Growing up to be a woman “ISN’T IT time she ha (go back »)

Female underwear 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). Never mind that the same men-folk lingered rather long on Baywatch and Victoria’s secret advertisements (in our foreign magazines) or that there was a huge pile of stinking rubbish, even bathroom 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 get married. My career-oriented cousins were truly happy after good boys were found for them. Then 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 became 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, ’settled down’ in time, honouring tradition.That is when I learnt why I was like my mother, 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 fulfillment when they have a family.” Then the questions, started. The whole lopsidedness of the equation. I had to work hard just to be who I am . That my 20 year old cousin had an option not to marry the ’nice man’ her parents found for her;since arranged marriage was an option she did not exercise, because she never knew that she had it. “Work twice as hard to be half as good,” a professor quoted once , 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, its an assumed duty of a spouse). The culture of fear - coming home before dark, staying wary of strangers, always having an emergency number on speed dial on a cell phone - indeed not venturing out without a cell phone.I wonder, how different it would have been had I been born a male. Would I know how the other half lived? Would I care, or would I attribute to ’gender difference’ the timid behaviour, the guilt of trying to be human even while bearing the burden of being female?