The Politics of Violence Against Women
Special Focus on India
Meera Khanna –
Where have all the
baby girls gone?
Sent to heaven by sex
sensitive death
Sent to heaven starved
to death
Where have all the
sisters gone
Gone to heaven abused
to death
Where have all the
wives gone
Gone to heaven hounded
to death
Where have all the
mothers gone
Gone to heaven giving
birth till death
These lines that I
wrote some time back are a pointer to the cycle of violence that women face from
the womb to the tomb. More importantly they reflect the status of women in a
traditionally patriarchal society like ours.
Violence
against women is seen both by governmental and non-governmental agencies through
two perspectives.The first of these is that violence – domestic violence is seen
as a kind of breakdown in an otherwise just or necessary system. This aberration may come due to family
conflicts, outside stresses, personal differences etc.
The other perspective
is that violence is among the many forms of subordination and oppression
expressed systemically towards women. Violence against women is only the tip of
the iceberg; the visible dimension of systematic subordination. But there is the
rest of the iceberg that is the firm basis for the tip.
There is a
sustained systemic, consistent and deliberate politics of violence against
women. One of the meanings of politics is “the use of intrigue or strategy to
obtain a position of power. It is by a carefully delineated strategy that the
patriarchal institutions are perpetuated by a culture of violence, which works
at various levels. Women become both victims as well as perpetuators of
violence, caught as they are in the same socio-cultural patterns, and the
struggle for survival. Men become the perpetuators as well as the recognized
protectors of the women, thus emphasizing her subjugated status.Violence is both
by acts of commission as well as acts of omission, as inaccessibility to health
care and nutritional resources indicate.
But what is
really more horrifying is the insidious ways in which tyrannical patriarchal
stereotypes are built either through media projections, advertisements, the
nuances of language, acceptability of unjust customs, or encouragement of gender
unjust institutions in the name of tradition.Many of these institutions
emphasize the weak, inferior, subordinate, victimised, objectified status of
women thus insidiously justifying the violence on her.
Language is
a reflection of social norms and in India has developed with specific
expressions, proverbs, abuses which only reinforce the inferior status of
women.(Pati
/Husband) For example abuses in
almost all languages of South Asia are expressions of forced sexual activity on
a woman – either as rape or incest.
This only reinforces the victimized status of a woman. More dehumanizing
than anything else is the oppressive discriminative expressions that are used to
describe a widow. The widow is not to be referred to as “she” but as “it”, thus
emphasizing her neutrality, in terms of sex as she is a “desexed” creature. She
is often referred to as “prani” – a
creature since it was her husband’s presence that gave her human status. Widows
are often ridiculed and made the butt of sexual jokes. In most regional
languages the descriptive term for a widow is often used as an abuse. In Tamil
the word “Mundachi or Munda”
describes a widow, but it is also a word heard in colloquial Tamil in the course
of any altercation. In Punjabi the widow is often abused as “Khasma nu khaniye”(husband eater) thus
squarely laying the blame of the man’s death on her shoulders. In Punjabi again
a widow is called a “rand” while a
prostitute is called a “randi”. The
close proximity of the two words indicates the social psyche. A widow’s
sexuality becomes suspect and a source of menace once her husband is no more.
Once she is a widow it is a small step to become a randi from a rand. Both words are used as common
abuses
The fact
that most of the descriptive expressions on a widow are interchangeable as
abuses indicates the socially degraded status of the widow.
The traditional Hindu
blessing for a married woman is “Sadaa sowbhagyawati bhavaa” thereby implying
that any other state is to be devoutly wished away. Again the blessing for man
is Yashaswi Bhava ( may your fame spread wide) or Aayushman Bhava (may you live long). But
for a woman these blessings are never given. Since her long life and
manifestation of her capabilities are immaterial to the power structure. The
blessing she gets is “Doodho Nahaao
Pootho Palo” May you give birth and bring up sons – sons mind you not
children. Her motherhood is to be controlled and channelised for sons alone.
Shouldn’t there be a conscious avoidance of such sexist aashirwads”
The daughter is often
referred to as “paraya dhan.
Have
we ever wondered why? The reason
for this discrimination is in the patriarchal attitude towards a daughter.It is
also an insidious way to deprive her of her property rights. Any property she
inherits will belong to another, since she herself belongs to someone else. In
northern
I am not
suggesting a forced purging of such expressions and proverbs. But language is a living index of the
social conditions. It reflects the
sensitivity of society.
Gender-sensitization would hopefully phase out such
expression.
