Chauvinism is often promoted by the urban female

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.