This post has been written by a friend of mine who believes that the Boys Locker Room is everyone’s fault. Read the post and drop your comments and observation around this incident.
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Bois will be Bois
They are just kids
It is between friends
Internet is at fault.
Girls have gone too wild these days.
Why is there a need to post your pics when you know that the internet is a dangerous place?
A recent incident of body- shaming, slut naming, rape threats, vulgar comments, privacy violation has happened in New Delhi. It has surfaced the above-mentioned remarks all over again.
The culprits are boys aged from 14 to 17 years.
The platform used is Instagram (a popular social media platform)
Victim- Girls (age no bar).
Important information to consider: All these boys come from well to do families, they study in high-end school, live in abundance but lack humanity and respect for others.
People responsible for this- “you and me”!!
Shocked!! ooh, don’t be.
“We as a society are responsible for it”!!
Why we are responsible for this? It is because we have the tendency to trivialize everything. Especially when it comes to “gender-defining roles and character”. This is “Male” so attributes defining him are strong, macho-man, no crying, insensitive and aggressive. This is “female” so attributes defining her are weak, sensitive, homebound, docile and submissive. We cannot afford to trivialize such things now. We must break free of these stereotypical adjectives based on gender.
The Boys Locker Room incident happened because of many things.
Bad parenting – we as parents are so focused on career and money that we fail in teaching them how to be a good and sensitive human being. Irresponsible education system– An education system which is failing to propagate the issue of gender sensitization.
Pop-culture– which is accepting everything on the pretext of freedom of speech and expression etc.
Society-where patriarchy is so deep-rooted that verbal, mental, physical assault on woman every now and then is Okay.
The other major institution responsible is also our Law Enforcement agencies. We have laws which are solely there to prevent such activities but considering the trivia nature of these issues, these laws have proved themselves to be useless time and again. Catching up the culprits to the framing of charges to proving of such crimes to actually bring them to justice, so much time is lost that “justice delayed is justice denied”.
In such a process, the gravity of these heinous issues is so lost that the victim somehow is blamed for the hapless incidents. Law enforcement agencies are there to act as deterrence for people to commit such acts. But they have also failed in preventing these acts.
Now there will be a section of people stating that they only wrote for fun. They did nothing. It didn’t mean anything. It was among friends and so this is acceptable.
So, my dear friends- it is “not acceptable” at all. This is an eye-opener for you and me. They wrote what they were thinking, what they meant to do, their writing clearly shows on what track they dirty minds are. Had there been no such intervention who knows one of them could have committed it. Because they already had validation for such acts. Who was going to stop them?
Knowingly or unknowingly we all are responsible for the growth of “casual sexism”. Every day I see my WhatsApp full with jokes based on casual sexism. So much so that even I end up forwarding the same. Sorry. I have spent half of my life in a big group of girls n boys. We almost had all sort of talks and discussion on everything happened or happening under the Sun. Maybe even we indulged in some sort of body shaming and judging other people too. For that, I am publicly apologizing. And I won’t garb it under the tag that I did it “unconsciously” and I meant “no ill-intention”. No, because, now I don’t want to trivialize such a thing.
Its high time that we start making a conscious effort towards “not-trivializing” such issues. We have to make a genuine and logical effort to stop trivializing such talks. We have to be careful about what we speak, think and execute. Because there is one whole generation of people who is getting affected by it. They are watching us, they are learning from us, they are getting our validation for such acts.
Therefore, this is high-time when we should start talking about equality, we have to relook and re-work on some age-long norms. We are teaching our girls to be independent, to talk out their minds, to walk in the man’s world. But are we working on our Boys? No. We have to teach them to respect girls not because they are just girls but because they are humans. They are as much part of this universe as you are.
But before teaching them, can we work upon ourselves? Firstly, we require to change our mindset. Women have to come in support of the woman. Men have to come out of their centuries-old conservative thoughts and accept a woman as their equal partners.
As soon as this article is uploaded, I know I’ll be branded as a “feminist”. So to talk about basic self-respect for an individual, to demand a dignified status in the society for oneself, to ask for an equalitarian society makes me “feminist”. Then yes, I am a proud one. But then remember “what you sow, so shall reap!!
Your
Fellow Society member!!
