Growing up female

Growing Up Female

“Isn’t it time she had a little brother”. I do not remember who said, it, but even at the very mature age of three, it was a very offensive remark. And of course, the person who said it, did not know my mother very well, because no one in their right senses would have risked that long winded and rather belligerent talk on gender equality and feminism. My mother is a formidable person, especially when crossed. And utterly non-hesitant in speaking out her mind. And expressing her opinion. Sometimes embarrassingly so, like in this case.

Over time I grew to realize that it was important for her to be so. She had evolved the formidable persona, this ready-to-take-on-the-universe attitude simply because of the fashion in which she chose to live her life. Not that there was anything wrong with her life. She was smart, a professor of Physics, married to the man she loved (Yes in the 1970s no less, with a “not taking your permission, but asking for your blessings” to her folks), financially independent, and with an only child, a daughter. But the formidable tough as steel façade was required. She had had to cultivate it, just because she had to live life on her terms.

And while I was growing up, apart from the “little brother” or the very patronizing “yes, girls are just like boys”, I pretty much was shielded from the rest of the world. The parallel world women are made to grow up into, wherein day after day they are fed the “you are female and thus different (read inferior, soft, to be taken care of)” was a rather alien place for me. Not too much though. Because there was school. And friends outside the home. And cousins. With the latter, I learnt that gender equality is not a genetic thing. It is something that has to be striven for. You need to “make your bones” for it.

I went to an all-girl’s school. Simply because the good schools in Nainital were not coed. The only one which was coed was a boarding school. And even that all-female educational atmosphere did not instill the “women can do anything”. They did talk about it. They did focus on famous heroines in history. But personally speaking, I knew they did not believe it. Because the “real” world ensures it to be a “feel-good” myth at best. Right from the very beginning an inordinate amount of energy was spent on skirt lengths. Long was ok, shorter than the knee screamed “wanton”. Even my rather precocious self could never make the connection why it was so wrong for a little bit of skin to show. Neatness, tidiness I could understand, but why was an inch of thigh so “wrong”? The boys in the nearby all-boys school—boys our age, did wear “short shorts”. But for us, knee and above was sacrosanct territory. And then the subtle differences began. By Class 3, we were having needlework and knitting lessons. Cleanliness was a virtue, as was humility. Doing well in Math and Science was a good thing (it is another story that I had to because my parents taught Physics, but I was an outlier), but it was not as much of a do-or-die as boys our age had it.

And then teenage brought along awareness that the world had totally different standards- for our difference in chromosomes. And somehow the little voice that said “School is like this because it is run by the Catholic missionaries, who live in the times of the Inquisition” become quiet. Because compared to what it was like inside the walls of St.Mary’s, the outer world was positively Jurassic. And it became even more anachronistic as teenage took over. We were ogled and followed. Leched at and groped. And( this was not for me) it was our fault. Our male cousins found us very interesting. Butwe were scolded off them and any other attention our male relatives may have given us. No explanations of course! Transition into womanhood was not a celebration, rather a shameful, very tentative, hand-up when the nice people from Johnson and Johnson showed us their “girl growing up” movie and handed out little packs of sanitary towels. [A lot of those Stayfree Pads ended up in the class dustbin, because people could not take theirs home, what would their families say?]

Then there were strange times when we were forced to remain indoors playing because some flasher took it upon himself to parade a colony naked. Of course our caring communities did not make too many efforts to catch the pervert, rather to keep us indoors. And it carried on. From being blamed and shamed, for wolf whistles and obscene phone calls on to the realization that we were unclean. Because religion is a very powerful medium to instill one’s unworthiness. [honestly, look at the quantities of guilt ALL religions dole out]. Also very effective at avoiding logic. Too unclean to sit near the idols, too dirty to do anything of note, only secondary humans- fickle, unworthy, irredeemable…. The list just grows. And wrapped in the guise of faith, of belief it just gets better.

