Back in the days when I was a kid, there were hardly any women drivers around.

I remember once when I must have been eight or nine years old, seeing a woman behind the wheel, smiling and looking a bit embarrassed as the men stared. Of course, there were many times fewer cars on the streets in those days.

Now before I go on, I’m going to make a couple of things clear:

No, I do not think unrestricted private car ownership is a good thing – those of you who are regulars on this blog have heard me expounding on this often enough, so I don’t need to repeat the reasons.

Also, I do not share in the belief (or pretended belief) that women drivers are inferior to men. On the other hand, I think women, with their lower testosterone levels and in general greater respect for authority, are liable – once they have an equivalent amount of experience behind the wheel or handlebars – to be safer and less aggressive drivers than men, any old day of the week.

So let’s get on with what I was saying.

Nowadays, close to half the non-commercial vehicles, at least in this city, are driven by women. And not just young women either – I’ve seen sixty year olds with white hair and bifocals taking driving lessons; and, really, why not?

Today, when I saw a woman driving a carload of kids back from school (and they were in the uniform of my old school, and all of a size; they were certainly not all her kids, either) I realised again, just how empowering driving is to a woman, and on how many levels.

First, of course, it frees her directly by liberating her from the constrains of being dependent on her man for transport (assuming that no dependable and affordable public transport exists). It gives her freedom to work, freedom from being housebound, freedom to be something more than a fixture.

(And, of course, it frees men too – when their wives can drive, they don’t have to take time off from work to take them to their jobs or shopping, or to bring the kids back from school. Got that, MCPs?)  

But it frees her on another, totally different level. Back in my youth, when women never drove, the average child thought of its mother as a homebound caregiver, no more. Watching those kids sitting staring out of the window as the woman negotiated bumper-to-bumper traffic, it struck me that whatever they thought of her now, homebound caregiver isn’t the term for it.

Roll on Michaela Schumacher.

    

Jug Suraiya is a member of the editorial staff of what is arguably India’s worst newspaper, The Times of India. Normally, I enjoy reading his columns, because he has some smidgen of a sense of humour – something rare in Indian columnists of any hue.

Anyway, to get to the point – in one of his recent columns, after tipping his metaphorical hat in the direction of Barack Obama, he went on to write at some length as to why he wanted, craved, ached for Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States: to wit, that she was a woman, and he, Suraiya, had once talked to some redneck in the US who scoffed at the idea of a woman ever being US president.

In other words, it’s the same old tired argument as was trotted out by the likes of Gloria Steinem: support Clinton (the erstwhile Rodham Clinton, let’s not forget, ladies of a feminist persuasion who back her because of her double X chromosomes) because she’s a woman – nothing else matters, not her politics or lack thereof, not her blatant waffling on key issues like Iraq, nothing but the fact that she’s a woman.

Hell, as I said before, on that basis, if I were American, I’d vote for Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin before I’d vote for Clinton. At least those two are upfront about being evil vindictive right wing bitches – they aren’t trying to hide it. What you see, where they are concerned, is what you get.

As for Suraiya: I wonder if he has something against a black man becoming president of the US, then?   

    

They call it the Battered Woman Syndrome, but I can't understand it.

One of the things that always has surprised and shocked me is the sheer number of women who are willing to stay with abusive men – men who torture them mentally, abuse them in public, beat them up daily, deny them food and shelter, and quite often end up killing them (whether by violence or AIDS or neglect doesn’t matter very much).

It wouldn’t be that shocking (though just as bad) if these women were all uneducated or unemployed and had no social or economic alternative – but so much of the time it isn’t.

I know women, educated, qualified women, who have been publicly insulted by their husbands, who have been turned into virtual marital slaves, who have nothing but the husk of a dead marriage to cling to – and still they won’t quit. I know at least one woman whose philandering, drug-addicted husband has tried to kill her more than once, and spent time in prison for it – and when he came out she took him right back, and he did it all over again.

It's not as though it were the children, either. There are these women with children old enough to withstand a parental separation, or even no children at all.

I wonder what it is that makes them do it. Is it the brainwashing their parents subject them to, that a woman must sacrifice herself for a man? Have they suppressed their self-worth so much that this seems better than the other alternatives? There are illiterate, “helpless” women who find the courage to walk out on abusive men – and here we have educated women, professionally qualified, preferring the marital hell to the air of freedom.

I’m sorry, I just don’t understand this phenomenon. Maybe someone will enlighten me. 

    

Over the years I’ve encountered many amazing examples of male chauvinism and – more amazing than that – female acquiescence to the chauvinism. There are questions and questions that I’ve asked myself and some conclusions I reached, while some other answers remain hanging in the air.

I can only touch the surface of this in a blog post; there must be encyclopaedias written on the subject, I’m sure.

Of course, one might begin with wondering about where male chauvinism began and why it still exists. I’m sure I can’t go and give you a full account, but – at least in this country – men are systematically brainwashed from childhood into thinking they are superior to women. Some of it they learn by watching their own fathers and their mothers. Typically, the mothers will tremble at the words of their lords and masters, and the fathers…well, the fathers will treat the mothers like a piece of kitchen and housekeeping equipment that doubles up as a sex toy. That’s about it.

