Portraying the female as the weaker sex, in whatever sense of the term, has lately tended to sound anomalous. Perhaps, the feature of males outnumbering the females in the land’s current population may uniquely support that time-honoured perception, while many other facts seem to falsify the off-quoted uncomplimentary comparison. Even as the issue of raising the presence of women in the nation’s parliament to not less than one-third of the total number of its members has been pending for too long, their presence in the country’s armed forces as well as the law-keeping (Police) wing of many State Governments, including Karnataka, is heading to get noticed. Girls are well on their way out shining the boys in the education sector of the country, both numerically and academically. Interestingly, the only boxing champion of the world that India has produced happens to be a woman.
If one digs into the pages of the land’s long history, one is obliged to take note of a large number of exceptions to the rule concerning the now-brittle gender connect. The much hyped issue of women’s safety in public domain, including the workplace, has assumed a twist as it were, given the flood of reports in the media citing cases of women complaining about sexual assault by the males.
The male-female equation has unarguably got tilted with the newspaper columns wearing a new look under the caption MeToo. The term is said to have been coined first in 2006 by an African-American civil rights activist Tarana Burke with the objective of uniting people who had suffered sexual assault and violence. After years of lying dormant, the term resurfaced in late 2017 following women resorting to go public with allegations against personalities conspicuous in society. Thus, a clearly private matter erupted in the media in public domain, giving people the much-desired matter for scandalising.
Seasoned analysts of the reports of women involved in the MeToo movement have observed that the year 2018 has been a water-shed year for the movement in India. A notable fallout of MeToo namely, heads of many prominent persons rolling cannot be missed. More is likely to happen in days ahead.
This post was published on December 31, 2018 5:47 pm