Skip to main content

#mymetoo


The first time I saw a picture of vagina was when I was in grade three. The vaginas would always show up in our bathroom walls. Drawn with coal, often the pubic hair sprouting in every direction. I went to an all-girls boarding school and the only males we had in our school were cooks and bera dais. There was also this son of a housekeeper in charge and an unknown lunatic who would flash his nuts from the back of our dormitory which was situated right below the pine trees, occasionally. Of course, we never saw his face or the fact that he was never caught didn’t surprise me even back then. These were the kind of things I believe weren’t considered dangerous.

I was too young to think about the perpetrator. I had never thought about those vaginas scrawling for almost three decades and suddenly I now realize that those drawings were in many ways the first kind of sexual assault for me or for my friends. I and my friends would stare at the scrawling quickly and never talk about it later because we had no idea what we were supposed to make of it. It was disgusting indeed! But now, when I think of it, the only thing I am certain, is, whoever scrawled those pictures probably had never seen a real vagina.

Why would men or boys want to scrawl pictures of vaginas in a girl’s bathroom? Is it a proclamation from the cowards stating their power to inform us – little girls that they know our intimate body parts in detail and they can publicly ridicule it at their pleasure? 

The sexual assault statistics state that one in every three girls will be assaulted sexually in their life time; and one in four women will be assaulted by her eighteenth birthday. When I think of it, the statistics is shocking but while we read daily about cases of sexual violations, rape, raping of minors and some as little as eight months old, the statistics doesn’t seem shocking anymore. We are also reading personal stories about women from all walks of life coming forward in social media and it isn’t alarming that every other girl has a horrendous story to share.

I too have a story. Almost 11 years ago, this one time during a field trip in my first job, a male colleague (older than me) had commented that I could sit on his lap if I wanted to while in a rickshaw and that I could come see his room too in separate accounts. I didn’t know how to react. I had frozen. Unfortunate that I didn’t confront him at the spot or even later. 

Twelve years working and travelling to different parts of the country, I feel like I now know how to deal with such remarks but then I haven’t faced one after that incident either. The fear of unknown remains. Travelling alone, getting in a heated discussion, telling a joke, wearing a dress to work – these are things we do automatically, but somewhere in the unconscious, a thought runs through my spine - have I said too much, did I put myself in an awkward situation, should I had not done that or said that? These are the thoughts that shadow me every single day, which I or any other girl shouldn’t have to worry about.  Until now it had just been me and protecting myself. I still remember the first time I held my daughter in my arms three days after the delivery. I had felt a surge of emotion I couldn’t comprehend then. I had thought, this little human will have to go through all physical and biological changes that I have gone through and it had made me deeply sad, not because she is a girl but because of what girls must endure. The fear of someone harming my daughter or every other child haunts me paradoxically.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A letter to my future teenage daughter

My dear daughter, you are only seven today but you will soon be seventeen. And when you become 17 I know the world will no longer be the same for you and I. We will be together in the same house but we will be distant apart in our heart and head. I was once 17 you know. And like everything else nothing is constant so before you grow up too fast I am writing a letter to you and the million other 17 year olds just like you. Love life - you are going to fall in love - hard. So hard that you are often dizzy with love. A love that is insignificant but withholds you from achieving all your dreams. Dreams that you dreamt when you were barely ten. Dreams that your parents dreamt for you when they first held you in their warm loving arms. Dreams that your mother dreamt for you when you were just a tadpole in her growing tummy. You are 17 and you have just graduated high school. At the verge of becoming an adult. You think you are big enough to make decisions and that you know the best f...

Leave the girls alone

Recently I read an article written by an Indian woman on how she forgot to raise her son well while she paid particular attention to raising her daughter to be an equal citizen. When we talk about gender equality we often focus on girls. How we should raise them - encourage them to fight for their right; admit them to the best schools; never tell them ‘they can’t do it’ and raise their expectations rather too high. I am a mother to a six year old girl and I often cringe every time I tell her – she can do anything if she wants. While we focus too much on raising our girl’s right we forget to pay attention to our sons.  I lived all my life in a boarding school, the first ten years in an all-girls school. Life wasn’t smooth. We felt foreign to the other gender. We giggled and burst out crazy if a boy approached us. We acted nonsensical at times. We didn’t know how or what they were. They were exclusive – all we saw was the other gender – foreign - boys. We lived in our own b...