So, the kid who goes through childhood watching this daily routine of a mom who basically slaves all day just to feed her brood and who has no opinion on anything…or if she does she takes jolly good care to keep these opinions to herself. And he sees how mom isn’t even consulted on anything, in fact isn’t entitled to an opinion on what’s to be affecting her own life, and he decides, yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Women are inferior animals with no brains of their own.

Now I’ll emphasise that this is not automatically true for every society or at all times. Of course, now, animals like hyenas or elephants have always been led by females, but even among human societies, the matrilineal condition has been at least as common as patriarchy. This was despite the fact that endless pregnancies tended to keep women tied down to the hearth. However – by and large – the more a society develops mercantilism, the more women are relegated to an inferior position.

This I believe is because of the simple ability of males to use their larger physical size to inflict violence on each other and on women; and the male belief that he’s got a more analytical brain than his mate and accordingly deserves to rule her thinking.

You must understand that in chauvinism of any kind, facts don’t matter.

For instance, the sex of the child may be decided by what chromosome the father contributes; but if the mother keeps giving birth to daughters in a male centric society, do you think she’ll be allowed to get away with it?       

For instance, a man can fall ill and demand that his woman forego food and sleep to wait on him hand and foot – but if she has the temerity to be ill, it’s because she’s trying to draw attention to herself. (Yes, I know one woman, an asthmatic, whose husband has repeatedly told her this in public when she gets attacks).

For instance, a woman will have to cook and clean and provide for the family – but if her husband neglects to give her any money to get all that done, it’s still her responsibility to do it all.

And then there is religion, of course. Just about all modern religions are aggressively anti-woman. The worst reputations are shared by Islam and Catholicism, but let me tell you – Orthodox Hinduism makes the Taliban look like ardent feminists. Among Orthodox Hindu goodies for women are –

Women are inferior to men; the purpose of women in life is to bear heirs for their men; women cannot worship many gods without male sanction and intercession; women cannot attend cremations; women cannot inherit property; menstruating women are ritually polluted; widowed women must spend the rest of their lives mourning for their husbands, who are literally their gods (pati parmeshwar); and more.

No wonder I find North Indian (especially, since antifemale discrimination is at its height in North India) women unable even to tell their own physicians their names or to answer questions like “where does it hurt”? They’ve been conditioned too – by their parents, by their religion, and by their milieu. They'll do anything, be starved, beaten, stripped of all dignity, even be burned alive, and they will take it as their lot in life. I used to see, when I was an intern in Lucknow, many women arrive badly burned in "kitchen fires" who would die after a few days stubbornly insisting they had accidentally caught on fire - and everyone knew what had happened. Brainwashed to the point of death.

Now we've arrived at the other side of the coin – female acquiescence. Frankly I find this at least as infuriating as male chauvinism. I’ve said this before: women are their own worst enemies, the worst enemies of feminism. If women didn’t gang up with men to insult, humiliate, and oppress women, how long could men last? A simple kitchen strike would have wiped them out! Sometimes the woman will for some unfathomable reason stay on and be abused rather than fight back. All too common. So common that I’ve stopped expecting anything else.

Damn. Time to stop for the night. This is getting me depressed.

     

    

India is going to get its first woman President.

 

OK, the formalities aren’t quite over yet, there is an election to be gone through, but her victory is a forgone conclusion, because the numbers are on her side and the opposition hasn’t even got its act together enough to decide on whom to put up instead.

 

There are just a few problems.

 

In the first place, no one, no one, has ever heard of Pratibha Patil. Oh, we may have come across her name in the paper one time or another, and we do see her in this photo. But I wager that nobody could tell you, only a few days ago, just who the hell she was.

 

In other words, she is a total nonentity. The perfect candidate for the post of a figurehead. She will probably give herself kyphosis genuflecting towards her political masters and alleged subordinates. But that’s what we get for having a constitution with a powerless rubber stamp president.

 

But so far as that goes, I guess she couldn’t possibly be worse than the one in the chair right now…the guy who pontificates on how desirable a two-party system would be (wow, all we need is a Republican/Democrat type of no-difference system), who continues to make hi-falutin’ prose on responsibilities and so on while promoting treasonable bastards like Narayana Murthy as his successor, who does not even have the courage of his alleged convictions when push comes to shove.

 

Good riddance, APJ Abdul Kalam. I won’t miss you.

 

Now we come to the other problems.

 

Now of course – of course – this is just arrant tokenism. Making a woman President may be all nice and PC, but it’s going to do doodly-squat for women in this country. Savitri Devi of Bihar still won’t get to learn to read or to have any voice in deciding whether to have another child or not; Fatima Begum of Hyderabad will still have to drag on a burqa and take her husband’s permission before setting foot out of her house; Angela Fernandes of Goa will still get beaten up and raped by her husband every Friday evening and not be able to divorce him because of social reasons; Pynsuklang Lyngdoh of Meghalaya will still be left flat by her common-law husband when he chooses to walk out of the “marriage” and cohabit with another woman. Nothing will change for any of them. After all, the Domestic Violence Bill, an alleged piece of hard pro-woman legislation, didn’t achieve a thing.

