FOR my column title today, I am stealing the title of the classic account by Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce of the year they spent in a small Bangladeshi village in the early 1970s.
The violence in their title refers to the violence done to the soul by the grinding poverty and hopelessness they found in the Bangladeshi countryside. But I have always thought the term a very fitting one to describe the violence done to the souls of women in our society, and it is in this sense that I use it today.
What has precipitated this meditation on how women remain second-class citizens in our society was attending Dhaka’s first ever showing of “The Vagina Monologues” last week in an event billed as V-Day in Dhaka.
V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of playwright Eve Ensler’s award winning play.
Seeing the poignant and ground-breaking performance brought home to me that as much as the overt violence against women and girls in our society, such as acid-throwing, rape, and domestic abuse, need to be confronted, equally corrosive is the quiet violence that women suffer every day in Bangladesh.
This is the violence of often not being able to walk down the street without abuse or harassment, of single women not being able to rent a place of their own, of all the countless petty ways in which women’s freedom is constrained or society conspires to chasten and humiliate them if they try to break free of its shackles.
This is why the performance was so important in its own right. In addition to confronting issues of violence against women, the play also broached a lot of taboo subjects, such as women’s sexuality and right to be able to control their own bodies, that we never see discussed in polite society in Bangladesh.
The truth is that our attitudes towards women, and how we limit them and constrict them and do not allow them the same freedoms that we allow men, what we consider permissible in terms of employment and comportment, the double-standards, the hypocrisy — within these lesser evils can be found the seeds of the greater evils of violence such as rape and acid throwing.
If we were a society that could truly accept women as having equal rights (including equal sexual rights) as men, then the culture of male supremacy and entitlement (that is at the root of such crimes as rape and acid throwing) could be confronted, and violence against women could be correspondingly diminished.
Our culture and our religions (all of them) preach respect for women. Decency, honour, and chivalry with respect to women is part of our cultural heritage. It was not long ago that the sight of a girl abused or harassed on the street or in a bus would outrage on-lookers, and women could travel freely throughout the country without fear for their safety.
But the truth is that in the culture of today, casual misogyny is everywhere. Our society’s attitude towards women and assumptions about their role and rights are fundamentally unfair and obnoxious.
If we want to fix what’s wrong with our society, out attitudes towards women and the freedoms that we permit them (or do not permit them) is as good a place to start as any. Even other crucial problems such as poverty and persecution of ethnic and religious minorities have a gender dimension. It is always women who get it the worst.
Now, of course, a lot has improved over the years. There are far more educational and employment opportunities open to women today, and the status of women within the family and society as a whole has improved immeasurably.
But many simple freedoms continue to elude women and they continue to be subjected to appalling double-standards and hypocrisy in our male-dominated society. Heaven help a woman caught in a sexual indiscretion, for instance. She would be torn to pieces by society in a way a man would not.
More than anything else, the path to women’s equality and respect for women’s rights and freedoms will need to originate in a healthy attitude towards women, and this includes a healthy attitude (in place of the current culture of shame and prurience) towards women’s sexuality. Trying to control women’s sexuality is nothing more than another way for men to try to control women.
This is why V-Day was so important. It shone a light on violence against women, but it also shone a light on the quiet violence that they must contend with every day, and attempted to start a discourse on breaking through the taboos and attitudes and assumptions that continue to curtail women’s freedoms.
As long as we continue to cling to our taboos and attitudes and assumptions about sex and sexuality, the status of women will never equal that of men. As long as we continue to propagate a culture of shame and double-standards, we will continue to create a society of inequality and immiseration.
Source: http://www.thedailystar.net
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