But even though my upbringing was more than secular, I did have friends and cousins. And it was in their houses that I got to see how little they regarded their men-folk shielding them from the vagaries of bras and female underpants drying on the clothes line (a stray strap, showing for a minute second was an inexplicable sin, punished by a long talk on appropriate attire). And a clean Sanitary pad was to be smuggled in to the common bathroom (the soiled ones probably apparated away Harry Potter style). Never mind that the same men-folk lingered rather long on Baywatch and Victoria’s Secret advertisements or that there was a huge pile of stinking rubbish, even bathroom “un-nameable” trash right outside the very respectable middle-class colonies- another safai karamchaari strike. Women and their bodily functions just did not happen at home. Because there was something wrong with them.

There was also a rather strange mixed message that popular entertainment and “success” stories of fellow females brought out. Men were “settled” when they got jobs. Women, after they got married. My career-oriented cousins (“they were too ugly for anything else,” said a disapproving at everything else aunt) were “truly” happy after “good” boys were found for them. And there was this undercurrent of being appropriately attractive. Appropriate, of course stood for denying any whiff of innate sexuality- probably because sexuality stood for control. So hair was oiled and sleekly plaited away- no wanton stray locks. Clothes were clean, decidedly feminine, but woe if necklines went lower, or hemlines high. Anyhow by the late teens skirts were out- and pants too non-female.“Attractiveness is important” was inculcated. So we powdered and plucked, painted and tweezed. And worried about how we looked. Even while being “proper”. Because after all the objectification and the problems thereof were strictly our issues, not at all the faults of a universe that treated us as property, not as human beings.

We grew up to careers. To be engineers, doctors, MBAs. Not like women a generation before us, who had to be content with teaching. We grew to MCAs and computer courses. What they forgot to tell us, but reminded us, ever more subtly that it was not because of our innate mathematical or technical abilities, rather because it increased our marketability to “dream catches”. If we were smart we had “something going” by the end of undergraduate college, if not, we “Settled down” in time honored tradition.

And that is when I learnt why I was like my mother. And understood how I had become as strident in voicing my opinions. Because I learned how to reply ”Well I neither have wonderful genes( I am uniocularly myopic) to pass on nor a kingdom to rule, that it is time for me to settle down” in reply to the officious, “You need to marry , women get more fulfilled when they have a family”. And then the questions, started. Or maybe they had always been there. The whole lopsidedness of the equation. That I had to work just ever so hard just to be who I was. That my twenty year old cousin had an option not to marry the “nice” arranged marriage man her parents found for her, an option she did not exercise, because she never knew that she had it.

“Twice as hard to be half as good” a professor in FMS had said, it was a quote then, but it became a hideous reality. The irrational gratitude at having been allowed to be “normal” – something which I see every time I hear a woman praising her spouse for being so “sensitive”. Men rarely talk about their wives being so caring, it is an assumed duty for a female spouse. And the myriad other circumstances. Not blatant discrimination. But the more subtle, more difficult to get rid of – because it is so difficult to pin point – nuances. In speech, in behavior- in everything. The culture of fear- coming home before dark, staying vary of strangers, always having an emergency number on speed dial on a cell phone- indeed not venturing out without a cell phone. EVER.

And sometimes I would be proud. Of how much I  had left behind- not only geographically, but also in terms of baggage. How much I had changed myself notwithstanding my background and the hundreds of things that had conspired to keep me down as a woman. Wonder if I could rest. Rest because I was tired of fighting the whole time, arguing , making my voice heard. Becoming “shrill”. And then events like the framing of “allowing abortion” or “permitting contraception” in this country – possibly one of the most advanced in the world- come up for discussion. With groups of old white men debating on women’s issues and holding entire economies hostage trying to balance the outdated demands of misogynistic religions on the rights of  what makes up 51 % of the population. And I know that the time to rest from fighting for my rights is not over. Not over by a long shot.

And I wonder, how different would it have been if I had been born male. Would I know how the other half lived? Would I care, or would I attribute to “gender difference” the timid behavior, the guilt of trying to be human even while bearing the burden of being female>