One of the
fundamental sources of gender inequality is the system of patrilocal
residence. In most
Hindu communities and in Muslim communities a woman leaves her parental home at
the time of her marriage to join her husband’s house. Patrilocality can also
mean the drastic alienation from her parental family that a married woman
experiences after her transfer to her husband’s family.For a woman, it means a
drastic alienation from her parental family, even when she is widowed. On the other hand
she suddenly becomes a burden on her in-laws. In this context the example of
matriarchal society is interesting. In Nair society the woman did not change her
residence on marriage, with the result widowhood did not marginilize her in the
manner as in Nambudri society which is patriarchal. While a woman lives on in
her husband’s home, she is subjected to untold miseries, some of which have
social sanction, and some have the tacit consent of the male forces of the
family.
Early
marriage and early motherhood while a reflection of a patriarchal society is in
itself a perpetuation of patriarchal norms. Marriage before adulthood is a socially
sanctioned practice to control the sexuality, the body and the personhood of the
women. Parents may genuinely feel
that their daughters will be better off and safer with a male guardian. One important impetus for marrying girls
at an early age is that it helps to prevent pre-marital sex and rape. Many societies prize virginity before
marriage and this can manifest itself in a number of practices designed to
“Protect” a girl from unsanctioned sexual activity. In effect they amount to strict controls
imposed upon the girl herself. She
may be secluded from social interaction outside the family. In NorthEast Africa, and parts of
Early marriage ensures
that a woman is submissive to her husband and works hard for her in-laws
household. Her immaturity, lack of
education, lack of financial independence makes it impossible to assert her
individual will. The younger the
woman, the better and more effective the control. That is why the emphasis on youth is
reiterated since they are best suited for a supplementary secondary role in the
marital relations. Also control on
her is total
Early marriage
inevitably denies girls their right to education that is the need for personal
development, preparation for adulthood and their effective contribution for the
well being of their family and society. Demographic and feasibility studies
indicate that an average woman with several or more years of education marry
four years late and have 2.3 fewer children than those with no education. The
denial of education means she looses out on socializing skills, making friends outside her
family circle and other useful skills. It reduces her chances of developing her
own independent identity. She grows up with no sense of right to assert her
viewpoint and little experience in articulating one. Lack of schooling also
means that those girls, who are abandoned, divorced or widowed have no skills to
earn their living and get pushed into exploitative professions this further
reinforcing their low status. Or else she joins the ranks of urban poor. This
early marriage contributes to the feminization of poverty and its resulting
impact on children.
One of the facts
governing domestic violence is that the degree and frequency increases when the
victim – the wife is unable to protest, and protect herself. The sense of power
feeds itself on the helplessness of the victim. The helplessness of the woman if
reinforced by her low social status, her lack of support as much as her low self
esteem.
The great tragic irony
of the Indian woman is that within the four walls of the temple she is
symbolized as the goddess but outside she is object of use, misuse and abuse. I
will quote from a poem I wrote a few years back on the Indian
woman.
They call you
Devi
You are
Annapoorna
You are
Saraswathi
Yet
unlettered
You have a
temple
Only my womb is
denied
You have
divinity
Socio
cultural rituals often emphasize subordination. -Karva
chauth is the ritual of no water – no food fast which women of North Indian
states keep for the long life of the husbands. The fast is accompanied by the
narration of an absolutely gory tale of the horrible tortures that a husband
undergoes if a wife does not keep the fast according to the rules The fast
reinforces the woman’s dependent status. She must fast since her status in
society is assured only as a wife. It is the husband who is her saviour, her
protector, and her annadata. Conversely there is no fast a husband keeps for the
wife’s long life or in appreciation of her support given unstintingly over the
years. Because she is a dispensable commodity. The media while reflecting these
attitudes perpetuates it by glorification.
Women's bodies have
been used whole, or in parts, to market everything from brassieres to monkey
wrenches. One effect of such ads is to give women unrealistic notions of what
they should look like. After instilling anxiety and insecurity in women, the ads
imply that buying consumer products can correct practically any defect, real or
imagined. Moreover, the women's magazines that could be telling the truth about
such marketplace fraud are largely co-opted by their advertisers. Advertising's images
of the ideal women are everywhere, but women's magazines deserve a special
mention for promoting their commercialized beauty ideal. These magazines, so
widely read that they are nicknamed "cash cows" in the publishing trade, have a
nearly symbiotic relationship with advertisers. Does any women’s magazine tell
us that no cream in the world can turn a dark skin fair? How could they? What
about the much-needed revenue from the plethora of fairness cream ads.In
addition to reinforcing sexist notions about the ideal woman, ads exploit
sexuality. Many products are pitched with explicit sexual imagery that borders
on pornography. Not only do these images encourage us to think of sex as a
commodity, but also they often reinforce stereotypes of women as sex objects and
may contribute to violence against women.
