The new substitute for a pocket pepper-spray is an app. After sending people to the moon, and sending a message from India to Australia within a few seconds, technology has once again proved it’s better than men, quite literally. By the way, this app sends a message to your friends or family in case you don’t return home on time, or get lost somewhere (it’s called Kitestrings, I think you must download it).
People get mugged every day, at every corner. Women get raped in metro cities. People go missing. They don’t come back home. And the worst of human capabilities are experimented on women. In our country, women are frequently treated as being a lower form on human species that can and should be controlled and dominated by men – a ‘higher’ power.
Let me tell you about a politician who, few days back, said that he’d ‘let loose his men to rape women, if his workers were threatened’. Look at the way he constructs the sentence. ‘let loose his men’. The last time I heard that, it was a rich, wealthy, dominating, controlling boss who would threaten anyone who got in his way or didn’t do as he said, with the release of a pack of brutal hounds to go after him (this was a cartoon, by the way).
All this is like, raping and killing is a way of saying ‘hey look, I’m stronger than you, I can do anything I want to, to you, and I can damn well get away with it (thanks to the ‘law’) if you don’t do and be as I please’. It isn’t about women wearing risqué clothes, or being provocative – it is about men trying to convince the world of their superiority by invading a woman. So, if you’re a really strong man as you pretend to be, you need a woman to prove that?
And so a woman today needs pepper sprays, pocket-knives, protective body-guards, and most ironically – another male to protect from a vicious male. We might as well have lived on different planets. Then the women would have been safe and protected and free to wear whatever they want and roam around at the oddest times of the night without an app telling them it’s time to go home. But the men on the other planet would have been totally dissatisfied probably – having no one to rule over, having no one to prove their ‘powers’ through.
You probably have made up your mind that I’m a woman writing this – and I am, indeed. But if you’re a man, like you say you are, you know that you’d have written and felt the exact same thing.
I know what a man is. A man is so strong he doesn’t need to hurt a woman. He doesn’t need to prove himself. A man protects a woman. A man can build the tallest of buildings, the strongest of bridges, the most overwhelming technologies, and he can still come back home and hug his wife and little sons and daughters and say that he is happy because he has a family, not just because he has enormous power.
Maybe there is hope left for us yet. Maybe these apps and pepper-sprays will go into extinction sometime in the near future. Or they’ll just have to come up with a technique that ‘lets loose the hounds’ on those ‘higher’ life-forms.