 

But it is politically convenient, and it makes women’s groups very, very happy. I have never been able to take women’s groups seriously. They have always seemed extraordinarily easy to please, and to be satisfied with the most transparent tokens. Sometimes I wonder if they are fronts for the patriarchy.

 

Be that as it may, we are going to have a woman in the top job, for the first time ever. No one – unless Pratibha Patil drops dead of a heart attack – can doubt this. (Personally, I wonder why nobody thought to put up Lakshmi Sehgal, who was a candidate last time. Was it because – unlike Patil, who is a political hack – she was a freedom fighter…a genuine, armed, violent revolutionary of a freedom fighter… with impeccable credentials? Was it because she is totally left wing, heart and soul? I can’t see Lakshmi Sehgal falling for political shenanigans. No.)

 

OK, since Danny (tsuihark) tells me that anyone who can’t explain an idea in a minute had better write a book instead, and I have no intention whatsoever of doing that, I’ll get to the third problem, the one over which they are all losing sleep.

 

Just what the hell does one call the nation’s president – in Hindi?

 

If it were a male, it would be easy – the standard form is Rashtrapati (literally, if you want to know, “husband of the nation,” but that is a fact something most people choose to ignore). Logically, therefore, we should call Patil – when she becomes President – Rashtrapatni (wife of the nation) …but, er, that would go giving people ideas they would be better off without. Like, who of the half a billion males of the nation would be sleeping with her tonight?

 

So they still suggest Rashtrapati, saying it’s the standard nomenclature of the post. Yeah, right. “Husband of the nation” and that a woman. I’m not the only person to find this ridiculous. (And, no, I’m not a fan of the silly fad of calling actresses “actors” or referring to “mankind” as “humankind”. It’s being far too stupidly PC as far as I’m concerned. Can you imagine “She phoned and the firepersons came”? Huh?)  

 

So, what the hell do we call her, then?

 

That national disgrace, that tabloid, The Times of India, put up a whole slew of suggestions, each more moronic than the last…the ultimate was RashtraAunty. Really.

 

Ah…I have it.

 

What word do Hindi speakers use as an honorific while referring to women in authority? What word is applied to the de facto ruler of the country (and everyone knows who she is)? What word, properly applied (with the “d” pronounced, as it invariably is in Hindi) brings to mind the connection with the brothel – appropriately, because India is a brothel where everyone in authority is either a pimp or a whore?

 

It’s time to welcome our first RashtraMadam…    

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

  

Possibly the stupidest argument I have yet heard in favour of the restriction of womens' rights came from a Taliban supporter on another website:

"The taliban were so good...they were stopping women only from working in those professions which were demeaning for them; and they were paying them salaries for staying at home."

Wow.

There are so many things wrong with this line of thought tht I did not even try to contradict him - anyone with that big a mental block can't be re-educated short of a brain transplant. I did think of asking him if public executions of women or whipping them for showing a fingertip was supposed to be non-demeaning, but again, what would be the point?

Some years back a girl was abducted and repeatedly raped in this town. When her assailants were captured, the women of the families of the rapists (there were about six of them) came out in their defence. "She was a whore" was the usual line. No proof given of course, but...

(While I am on this topic - why do women continue to accept male dominance, even to the extent of helping supress female aspirations to equality? I have often thought that women are their own worst enemy) 

Assuming she was a hooker. So bloody what? Does that make her fair game or something? Is a hooker a vampire?

Whenever a woman gets molested/raped in this country, the standard, and frequently official, response: "She was asking for it; she dressed indecently, went around on her own without a man to take care of her, wore make up, was sleeping around..."

Where is the difference  between this attitude and the taliban worshipper I mentioned?

Of course, the usual way to humiliate someone is to rape his wife or daughter - optionally, kill her afterwards, or at least drag her around naked in public; rape has been used in Gujarat as a matter of policy during the 2002 pogrom. That's understandable in a country which says having sex, evn if forced, is something that destroy's a woman's "honour" (even our Supreme Court made this observation). But rape is not the only way women can be kept under masculine control.

You can restrict a woman's education, nourishment, brainwash her into believing she can't survive without her man (some of my woman patients in Lucknow were village types who dared not even tell me their names - even for that I had to ask the husband). You can keep her barefoot and pregnant. You can beat her up when you want, and incredibly often she will still stay loyal to you. You can force her into clothing that removes all traces of her individuality, not to mention her sexuality. You can cripple her by glass ceilings if she does find employment. If she is put in an adminsitrative position, you can sabotage her by dumb insolence. It will almost always be blamed on her own incompetence.

And if it fails, of course, you can shoot her.

There will always be those who will say it was her own fault.

Don't you dare
Raise your head.

I give you a place to stay
My earnings bring you your food.

This means I own you.

And you want  to
Be independent
To go out and work.
There's ingratitude for you.

You don't know where you're better off. 
Or is it
That this is just a ruse
To meet other men?
Things need to change round here.

I've been too good to you.