Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Dirty F Word

I mean Female of course. Also Feminism. One likes to get things clear at the outset.

When a nation's resources are usurped, its decisions made by an authority outside of itself and its economic independance stunted, you call it Imperialism. When the same thing happens to a woman, its just the way the world is. When certain ascribed identities - castes - are denied entry into temples, you say its discrimination and grossly unfair. When a woman is kept out by a temple, you bring up the fact that a temple is in fact, private property, and can frame its own rules. You don't care so much when text books use the word 'man' for all of human kind or where it could have used the world 'people'. Heaven forbid if the text book said 'white man'. When a particular racial group is denied employment, a political crisis grips the media and the world. When a girl is prohibited from leaving her home to work, indeed, not allowed to seek employment, its family tradition and conservatism. When the upper classes, upper castes, the rich, the aristocrats, the manistream, the majority dominates or monopolizes something to the detriment of corresponding opposite groups, it's injustice. When men dominate a field, its perfectly normal.

It's all quite logical actually. Discrimination against half the world is Not Relevant.

Let's just accept that it isn't relevant to deliberate upon patriarchy and women's empowerment. Not intellectual enough, and quite disconcerting to say the least. It's both more important and more intelligent to talk about racism, imperialism, caste bias, communalism and tribal issues. But a group that constitutes 50% of the world's population doesn't qualify as a cool enough debate. It never has. Gender studies are a bizarre and irrelevant discipline to spend your academic years studying. Women are something that loud and screechy women NGO workers talk about, and ugly dishevelled women academics.

It's something a teacher once said during a lecture on 'Instability'. It is assumed that instability is a consequence of fairly widespread inequality. And yet, women who constitute half of the entire world's population and have been subject to the grossest forms of violence, discrimination and subjugation, have never caused any political instability.

They're Irrelevant after all.

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