In The Driver's Seat

March 2008

Back in the days when I was a kid, there were hardly any women drivers around.

I remember once when I must have been eight or nine years old, seeing a woman behind the wheel, smiling and looking a bit embarrassed as the men stared. Of course, there were many times fewer cars on the streets in those days.

Now before I go on, I’m going to make a couple of things clear:

No, I do not think unrestricted private car ownership is a good thing – those of you who are regulars on this blog have heard me expounding on this often enough, so I don’t need to repeat the reasons.

Also, I do not share in the belief (or pretended belief) that women drivers are inferior to men. On the other hand, I think women, with their lower testosterone levels and in general greater respect for authority, are liable – once they have an equivalent amount of experience behind the wheel or handlebars – to be safer and less aggressive drivers than men, any old day of the week.

So let’s get on with what I was saying.

Nowadays, close to half the non-commercial vehicles, at least in this city, are driven by women. And not just young women either – I’ve seen sixty year olds with white hair and bifocals taking driving lessons; and, really, why not?

Today, when I saw a woman driving a carload of kids back from school (and they were in the uniform of my old school, and all of a size; they were certainly not all her kids, either) I realised again, just how empowering driving is to a woman, and on how many levels.

First, of course, it frees her directly by liberating her from the constrains of being dependent on her man for transport (assuming that no dependable and affordable public transport exists). It gives her freedom to work, freedom from being housebound, freedom to be something more than a fixture.

(And, of course, it frees men too – when their wives can drive, they don’t have to take time off from work to take them to their jobs or shopping, or to bring the kids back from school. Got that, MCPs?)  

But it frees her on another, totally different level. Back in my youth, when women never drove, the average child thought of its mother as a homebound caregiver, no more. Watching those kids sitting staring out of the window as the woman negotiated bumper-to-bumper traffic, it struck me that whatever they thought of her now, homebound caregiver isn’t the term for it.

Roll on Michaela Schumacher.

"Stand By Your Man"

They call it the Battered Woman Syndrome, but I can't understand it.

One of the things that always has surprised and shocked me is the sheer number of women who are willing to stay with abusive men – men who torture them mentally, abuse them in public, beat them up daily, deny them food and shelter, and quite often end up killing them (whether by violence or AIDS or neglect doesn’t matter very much).

It wouldn’t be that shocking (though just as bad) if these women were all uneducated or unemployed and had no social or economic alternative – but so much of the time it isn’t.

I know women, educated, qualified women, who have been publicly insulted by their husbands, who have been turned into virtual marital slaves, who have nothing but the husk of a dead marriage to cling to – and still they won’t quit. I know at least one woman whose philandering, drug-addicted husband has tried to kill her more than once, and spent time in prison for it – and when he came out she took him right back, and he did it all over again.

It's not as though it were the children, either. There are these women with children old enough to withstand a parental separation, or even no children at all. 

I wonder what it is that makes them do it. Is it the brainwashing their parents subject them to, that a woman must sacrifice herself for a man? Have they suppressed their self-worth so much that this seems better than the other alternatives? There are illiterate, “helpless” women who find the courage to walk out on abusive men – and here we have educated women, professionally qualified, preferring the marital hell to the air of freedom.

I’m sorry, I just don’t understand this phenomenon. Maybe someone will enlighten me. 

    

Sleeping With The Enemy

Over the years I’ve encountered many amazing examples of male chauvinism and – more amazing than that – female acquiescence to the chauvinism. There are questions and questions that I’ve asked myself and some conclusions I reached, while some other answers remain hanging in the air.

I can only touch the surface of this in a blog post; there must be encyclopaedias written on the subject, I’m sure.

Of course, one might begin with wondering about where male chauvinism began and why it still exists. I’m sure I can’t go and give you a full account, but – at least in this country – men are systematically brainwashed from childhood into thinking they are superior to women. Some of it they learn by watching their own fathers and their mothers. Typically, the mothers will tremble at the words of their lords and masters, and the fathers…well, the fathers will treat the mothers like a piece of kitchen and housekeeping equipment that doubles up as a sex toy. That’s about it.

So, the kid who goes through childhood watching this daily routine of a mom who basically slaves all day just to feed her brood and who has no opinion on anything…or if she does she takes jolly good care to keep these opinions to herself. And he sees how mom isn’t even consulted on anything, in fact isn’t entitled to an opinion on what’s to be affecting her own life, and he decides, yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Women are inferior animals with no brains of their own.

Now I’ll emphasise that this is not automatically true for every society or at all times. Of course, now, animals like hyenas or elephants have always been led by females, but even among human societies, the matrilineal condition has been at least as common as patriarchy. This was despite the fact that endless pregnancies tended to keep women tied down to the hearth. However – by and large – the more a society develops mercantilism, the more women are relegated to an inferior position.

This I believe is because of the simple ability of males to use their larger physical size to inflict violence on each other and on women; and the male belief that he’s got a more analytical brain than his mate and accordingly deserves to rule her thinking.

You must understand that in chauvinism of any kind, facts don’t matter.

For instance, the sex of the child may be decided by what chromosome the father contributes; but if the mother keeps giving birth to daughters in a male centric society, do you think she’ll be allowed to get away with it?       

For instance, a man can fall ill and demand that his woman forego food and sleep to wait on him hand and foot – but if she has the temerity to be ill, it’s because she’s trying to draw attention to herself. (Yes, I know one woman, an asthmatic, whose husband has repeatedly told her this in public when she gets attacks).

For instance, a woman will have to cook and clean and provide for the family – but if her husband neglects to give her any money to get all that done, it’s still her responsibility to do it all.

And then there is religion, of course. Just about all modern religions are aggressively anti-woman. The worst reputations are shared by Islam and Catholicism, but let me tell you – Orthodox Hinduism makes the Taliban look like ardent feminists. Among Orthodox Hindu goodies for women are –

Women are inferior to men; the purpose of women in life is to bear heirs for their men; women cannot worship many gods without male sanction and intercession; women cannot attend cremations; women cannot inherit property; menstruating women are ritually polluted; widowed women must spend the rest of their lives mourning for their husbands, who are literally their gods (pati parmeshwar); and more.

No wonder I find North Indian (especially, since antifemale discrimination is at its height in North India) women unable even to tell their own physicians their names or to answer questions like “where does it hurt”? They’ve been conditioned too – by their parents, by their religion, and by their milieu. They'll do anything, be starved, beaten, stripped of all dignity, even be burned alive, and they will take it as their lot in life. I used to see, when I was an intern in Lucknow, many women arrive badly burned in "kitchen fires" who would die after a few days stubbornly insisting they had accidentally caught on fire - and everyone knew what had happened. Brainwashed to the point of death.

Now we've arrived at the other side of the coin – female acquiescence. Frankly I find this at least as infuriating as male chauvinism. I’ve said this before: women are their own worst enemies, the worst enemies of feminism. If women didn’t gang up with men to insult, humiliate, and oppress women, how long could men last? A simple kitchen strike would have wiped them out! Sometimes the woman will for some unfathomable reason stay on and be abused rather than fight back. All too common. So common that I’ve stopped expecting anything else.

Damn. Time to stop for the night. This is getting me depressed.