Dear ladies, I have a question to ask.
How many times a day do you deal with creeps?
How many times a day do you give their crap right back to them?
I can just see the comments board now – women listing statistics bad enough to send you to the airport with the intention of buying a one-way ticket out of here, and men going “We don’t believe it’s THAT bad!”
Here’s the thing…A few days ago, I was on Facebook, minding everyone’s business but my own, as usual.
There’s this photographer, an acquaintance really.
He’d put up a status critiquing a photo series that was about how women get stared at in India.
He had nothing against the series per se – it was a purely technical critique of the composition of the pictures.
So he’s out of this equation.
What interested me was this one guy – not even Indian – who got onto the comments for apparently no other reason than to argue the dictionary definition of leering as a form of sexual harassment.
He denied such a thing existed. Then he said we women were making too big a deal out of nothing.
You can imagine how well that went down.
But out of the raging, ugly mess of that conversation, one thing became increasingly clear.
Women are fed up.
Fed up of being leered at.
Fed up of catcalls.
Fed up of men sticking elbows and thighs into our personal space on buses and shared autos and trains.
Fed up of delivery guys memorizing our numbers and sending creepy WhatsApp texts.
Fed up of “will you fraandship me” requests that turn into insults the minute you ignore them.
But mostly, fed up of acting like all this is No Big Deal and we all Need To Chill.
So here’s my third question.
Why?
Why are we not allowed to speak up and tell someone off for being a creep, without being called hysterical?
Why does everyone from our mothers to our best guy friends keep telling us to calm the eff down?
And WHY, for the love of sanity, does no one, including us women, realize that every time we let even a tiny little incident pass by wordlessly, all we are doing is letting the creep in question think this kind of behavior is a-okay?
Do you really think that guy on the bus who’s sticking his elbows into your boobs will try it again if you loudly advertise his actions and ask him to stop?
Do you really think that delivery guy will try the WhatsApp stunt again if you call his boss to complain and let him face the consequences?
Think of it as ingraining a habit in someone.
This country is plenty illiterate, and plenty ignorant too, when it comes to common decency as respect for the other sex.
So if you don’t stop a potential creep from building those bad habits, he’s going to escalate, and escalate, and escalate, and some day, some poor girl is going to find herself abused – if she’s attached to him – or raped – and it won’t much matter if she’s attached to him or not.
So for the love of ourselves, ladies – and gentlemen too – when are we going to start speaking up against even the tiniest bit of creepiness that we face each damn day, till this country gets it?
Image credit: The Sydney Morning Herald