Everywhere we turn,
ads tell us what it means to be a desirable man or woman. For a man, the message
is manifold: he must be powerful, rich, confident, athletic. For a woman, the
messages all share a common theme: You must be "beautiful." Your hair needs more
shine and gloss. The aging of your skin has to be camouflaged. Your legs must be
hairless and smooth. If your skin is not glowing then your husband will think
twice before taking you out. Just as an old coat is not worn outside
Advertising, of course, did not invent the notion that women should be valued as
ornaments; women have always been measured against cultural ideals of beauty. But advertising has joined forces with
sexism to make images of the beauty ideal more pervasive, and more unattainable,
than ever before.
Take a look at the models we see in the
print or electronic media -a nineteen-year-old professional model, weighing just
120 pounds on a willowy 5'10" frame. Her eyes are a deep black, her teeth pearly
white. She has no wrinkles, blemishes--or even pores, for that matter. As media
critic Jean Kilbourne observes in Still Killing Us Softly, her groundbreaking
film about images of women in advertising, "The ideal cannot be achieved; it is
inhuman in its flawlessness. And it is the only standard of beauty-and worth-for
women in this culture."'
The flawlessness of
the model, in fact, is an illusion created by makeup artists, photographers, and
photo retouchers. Each image is painstakingly worked over: Teeth and eyeballs
are bleached white; blemishes, wrinkles, and stray hairs are airbrushed away.
According to creative directors, almost every photograph we see for a national
advertiser these days has been worked on by a retouched to some degree.... By
inviting women to compare their unimproved reality with the models’ airbrushed
perfection, advertising erodes self-esteem, then offers to sell it back-for a
price.
The price is high. It
includes the staggering sums we spend each year to change our appearance: In
US $33 billion on weight loss;47
billion on cosmetics; $300 million on cosmetic surgery. The emphasis is that
woman is the body, the body and only the body. They would have done away with
the woman’s head, but you need a head for shampoo or hair oil
ads.
. The psychological costs of advertising
induced self-consciousness are difficult to quantify. For most women, they
include an endless self-scrutiny that is tiresome at best and paralyzing at
worst. It includes women's lives and health, which are lost to self-imposed
starvation and complications from silicone breast implants. And it includes the
impossible-to- measure cost of lost self-regard and limited personal horizons.
She is never quite satisfied, and never secure,” for desperate, unending
absorption in the drive for perfect appearance -is the ultimate restriction on
freedom of mind." The violence done on the body is temporary. But the violence
on her mind, through the loss of self-esteem makes her an involuntary accomplice
to the violence committed on her.
Women come in an
endless array of shapes and sizes, but you'd never know it from looking at ads.
In every generation, advertisers issue a
new paradigm of female perfection. The very rigidity of the ideal guarantees
that most women will fall outside of it, creating a gap between what women are
and what they learn they should be. This gap is very lucrative for the sellers
of commercialized beauty.
In the portrayal of
women's bodies, the gap has never been wider. The slender reigning ideal
provides a stark contrast to the rounder curves of most women's bodies. As an
adaptation to the physical demands of childbearing, women's bodies typically
have a fat content of around 25 percent, as opposed to 15 percent in men. For
much of human history, this characteristic was admired, sought after, and
celebrated in the arts. But the twentieth century has seen a steady chipping
away at the ideal female figure. A generation ago, a typical model weighed 8
percent less than the average woman; more recently she weighs 23 percent less.
Most models are now thinner than 95 percent of the female population.
As the gap between
ideal and reality has widened, women's self-esteem has fallen into the void.
Glamour magazine survey of 33,000 women found that 75 percent of respondents
aged eighteen to thirty-five thought they were fat, although only 25 percent
were medically overweight. Even 45 percent of the underweight women believed
they were fat. Weight was virtually an obsession for many of the Glamour
respondents, who chose "losing 10-15 pounds" as their most cherished goal in
life Although the glorification of slenderness is sometimes defended in the
interests of health, for most women it is anything but healthy. In one
scientific study, researchers found that women's magazines contained ten times
as many advertisements and articles promoting weight loss as men's
magazines-corresponding exactly to the ratio of eating disorders in women versus
men.15
Surrounded by ads that
depict a stick figure, few women can eat in peace. On any given day, 25 percent
of American women are dieting, and another 50 percent are finishing, breaking,
or starting diets. While women have purged and starved themselves, the diet
industry has grown fat.
Urban
The flip side is - are
we health conscious or weight conscious? 90% of men and women visiting the
health clubs desire to lose weight.
