By: Faizah Aziz Aditya

Asian University for Women, Bangladesh

 

The Dampara highway was abuzz at peak hour with vehicles of all shapes and sizes. A cacophony of shrill horns began at 8 pm. With office-goers returning home, trucks leaving the city after a day of carrying and selling raw materials, and long route buses coming and leaving, everyone was rushing towards their destinations.

Amongst this chaos of life, no cars pausing for even a millisecond, let alone making way for pedestrians to cross, three friends were stuck. After a nice evening out, these friends found themselves on one side of this highway, but needing to cross to the other.

After fifteen minutes of futile attempts to bravely put one step forth, these friends decided to approach the traffic police, their last hope; otherwise, they would have to stand there and wait until peak hour was over, an hour and a half away.

The traffic policeman seemed dejected- tired from the heat, the dust in the air, and the constant discord unique to unrhythmic shrieks of honking from an assortment of vehicles on a Bangladeshi road – rickshaws, CNGs, taxis, cars, vans, minibuses, tempos, buses, trucks.

The traffic policeman looked incredulous as the three friends asked him for what seemed impossible – to cross the damn road. Nevertheless, he nodded bleakly, out of responsibility as a uniformed officer if nothing else. His attempts were halfhearted, though, and who could really blame him? The ferocity and velocity with which each vehicle passed was beyond the hands of a mere traffic officer to stop.

Another ten minutes trickled by painfully, frustratingly, and it was still impossible to cross. Prottasha, the protagonist of this short story, stomped her feet in irritation and then paused, closed her eyes, took a deep breath to calm her nerves, looked at the other two sharply and said, “Follow me!”

She grabbed the hand of one of her friends, who in turn grabbed the other’s; she looked right before confidently striding across the road, her free hand authoritatively held out at the oncoming vehicles. With her palm and fingers outstretched, she walked forth, an image of Prophet Moses crossing the Red Sea, seeming a miracle-worker to her friends as vehicles stopped short of hitting them as they crossed.

What went through Prottasha’s mind at that exact moment, nobody can tell, but her friends surely had gone into shock. They walked quietly behind her, their eyes wide with terror and disbelief, their mouths a little parted, words failing them as Prottasha guided them to the other side with the same confident long strides. Her friends’ feet shuffled and marched behind her of their own volition.

As soon as they reached the other side and the whirl of movements resumed on the highway, as if someone had hit the pause button and now hit play again, the two friends finally snapped out of their trance of terror and stared at Prottasha for a whole minute before throwing a jumble of questions, accusations, and comments her way:

“Are you crazy?!”

“Why did you do that? What if we had gotten hit?!”

“Oh god, my heart is still hammering in my chest!”

“My whole body is trembling.”

“You are crazy!”

“It was sheer luck we made it through!”

“Who even taught you to cross the road like that?!”

It was that last question which produced a reaction from Prottasha, who so far had been silently looking at her friends and letting them rant. She said, indignantly and boldly, “My dad.”

The response immediately brought a cold chill and silence to the group, as the two friends looked ashamed and apologetic. They could only muster a soft, surprised “oh!” and a mumbled whisper of “I’m sorry” in answer.

“I’m sorry for making you cross the road like that. I understand it seemed completely reckless, but how long were we going to just stand there and wait? Someone had to take action; even the traffic police didn’t help!”

One of the friends answered meekly, “I’m sorry for the tone I used earlier, I did not mean any disrespect to your father, but you do realize that was no way of trying to solve the problem- it was very risky!” her voice getting stronger near the end.

“Did you have any better ideas? We couldn’t just wait an hour or two in the middle of nowhere, we were getting late!” Prottasha snapped back before taking a deep breath and sighing.

Her voice steadier now, she looked back at the whirlwind of life rushing past them at breakneck speed and said, “Dad taught me how to cross the road when I was really young. I don’t remember much about him anymore, just snippets- a dialogue here, a black and white picture there, buried somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind– I doubt how authentic they really are…” Distant longing tinged her voice as she looked back at her friends.

“But this one,” she continued, “I remember vividly! I was seven years old. There was a narrow street in front of our house where cars would come and go infrequently, and I would always be so scared of crossing it on my way to school. Usually, mom or dad would hold my hand and help me cross, but one day dad said he would teach me how to cross so that it wouldn’t be such a Herculean task for me anymore.”

