Do Women Expect To Be ‘Empowered’?

During the wee hours of this day, as I was tossing and turning in my bed, moving in and out of sleep, my mobile emitted a buzz notifying a message. Wondering who could be sending me a message at this odd hour, I picked up my phone and peered into it half asleep. It was from a friend of mine from across the globe, from across a different time zone.

She had sent a couple of lengthy messages admonishing one of my Facebook posts, where I had mocked an actress proclaiming 'her choices', in what I considered to be ‘a stupid and senseless manner’. My friend was of the opinion that the Indian women are only now coming of age – my friend herself is an NRI, having shunned this ‘Third World country’ for the comforts of modern skyscrapers of dreamland America – and are starting to come out of their cages(!). She said that men like me (I don’t know whatever the hell she meant by that) should stop questioning the choices of women and start being more generous by accepting and supporting her choices. It went on like this for a few lines.

Drowsy till then, my mind started playing faces like movie-reels, faces of all those women who had entered my life and made their presence felt in one way or the other, women that had either graced or grated my life. It is one long list, but I was able to think of many women whose mention is relevant to the context of this video of my choice.
 

There have been plenty of women in my life - woman who loved one person and married another, woman who fought to the hilt to marry the only guy she loved, women who opted divorce due the cruelty/infidelity/incompatibility of their husbands, woman who divorced her husband for her own promiscuity, women who booze and party as they wish, women who consider it a taboo to even mention such things, women who brilliantly shone in academics but decided to dwell into family ways, a woman who runs a successful business despite the lack of education, a woman who is a lesbian, a woman who has even shunned the very idea of sex, women who brutally believe in their religions, women who question the very need for religions, widowed women who have gone through their entire lives to bring up their children singly and in the best ways possible, women who fight with their companions tooth and nail over every petty topics of life, women who chose their companions simply on the basis of religious/caste/financial backgrounds, women who chose their men for reasons other than the mundane, women who have had as much physical intimacy as they wanted before marriage, women who avoided even talking to the men before tying the knot, women who behave like jack-in-the-box and lead sprightly lives, women who prefer the solitude and safety of their residential confines, women who address their husbands however they wish, women who won’t even utter the name of their husbands, women who chose wealthy grooms to take them abroad and settle there, woman who withstood physical abuse and rape but went on to make a good family life of her own with a man of her choice, women who chose a life of solitude or simplicity to stay back and work for the society around them, women who started working at very young ages to support their struggling families, women who have not even entered the kitchens of their houses  – the list kept going on and on.
 

As I lay there in the dark, I tried recalling as much as I could about whether any of them ever waited for the approval of their choices from the people around.  To whatever little knowledge I had about their lives, to whatever extent I was allowed a glimpse of their lives, I didn’t remember knowing any of them give up on their choices due to the disapproval from others. They all made their choices, and they all live with the consequences of the same still now and contentedly so. None of them sought the approval for their choices from the world around them, including that of their own family members and none of them had any need to advertise their choices as pertinent to all of womenfolk either.
 

With the recent video of that movie actress making headlines, and the social networking sites abuzz about it, I get see a flurry of messages, jokes, videos that go for and against that video. I am thinking – aren’t we all getting into a stereo-typing show here?
 

On one end, people who crave for age old chivalry, who need to see knights in shining armors arriving in their mighty stallions to protect the damsels in distress – protect women from dowry, protect women from abuse at the household, protect women from rapists, protect women from oppression, protect women from this, protect women from that, protect women from what-not. According to them, a woman is nothing but a dainty creature that needs protection from evil, careful and tender handling – a delicate flower that should not suffer violation at evil hands and wilt away.
 

On the other end, there are people who try to pull down her supremacy, by casting her as a clichéd ‘feminist’, a ‘free’ persona, whose freedom is defined only by her ability to booze, visit pubs, ability to copulate with anyone at will, ability to flaunt her skin and gain applause, everything that will make her physically free but nothing that will approach her as a soul, a bundle of thoughts, ideals, ideas and emotions. These so-called feminists are just the mirror images of those oppressive mules who cannot think about women as anything more than whatever is visible to the eyes.
 

If one lot thought of woman as just a possession that has to be protected with ‘chastity belts’, the other lot feels that a woman’s freedom is all about breaking it away for mere banal carnality.
I felt that both are absolutely irrelevant and ridiculous in the context of the women I have met in my life. None of these women waited for their knights in shining armors. None of them worried much about the size and shapes of their exterior. None of them cried from within the dungeons and castles awaiting a knight to come and save them. None of them took to blatant brazenness as freedom either. They took charge of their lives and live with their own ways, seeking peace and happiness in the process.
 

As I turned to fall asleep for a brief while before the Sun came up, I couldn’t help imagining the following thing – a strong while horse with a flowing mane, astride it a knight in shining armor, with a long, unsheathed sword in one hand. And, as the knight moved the hand up and removed the visor to reveal the face, it turned out that the knight wasn’t a male, but a female with glowing eyes and flowing tresses. Yes, a woman is her own ‘knight in shining armor’ that neither needs you to protect her nor oppose her. She neither needs you to approve her choices, nor cares if you assail them. A woman just expects to be left alone with her choices and her own ways of living, free from both the stereo-typing feminists and slickly shining knights!

Ashok Krishna