Fight for gender equality is far from over

So far, the most popular post on my Blog is "Chanakya and his views about women." I wrote that post with a specific intention and mentioned it clearly in that post. The intention was not to display Chanakya in a bad light, to question his intelligence, or to criticize him. However, some people blinded by their faith and love of their idols didn't even bother to read the post carefully. Many such people took the post as a direct attack on Chanakya and somehow they also thought I was questioning his wisdom. They just couldn't tolerate my objections to some of his statements about women. They thought how can a person who was so brilliant and expert in many fields can make any mistake, and even if he made any mistake who am I to question it?

The post itself came into existence because of my two posts related to Prabhupad's book Gita as it is. In this book, he (Prabhupad) used some of Chanakya's quotes about women to claim that women are generally not very intelligent and trustworthy (compared to men). He also claimed that women are more prone to (moral) degradation, ironically this all was written in a book in which he claims to explain Gita as it is, this means Prabhupad claims that Gita is also a gender-biased text. So, the post "Chanakya and his views about women" was an attempt to show that an intelligent and wise man like Chanakya can also be biased about women. Such statements by influential people like Chanakya could be used to suppress women, hinder their progress, and restrict their freedom. Therefore, we need to question such statements, that's why I wrote that post. I thought it was a very simple thing to understand but unfortunately, some people failed to get it. This current post is not to defend that post or to justify it, I don't think I need to do that but I want to share my experience in dealing with some people who aggressively commented on that post to defend these views of Chanakya. Actually, this was not a totally unexpected reaction but in this process, they also shared their misogynist views like women are indeed not equal to men, women have some "natural flaws" that make them somewhat inferior to men, etc. One can see that even in today's world people are still nurturing some age-old misogynist beliefs.  Surprisingly not only some men but some women also claimed that indeed they were somewhat inferior (or weaker, having more problems, basically they meant inferior) to men. This shows how strong is the prejudice against women in our society. The years of brainwashing and suppression have made even women themselves believe that they have some natural flaws that make them less competent compared to men.

In the last few years, many laws have been created to protect women from social and sexual abuse. These laws were required because there were many cases where women were harassed for dowry (especially in India) or exploited sexually (all over the world). These laws helped to reduce these cases to some extent, at the same time nowadays there are many incidents reported in newspapers for misuse of anti-dowry laws and sexual harassment laws. Few women use these laws to blackmail their partners for selfish motives. Misuse of any law is not a new thing, many people exploit some loopholes present in any legislation. This is wrong and strict measures should be taken to stop it, but people should also try to understand why in the first place these laws were introduced. These types of laws were needed to stop those crimes against women and like many other laws some people misuse them for selfish purposes but that doesn't mean that we don't need these laws or only women misuse laws and men don't do it. Our society still needs these laws, we need to fine-tune them as much as possible so that people can not misuse them, but a few people misusing them can not be a reason to blame all women and conclude that we don't need any such laws. It's very foolish to generalize and conclude something like this. This is just one example that shows how some people want to use certain isolated incidents against women, based on a few incidents they like to jump to the conclusion that women should not be given equal status to men in society and that women must only perform certain traditional roles. They are eager to turn the wheels of the women's liberation movement backward.

The fight for gender equality has been going on for decades. A lot has been achieved by many feminist movements but still lot needs to be done. This fight is far from over. We can clearly see that still many think that men and women are not equal, they want to force women to do only some particular jobs, want to put boundaries around them, and suppress them. However, whether they like it or not those days are gone or will be gone very soon. Women have already proved their capabilities and earned respect and equal status in many societies around the world, and societies where they still don't have equal status they are catching up very fast, but as long as people with discriminatory mindsets are there, the fight for equality continues.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic. 

[Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing]

Links:
1. Chanakya and his views about women 
2. Bhagadvad Gita-As it is or As it is NOT..Part-I
3. Bhagadvad Gita-As it is or As it is NOT- Part-II