MCP --- Male Chauvinist Pig…jokingly or seriously we often
label a man MCP. But have we women looked at ourselves? How we continuously
encourage chauvinism and then cry out aloud for discrimination?
Let me share an instance from my college days --- We often
celebrated birthdays by cutting cakes in the class. A girl once very candidly
suggested that the girls should sacrifice and hand out the bigger pieces to the
boys. I think the rule was that when you serve something you keep the smallest
helping for yourself irrespective of gender. But this girl felt that boys by
virtue of their “superior” gender should get the bigger pieces. [In case you
are wondering…no, I am not fat and don’t crave cakes. It’s solely the
discrimination and not the scrumptiousness of the cake that hurt me. J]
I went to study in a coeducational institution. And never ever have I
come across a boy who treated girls as lesser beings. When a girl topped a
class not a single boy felt bad about being overtaken by a “lesser mortal”
Competition existed…a competition among equals in a healthy way. But outside
the school mothers often were heard defending their boys’ bad score. “Boys do
not study…they tend to be more intelligent but they neglect their studies and
hence the bad grades. Girls are basically stupid…but they put in hours of
studies and hence the good grades.”
Thankfully I never heard a single boy use this excuse. The
urban Indian male mostly attaches similar status to each gender. [Well it
started from the time of Vidyasagar and later Raja Rammohan Roy who thought it
would be unfair to leave the women illiterate and even more unfair to burn them
alive.]
The rule of Sati is yet to be abolished completely. Even
today women openly say that the value of a woman’s life is less than that of a
man. A woman is told to follow rituals to ensure her husband’s well being while
her own health can go to hell. This stink of chauvinism is more prominent in
the (n-1)th generation of females. India is a country heavily biased
towards men. Fortunately things are changing. But in a country where once wives
used to be burnt alive after the husband had passed away you would need time
for things to improve. A lot of time. Several generations. You would see that
each generation of women enjoy better privileges than the preceding one. And
unfortunately that is the very thing which women take as a reason to bicker
about.
The responsibility lies with us, the women of the current
generation to take a vow that we will not compare the girls of the next
generation with ourselves. We are fighting a battle…a battle to win equality and
if we see the next generation girls an inch closer to that equality then we
should feel happy and not threatened…happy that our lives have not been wasted…happy that our
battle is nearing its end.
