'Frailty, thy name is woman,' cries Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's immortal Tragedy. But I think that the Great Bard had it wrong, in one sense.
March 8 is 'International Women's Day'. I hate the idea of assigning 'days' for everything, which, like I said in
my last post, are inventions of commercialisation.
In the case of '
Women's Day', I am willing to make an exception.
Last year, on a blog elsewhere, I ranted about our audacity of consigning just a day to women. It seemed to imply that we could ignore them for the rest of the year.
This year, I concede, we do indeed need this day on which we can pay tribute to these wonderful additions to our lives - I write, of course, as a man!
I am unmarried, so I will not write what a wife can do to a man. But, I have lived all my life with examples of womanhood present before me.
I have my mother to thank for providing me with a pillar on which I could trust, so that I was able to independently take my own decisions in life, and to make my own little mistakes and my own little triumphs.
I have my sister who is an example of how a woman can withstand many of the shocks that life can throw at you, and carry on.
Over the years, I have met many more women, some strong, some weak, of many hues and tongues and regionalities. There is not one, though, that I can say has not left me without an impression of some kind.
So, when I look at
Hamlet's assessment of woman, I say it is right in one sense and wrong in another.
We see two different women in Hamlet -
Queen Gertrude and
Ophelia. These represent the two attitudes men have towards women in general.
When Hamlet condemns his mother of 'Frailty', he generalises a feeling of all men who will tolerate a kind of behaviour in men, but not in women. If Gertrude wanted Claudius, her husband's brother, it is wrong. A man wanting another women, despite marriage would just attract a wagging finger and a wink.
Ophelia is the face of women generally, where she is governed solely by man, whether her father or her lover (or husband, as the case may be). An abject creature, beaten down in spirit, to be a man's slave.
Look around you and you will see the same attitude on the rise. One set of examples can be found in the comments I got to
one of my posts.
Who gives a man the right to say what a woman can do? We say we are above animals - if so, why is it so difficult to grasp the idea of true equality?
There is a historical incident in Kerala, which is dusted out every year, at this time of the year. This is the story of Kuriyedathu Tatri, a Brahmin girl who was drummed out of her caste for having slept with 64 different men. She is held up as an example of liberation. I see her as the victim of exploitation, because she was first raped at the age of 10, and continued through her life, voluntarily and otherwise, as a plaything of various men. Who was punished? The woman, of course.
The reason I quote this story is not because immorality is the way of equality.
Equality does not mean that the woman can wear lesser clothes, or of manly fashion. It means that woman has an equal choice in the matter.
Equality does not mean that a woman can smoke or drink. It means that she can have her own decision.
Equality means a lot of things - but, in our land of female gods, we can tolerate only godliness or slavery for our own women. This has to change.
We do not need moral policing to 'straighten' our women. We do not need forced sanctity thrust upon our women.
What we need is to let our women be human beings, in their own world, equally shared with their male counterparts. I am sure that there will be comments here that will ask me if I would let my sister do this - or my wife (if I had one) do that. To them, I say - it is not your concern.
To all who would try to curb womanhood, I say - be honest, is it not your perverted sexual frustrations that make you go out in the street and and paw and pull at women, in the name of morality?
This Women's Day, let us take a decision that we will not leave it to just one day - let the day last forever, so that this one day of platitudes will never be necessary again.