It’s been the week of the tragedy of Dr. Moumita Debnath. A young woman, a doctor, brutally raped and killed at her workplace. The dastardly act has sent ripples of anger coursing through the country and rightly so. It is also the week when I received two videos that purportedly showed gentlemanly behavior. One involved an elderly Sikh gentleman and the other a small boy of about six or seven.
Video 1: This video is of a prank. A young woman stops an elderly Sikh gentleman and asks for directions. After he gives her the instructions and she is walking away, he realizes that her t-shirt is torn at the back. He calls her back and begins to question her about where is coming from and where she is going to. When she tries to walk away, he grabs her by the hand and pulls her to the side. In the video, the man goes on to remove his turban, which is of huge religious significance to the Sikhs and uses it to cover her torn top.
Video 2 has a young girl, maybe in her twenties posing in pants that have slits down the outsides to her younger brother. In the second scene, we see the boy stitching up the slits.
Both videos expectedly got a lot of positive comments about the behavior of both men. There is the usual bullshit about preserving culture and the dignity of women. But what I saw was two men imposing their definition of what is appropriate attire for the women around them.
The second video was even sadder. To think that at even at that young age a boy thinks it is fine to decide what women around him should wear.
In both cases, men seem to routinely take away the agency of the women around them and sadly this is hailed as good behavior in our society. So then is it hard to make the jump from here to, “if she is showing skin, she is asking for it”? What a woman wears, eats, or drinks should have no bearing on whether she is “asking for it”. No woman ever asked to be the pride of her family or culture. We men have hoisted this on them and then taken it on ourselves to protect that pride.
To call ourselves a truly enlightened society, it should not matter to us that our neighbor doesn’t live their life along the lines we have drawn for ourselves. A couple may live in. A girl might decide she wants to go down to the local store in a t-shirt that is torn. A sister might want to wear harem pants with slits along the side. Who are we to tell anyone what they can and cannot do or what is and isn’t right? As long as a person’s actions do not result in harm to people around them, the choice of how to live their life is theirs.
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