Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

USA/India: We Need Equality in the Kitchen and the Streets

By

Rupande Mehta, New Jersey, USA SSH Blog Correspondent

roti imageA few days ago I came across a picture on Facebook that compared rotis (Indian bread) made by wives through a traditional (arranged) marriage and love marriage. The arranged marriage wife’s roti looked excellent, had the desired plumpness and was extremely edible. It looked like something that comes out of my mom’s kitchen. The love marriage roti, on the other hand, looked far from edible; burnt and flat. It was nothing like what most Indian men would expect when they sit down to dinner. And if they did, their disappointment would be transparent or there would be facetious innuendo in reference to the wife’s culinary skills.

I don’t know how to make rotis, never learnt and frankly don’t care that I cannot make them. My husband can cook and we never discussed my inability to make a particular kind of food. Still, that picture bothered me. The collective consciousness inside me took a dramatic turn for the worse when a friend passed along the source of the link; a popular food curation portal, Food Talk India. Shared as a ‘funny meme’, the site claimed it posted the picture in ‘good humor’ but when there was backlash from several quarters of the society, they wisely took the picture down. Despite the criticism, the site though through one their cronies, sent Vagabomb what they thought of the controversy: a picture of a penis.

Now I am not a bra burning feminist, I like my bra where it belongs…thank you very much but such pictures and attitudes are at the very crux of the gender inequality debate. These are the ideas that propagate the belief that a woman belongs in the kitchen and the man does not. In India, where the last few years have seen stalwart economic progress, such pictures successfully demonstrate the long road women have to fight to get justice and equal societal norms. It shows the kinds of “standards” we expect from a woman of honor; the one who always “does the right thing” and knows how to keep her husband happy and her family cultured.

If we all engage in eating, is it not discriminatory to expect only the woman to cook? Putting a woman to such practices is no different than saying that she deserves to be catcalled on the streets or she has no right to dress a certain way and if she was assaulted it is definitely because she brought it on. It sets the stage for those other crimes that we get so passionate about and want to castrate men for.

I do not believe that any gender is superior. My feminism is not a fight to make one gender better than the other but to fight for equality. If I am expected to cook and clean so should my male counterpart. If I am told, “you have no marital prospects because your rotis are burnt”, so should a man. We do not live in a primeval world where the man hunts and the woman gathers. We have reached the era where men and women walk toe to toe and contribute equally to the welfare of a family.

In a day where women are constantly breaking the glass ceiling, why are we still circulating pictures of the rotis they can make? At which level is this funny? And how are such attitudes supposed to break the stereotypes that lead to other aggressive assaulting behaviors towards women? Believe it or not, these “hilarious” photos lay the foundation to prejudiced mentality and contribute in the next layer of beliefs that women can be harassed on the streets, raped or do not have the right to consent.

Perhaps Kalki Koechlin is right and the issue of women’s safety will forever burn in India. In her latest poem, “The Printing Machine”, the outspoken and fierce actor has succinctly laid down everything that is wrong with our culture. Making several references to the countless rapes registered in the country since 2012, she says, “How our great Indian heritage fell to its knees at the mercy of our innocent little printing machines.” Set to a percussive soundtrack, Kalki delivers a scathing attack on stereotypes, indifferent attitudes and India’s traditional culture that is used to primarily promulgate further discrimination of women.

In the end it is not about the dumb picture. Also, I am not making a big deal out of nothing. A subtle picture such as this goes a long way in showing that there still exist many educated men from our generation, who fought for Nirbhaya and stand for women’s safety, delving on attitudes where the size and texture of women’s rotis is used as a reminder of their real role in society. It goes to show that despite India’s equality and safety movement, my mom’s premonition for women, at some level, was accurate: no matter how educated we are; we will always end up in the kitchen.

A picture speaks a thousand words. This one did just that.

Rupande grew up in Mumbai, India, and now resides in the U.S. She has an MBA and is currently working towards her MPA, looking to specialize in Non Profit Management. You can find her writing on her blog at Rupande-mehta.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter @rupandemehta.

Share

Saudi women can vote! Next: driving and the end of male escorts?

By

Image via Peace is the New Black

Did you know that women in Saudi Arabia cannot vote? It’s true, but only for four more years. Yesterday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a big announcement: in the next election cycle women can run for office and vote. This is major (long overdue) progress and a cause for celebration, even if Saudi women won’t see its fruition until 2015.

What’s caused this change?

Via The New York Times:

“There is the element of the Arab Spring, there is the element of the strength of Saudi social media, and there is the element of Saudi women themselves, who are not silent,” said Hatoon al-Fassi, a history professor and one of the women who organized a campaign demanding the right to vote this spring. “Plus, the fact that the issue of women has turned Saudi Arabia into an international joke is another thing that brought the decision now.”

Related, the Arab Spring combined with social media and women’s determination also inspired about 30 women to organize a protest in June against the no-women drivers law and they drove cars.

Via The Washington Post:

“Maha al-Qahtani, 39, drove for 35 minutes in Riyadh with her husband in the passenger seat. ‘This is my basic right. It should not be a big deal. There is nothing wrong or illegal about driving,’ Qahtani, a state employee, said. ‘The decision to ban driving proves how backward the regime is.'”

You can follow the latest news on women working to secure the right to drive on the Saudi Women Driving blog.

Today, Saudi Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel spoke to Forbes.com about women’s rights and why women should be allowed to drive. She said:

“Other than it being an economical barrier—an average woman spends 30% of her salary on a driver—[it’s] a social barrier. She can’t go some places because of this driver, lack of privacy, sometimes safety issues. It is symbolic outside, where we are being judged as suppressed and as happy with the status quo when we’re not. No matter how many great things we do, we’ll always be judged as a country that suppresses women because we’re the only country in the world where women can’t drive.”

Good for her for speaking out!

As Al-Taweel alludes to, being able to vote or drive are not the only rights women are denied in Saudi Arabia. Saudi women also have very little access to public places, especially compared to most women (and nearly all men) around the world. This is an excerpt from my book on this subject:

“There are countries where the laws, as well as male harassment, keep women from having the same access to public spaces as men. One of the worst countries for women’s equality in public spaces—and equality in general—is Saudi Arabia. Women are forbidden from leaving their local neighborhood without the company of a male family member or guardian. Women need permission from their male family member or guardian to travel by airplane, check into hotels, or rent apartments. Even mosques and some public streets are reserved for men, and women only have limited access to parks, museums, and libraries.

Women in Saudi Arabia are also prohibited from driving cars. Abdel Mohsen Gifari, a researcher for the country’s religious police who has spent much of his career enforcing laws, such as those prohibiting women drivers, told to a Miami Herald reporter in 2009 that one of his daughters wants to drive. “I told her that driving is allowed in Islam,” Gifari said in an interview with a Western reporter. “But it is more of a cultural thing. We already have a lot of problems on the road when it comes to sexual harassment, with guys flirting with girls in the car. If a woman drives, it’s only going to bring more problems.”

Other countries that legally restrict or legally permit the restriction of women’s mobility in public spaces include Kuwait, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).”

Hopefully with the right to vote and run for office secured, Saudi women can use their political voices to chip away at these severe inequalities. And in the meantime, I look forward to hearing about more protests of the driving ban as well activism around the unfair decree that women must have male permission and/or male company to go places. They have my support as they move forward to secure more rights!

Share