STEREOTYPES
AND THE GUILT FACTOR
February
19 witnessed quite an uproar on social media. A meme showing a list of what
constituted the quintessentially bad Indian girl was trending. Girls who ate
more, girls who ate less, had big breasts, travelled to Goa alone, rode motor
bikes, fell in love in parks, leched at boys, could not perfect in the art of
roti-making, etc, etc.
Shocking!
Outrageous! Yes. The list, created by a bunch of 22-year-old art students from
Bangalore, was meant to be a satire on vernacular (read Hindi) visual
literature. The satire somehow blurred the actual and the virtual, and this is
what the students had desired - to arouse shock, anger and outrage, and
laughter; to a great extent, and they succeeded in creating that effect.
But
my problem was elsewhere. As much as I expressed my share of shock and outrage,
and rolled on the floor with laughter, I was intrigued by the use of
stereotypes and the conflicts. Where is the conflict between riding a motor
bike and making a perfect roti. I may excel in one and fail in another, or
excel in both, or be a complete failure in both. And why should there exist any
guilt if I can't accomplish that?
Stereotypes
are the biggest hindrances to liberation. The distinction between a good girl
and a bad girl somewhere rolls back to our childhood when we were strictly told
by our elders what we should do and what we should not. As much as values help
us in shaping our lives, so do stereotypes. With stereotypes, come another
aspect. And that is guilt.
Now I will go back to the quintessential bad girl list. Let's begin with the one that says you aren't a good girl if you don't know how to make a round roti. When we were children, we were often told by our elders that if we did not learn how to cook, we would be greeted with immense misery after marriage. That it was the duty of a good wife to cook and do household chores and tend to her husband, in-laws and children. No matter how good we were in our studies or sports, how well we painted, sang or danced, our greatness would fall apart if we failed to be the quintessentially good daughter-in-law, wife or mother. Even if daughters grew up to be professionals, the key to a good woman lay in tending to the house, rearing and raising children and being obedient.
This
means that in spite of breaking stereotypes, women have to mould themselves in
the archetypal mode to fit in, failing which could invite dissatisfaction, and
often leading to a feeling of guilt by the women for having failed to
please the majority at large. I have seen women getting stressed out trying to
be a perfect worker in office, a great wife, a doting mother and a dutiful
daughter and daughter-in-law at home. Expectations from us are high, said SBI
chairman (yes, that's what she calls herself) Arundhati Bhattacharya. We have
to be an excellent homemaker and yet crack the male bastion at work, she said.
A
former colleague of mine once told me that she constantly worried about her
child when she was not at home and felt she was somewhere not being a good
mother as she could not attend to her child all the time. This led to immense
stress, causing depression, and one fine day she left her lucrative job to do
what she felt she was not doing.
Let
us move on to the list where a big-breasted woman is labelled as bad.
Some
in our society distinguish a good woman from a bad one by dress codes. Wearing
jeans provokes men to rape women, hence, there are so many rapes happening in
cities, rants a self-styled moral guardian of a right wing cultural
organisation. As this list above shows, such organisations and people consider
a big-breasted woman bad for society. She is the essential provocateur, a
symbol of lust, hence a threat. So when Nirbhaya got raped, there were many,
including women, who questioned her morality, asked why she was out with a guy
at 9 pm, many even going to the extent of justifying the rape of girl/woman who
hang around with guys that late at night. In other words, arouse a sense of
guilt.
Many
women feel guilty of committing acts that are otherwise natural to human
beings. If a woman travels alone in an express train and is harassed by her
male co-passengers, her family and relatives put the blame on her shoulder for
not being cautious. On top of the humiliation meted out to her, she ends up
feeling guilty for inviting trouble.
This
brings us to the other aspects of the list. Stuff like travelling alone,
leching at boys, falling in love in parks and riding motor bikes break stereotypes.
They challenge the popular notions of womanhood. And the list that threatens
such popular perceptions is endless.
I
will now draw an inference from an old Bengali movie Agnishwar. In the film,
there is a scene where the protagonist Dr Agnishwar Mukherjee attends to an
ailing and under-nourished mother of multiple children. She is advised by the
doctor to replenish herself with nutritious food, but the poor woman feels
guilty of eating those good foods alone and distributes the eggs chicken, fruits,
milk, cheese and other nourishing food articles among her husband and children.
Being
the mother, she cannot bear to eat those goodies alone while her children and
husband remain deprived. She tells the doctor that since her husband comes home
after a day of hard labour and can't afford sweetmeats for the children, she
provides her husband with the milk and makes sweets with the cheese for her
children, thus depriving herself of the nutrition when she most needs it.
Somewhere in her sub-conscious, she has the social and religious hierarchy that
keeps women in the low rung of society that forces them to eat the last
remnants of the pot after providing the male members and the children with the
cream. Agnishwar was about a story before independence, and a lot has changed
since then. But as they say, the more things change, the more they remain the
same.This brings us to the list of eating too much or too little.
I
have often seen mothers, including mine, keep the best portion of mutton or the
chunkiest pieces of fish and the best or biggest sweets for the father and
children. The smallest piece of fish would always be assigned for the mother
though she cooked for the entire family. The mother always makes the sacrifice,
or else she is ridden with guilt. And the above-mentioned meme reinforces that
feeling. I have seen my well-provided former land lady divide one omelette into
two and distribute that among her two pregnant daughters-in-law, when they
probably required two eggs each a day. I have seen one of them secretly sneak
into her bedroom and eat behind her mother-in-law to nourish herself, of which
she was being deprived of.
It
is ironic that while a lot of food goes wasted, there are some who stay malnourished.
According to Unicef, malnourishment in kids is so common in India and
sub-Saharan Africa that every one child out of three is malnourished. The
Unicef cites around one-third of all adult women are underweight as inadequate
care of women and girls, especially during pregnancy, results in low- birth
weight babies. Nearly 30% of all newborns have a low birth weight, making them
vulnerable to further malnutrition and disease, says the world body.
Hence,
the meme while making fun of the perceived notions, subtly questions the
visible inequalities prevalent in our society.
We,
as a society, strive for perfection, create rules and stereotypes, often at the
cost of our own happiness and well-being. We feel immensely guilty if we fail
to do something that is expected of us. We try to constantly please others
without thinking whether that's needed or not. We sacrifice a lot for others
without a thought for us.
There is nothing called an ideal society or an ideal man or woman. Each of us is unique and each of us have the right to live the way we desire, without hurting others.
So,
as we approach yet another year of International Women's Day, let the man,
woman and child in us celebrate by being happy and living a guilt-free
independent life. Let us do away with stereotypes and eat, dance, love, work,
travel, celebrate our body like there's none other.
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