This is particularly true for women. Fine, this is a very laudable aim. But the contradiction is losing weight
to be fit is one aspect - losing weight to restructure the body is another. Urban Indian women are by and large out
to redefine the weight distribution of their bodies based on certain Western
principles. Fashion tenets laid
down by a totally alien culture nurtured in vastly different geographical
conditions are dictating to us, as to how we should look. Why is it necessary for us to look good
according to Western standards? The
Anglo-Saxon fashion world has refashioned the generally `Pear shaped’ female
body into a V-shaped one. They have
dictated a small but stiff bust line, a tiny waist, an almost non-existent
derriere and very long legs. The
fashion `pundits’, the advertising and multi crore slimming industries have done
this. One good look at the Barbie
doll is enough to give any Indian apsara an inferiority
complex.
There is an inherent
difference between the Indian women’s body and her Western counterpart. The Indian women’s bust line is fuller
and starts higher, while the Western women’s is smaller and starts lower down on
her torso. We are not long
legged. The proportion between
torso and legs is almost the same, with the torso being longer sometimes. Very well defined hips, a broad pelvic
girdle and generous thighs accentuate the Indian femininity. This is in absolute contradiction to the
proportion laid down by the fashion world - not our world. This body structure
has come to us, not yesterday but through a 5000 years old racial growth. Now, hounded by the fashionable picture
of femininity, bombarded by a blitzkrieg of advertising, we set out not to
become fit, but to refashion our bodies.
Often, one sees slim college girls doing a work out to become slimmer, to
fit into the tightest possible jeans.
There are 30 + women with well defined bust lines who’re desperately
trying to wish it away, since it does not look good in T-shirts. A multi crore
cosmetic industry, slimming industry, fashion industry is now dictating who is
the ideal woman, who is the beautiful woman.
A strategised violence is being done on
the woman’s body keeping sharp eye on a burgeoning market for slimming pills,
diets equipment for western outfits and cosmetics, as the new found beauty of
Indian women, seems to indicate.
It’ll of course be
argued that it’s a freedom of choice, to suffer from anorexia or not. Of course
it is. But the question is it a free choice at all? Free choice implies informed
choice. Do any of the gyms or slimming ads tell us that when we go on
carbohydrate free diet we may damage our kidneys. Do they tell us that constant
yo- yo dieting harms our chances for nomal pregnancy or
children.
The present lot of ads
shows women empowered enough to make choices be it toothpaste or detergents.
Women are no instruments of selling but are the agents themselves. But this
economic standardization of consumer goods cannot be mistaken for equality in
the freedom to make choices. Women make the choices within the patriarchal
framework, to please the husband, support his career prospects, win over a
mother in law, or meet the never ending demands of a selfish family. Her only
aim in life, as ads in most Asian channels show is to look good, make the home a
haven even if she’s to face hell and nurture the boy child. If she’s to be shown
as empowered then she is helping in homework or doing aerobics. The world is
make believe, but conversely it also reiterates certain social and cultural
beliefs.
The points under
discussion is the compartmentalization of the women’s role, the danger to take
her contribution to the home as granted and the emphasis that she really has no
life or identity beyond this. Beyond this are the levels of expectation that is
raised of the woman’s capacity and capability. The reach of the audiovisual
media is tremendous.I’ll focus on the ads of fairness creams a market worth more
than RS 300 crores in
By instructing men to
regard women's bodies as objects, ads help create an atmosphere that devalues
women as people, encourages sexual harassment, and worse. Many ads of this genre
take the dehumanization of women a step farther by focusing on body
parts-another convention of pornography. A pair of shapely female legs emerges
out of a bath that is an ad on bathroom fittings. We see less of the fittings
and more of the fit girl. A woman's torso is juxtaposed against a photo of a
sportscar; we are invited to admire the curves of both. Such ads degrade women
turning her into a thing. Turning a human being into a thing is almost always
the first step in justifying violence against that person," says Jean Kilbourne.
We are stuck with the chicken-and-egg question of whether ads cause harmful
social effects or simply mirror them. In either case, advertising fuels the
perception that women are things, to be used or abused as men see
fit.
A beautiful woman is
one who pleases the eyes of men. Beauty is a political idea, It is a set of
standards we are told to conform to-even if it takes surgery to do so! It is a
set of behaviors to which we are restricted. It defines what is good, useful,
acceptable, worthwhile in a woman. What makes a young woman worthy : passivity,
obedience, youth, a starved body, a glowing skin and a glossy head of
hair
We live in a state of
white supremacy, and the ideal beauty is fair. We live in a state of male
supremacy, and the ideal beauty is pleasing, polite, smiling, small, and weak:
no challenge, really, to anyone's ego of privileges. If we are to end forever,
the use of women as slave labor and as livestock,if we are to end the concept of
women as objects, if we are to end the role of women as subordinates then we are
going to have to change, radically what we think of ourselves as women and what
the world thinks of us as women.
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(Meera Khanna is a leader for women’s social
issues and programs, a free lance writer, and a social activist. She lives in