“So he took my hand, and I remember him saying, ‘you first look right, and then left, and then right again, and slowly but confidently and steadily cross the road.’ Then he paused and said, ‘Also, remember that the cars in the roads of Bangladesh never stop for anyone, so if you keep waiting, you will never be able to cross.’ He held out his hand towards the traffic, looked at me and said, ‘just hold out your hand confidently like this and cross, the cars will see your hand and understand you want to cross and will stop!’ ‘And remember,’ he added, ‘never run. You run, and you will get run over for certain. Always walk with long strides, and you’ll see you have crossed the road in no time!’ And then he made me cross the road on our way back to make sure I had practiced my lesson.”

Prottasha paused for a moment, a soft smile playing on her lips now, and said, “After his death that year, I don’t remember ever being scared to cross the road again. I have crossed the road all by myself ever since, as mom got busy working to support our family, and there was no one to hold my hand anyway.”

As she started walking again towards home, indicating for them to follow, she said, “It sounds ironic, but every time I cross the road now, I feel like he is watching over me. It is only amidst this whirl and cacophony of rushing vehicles and shrill honks that I vividly remember him and the way he used to securely hold my hand and smile at me as we crossed the road together. It is only amidst this chaos that his words give me protection and his memory gives me peace.”

 

By: Farida Naz

Asian University for Women, Chittagong, Bangladesh

Many people believe that women’s empowerment is a fancy term for feminism. Regardless of the good that feminist movements have achieved, many people don’t want to identify as feminists because of negative connotations associated with the word. Some people argue that there is nothing left for women’s empowerment because women already have equal rights in society. Yes, women do have more social, political, and economic rights than ever before. However, on a global level, women are still suffering from gender inequality and struggling with basic human rights like honor killings; child marriages; female genital mutilation; street harassment; rape; pay inequality; educational inequity, and more. In the modern world, women also have to deal with body-shaming, slut-shaming, and victim-blaming on a daily basis. Those who claim that women have equal rights fail to recognize this troubling global picture; they ignore the inequalities that accompany assigned gender roles and limit the abilities of both men and women.

We need women’s empowerment because the honor killing epidemic needs to be addressed. According to survey data, around 2,000 women in India and Pakistan are killed by family members every year in an effort to “restore the family’s honor.” This crisis violates the right to life and is motivated by cultural norms. In both countries, the actual rates of honor killings are much higher than the survey reports; most of the time, family members commit the killings, thus there is no one to report the case on behalf of the victim. In Pakistan, in July 2016, the social media star Qandeel Baloch was killed by her brother in the supposed name of family honor. Her brother’s explanation for the murder was that “girls are born to stay home.” In a press conference, he announced: “I am proud of what I did… I drugged her first, and then I killed her. She was bringing dishonor to our family.” Police investigations later revealed that her brother was a drug addict with a history of theft. He is now a murderer. This is the situation in male-dominant societies like Pakistan; if a male is a thief, drug addict, and even a murderer, that doesn’t bring shame to the family. On the other hand, if a female becomes famous because of her hard-work and talent, that brings shame to the family because “girls are born to stay home.”

We need women’s empowerment because, daily, nearly 40,000 girls are wed before 18. In 36% of cases, the girls are younger than fifteen. Child marriages take away the childhoods of little girls and push them into the responsibilities of married life. These young brides cannot continue their education, they cannot enjoy their childhood, and they have more health complications and high maternal mortality during childbirth. According to a report by the organization “Because I am a Girl,” a girl under the age of eighteen is wed every two seconds. If this issue is not addressed, more than one hundred and forty million girls will become child brides by the year 2020. Early marriages are forced marriages. Most common in South Asia and Africa, they are often motivated by the perceived obedience of younger wives. In patriarchal societies, men still want to dominate their partners. They don’t want a significant half; rather, they want a submissive sex slave and a servant to meet their needs. Parents wed their daughters early to protect girls from sexual violence. However, ironically, child marriages hold a larger risk of sexual abuse and domestic violence than adult marriages.

We need women’s empowerment because Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons, is happening in twenty-nine countries and is practiced on girls as young as five months old. FGM prevents girls from having pleasurable sex and is viewed as protection against promiscuity. More than two-hundred-million girls and women alive today have been cut in thirty countries between Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. FGM has many short and long term health effects; the procedure may cause excessive bleeding, problems with urination, vaginal infection, sexual difficulty, and a high risk of mortality during childbirth. FGM, a very brutal act, is done to girls only because they are female. We need women’s empowerment to educate others about such deadly societal norms, to safeguard human rights, because FGM is not a “women’s problem,” it is the violation of human rights.

