said it commited suicide the day she got served divorce papers.