MANCHESTER: One of my male friends shared a post on his Facebook wall, which I would like to share. The post states: “Men should be offended when someone claims that women should prevent rape by not wearing certain things or not going to certain places or not acting in a certain way. That line of thinking presumes that men are incapable of control; that they are so uncivilised that it takes extraordinary effort for them to walk down the street without raping someone; that they require a certain dress code to be maintained, that certain behaviour be employed so that maybe, just maybe, they won’t rape someone today. It presumes that their natural state is that of a rapist — Unknown .”
This friend of mine has over 500 friends in his friends list, who belong to different educational backgrounds, including doctors, engineers, civil servants etc, with most of them being male. And whenever he shares a post it is ‘liked’ by 20 to 30 men within an hour but it has been more than 20 days since he shared the abovementioned post, yet there is not a single person who ‘liked’ it just to show his approval or agreement for the post.
This small incident goes to show that male chauvinism is so deeply entrenched in our society that people consider it to be below their dignity to even ‘like’ a post that is in favour of women. It also shows that in their minds, our men hold women responsible for rape cases. Moreover, it appears that out of 500 men, only one (who shared it) has enough guts to favour the fairer sex. If this is the proportion of enlightened men in our society, who are all educated, what can we expect from the uneducated class?
Momina Giranaz
Published in The Express Tribune, January 16th, 2013.