We need women’s empowerment because girls have fewer opportunities to receive an education in developing countries due to limited resources and gender parity. Providing education to girls will help to end vicious cycles of poverty. Education is a fundamental human right, but, sadly, women comprise two thirds of all the illiterate adults worldwide, as well as 60 percent of the world’s poorest people. Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai, was shot to death because she stood up for girls’ education. In conservative societies, we need more people like Malala. We need more empowered women who can stand up for our rights.

We need women’s empowerment because women experience terror when walking alone under the moon and, in some places, even under the sun. Street harassment is a major problem faced by women, including myself, on daily basis. The Stop Street Harassment study, “Statistics- The Prevalence of Street Harassment,” reveals other staggering data. Public violence and street harassment are serious problems for:

79% of women living in the cities of India

86% in Thailand

89% in Brazil

75% in London

These high rates of street harassment prove that women are treated as inferior. Women face serious insults in the streets every day. In addition to street harassment, sexual harassment is a grave problem.

The worst kind of street harassment is rape. Sadly, we are living in societies where rape is a common problem. Women are the major victims. The United States, the “superpower” of the world, holds the first position in rape cases. We are living in a rape culture where women are blamed for having been raped. Women are “slut-shamed” for provoking ever-innocent men. Instead of asking men to stop dehumanizing others, to stop snatching their rights, women are asked to wear proper clothes, to behave properly in order to avoid rape.

We need women’s empowerment because women are still defined by their looks. Women are pressured by media and the beauty industry to have skinny bodies and flawless faces. The beauty standards of mass media are one of the main reasons behind the bullying of young girls in high schools. Such harassments have devastating effects: depression, low self-esteem, anti-social behavior, seclusion, and even suicide. If women are obese, they may face problems in their marriage and personal life. Studies even show that obese women tend to make lower wages than other women. Due to such pressures from society, some women have potentially fatal surgeries if they can afford them, while others face social stigmatization and “fat-shaming.” Today, women across the globe are struggling with severe eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, among others. According to one study, every 62 minutes at least one person dies as a direct result from an eating disorder. Women form the majority of people who suffer from eating disorders, and a major reason for such disorders is the standard of beauty given to us by the media. Healthy women are rarely happy with their bodies due to thin models whose beauty is manipulated in TV ads. Dark-skinned women are subjected to the pressure to look paler and pale-skinned women are lying under the sun for hours to get tan, no matter that overexposure to ultraviolet rays is known to cause skin cancer. The media is successful in making us all uncomfortable with our skin and our body types. Competitions such as Miss Universe, Miss World, and other beauty contests make women self-conscious about their looks; beauty contests say that they judge participants on the basis of “knowledge, sensitivity, social commitment and intelligence,” but I wonder: what does physicality have to do with intelligence and knowledge? If competitions seek to test social commitment, then why are the participants almost nude on the stage and catwalk? If these are the standards for testing intelligence, then why aren’t men asked to do ramp walks in underwear to demonstrate their knowledge? We need empowered women to stop the beauty propaganda on TV advertisements, to make people comfortable with their bodies, to stop judging people on the basis of their looks.

Women’s empowerment is a belief that women should be treated the same as men, not because women are better than men, but because women are also human beings and they have the same human rights as men in any society, in any time period. Men don’t have joyful lives in many societies due to gender parity. We need empowered women to ensure equal rights for all and for equal division of labor in society. Men are often considered money makers and providers for the family. Even if the women in a family have equal or more income than the men, men are still expected to bring more money to the family and to take care of family’s financial needs. One common expectation of men is that they be physically powerful: big, strong, muscular, and not vulnerable to any challenge. Men are expected to not express their emotions publicly. A common phrase in our society is “Men don’t cry.” Gender roles are holding society back. According to a study published on the Change Our World website, boys, due to gender parity, are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with a learning disorder. Thirty percent of boys are more likely than girls to drop out of school, they report. Tragically, they grow up into men who are also more likely to binge drink and around four times more likely than females to commit suicide. Gender roles limit the abilities of individuals and reinforce stereotypes about gender in society. It is time to appreciate the abilities of individuals for what they are regardless of their gender and sex.

I want to be an empowered woman because I don’t believe in a narrow definition of masculinity or femininity. I agree with British actress and activist Emma Watson who said, “Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive, both men and women should feel free to be strong.”