What Girls Want ... Let's hear them out
*Since I have lived a big majority of my life in India, my viewpoints might be very specific to the Indian society
Gender equality begins at home if you ask me. The day we let girls express themselves freely at home, we can confidently say we would have taken the first major step towards gender equality. And parents hold primary responsibility in ensuring this happens. When girls begin to express openly their feelings, emotions, desires and opinions that is when we make our first step towards being a gender neutral society. Two good things that would result in girls expressing themselves - 1. all major social reforms, scientific inventions and disruptive entrepreneurial ventures, everything started with expression of one's thoughts or opinions. So more freely girls start expressing themselves, the more we empower them and the better it is for the society. 2. Today's boys will grow up understanding what girls want, what their desires are, what their aspirations are, what their feelings are and what their opinions are.
The second point I believe is more important in grooming a gender neutral society where women and men understand each other better and because of that respect each other. Today I believe the real abuse starts in the family, when parents of girls themselves instill and ingrain in their daughters, and the sons, that girls are inferior to boys. Both girls and boys grow up with this thought and girls' voices are heard lesser and lesser. Parents of girls need to play a bigger role to ensure that their daughters are given enough opportunity and a platform to express themselves freely. Whatever be their desires or dreams, let's hear them. Not all might be worthwhile or implementable right away, but who cares. The other day I heard a girl's father yell at his daughter - "How could you even 'think' of doing it 'being a girl' ". And what was the heinous crime that the girl did - she expressed an interest in having a drink with a boy, who was of the same age as she was, during a family reunion. Now two things that went terribly wrong here if you ask me. One, the girl was yelled at for not behaving or expressing, but even for thinking, and that too because she was a girl. This was very categorically instilled into her brain by her own parents as though it was the biggest crime one could commit in today's world. Second, we are ingraining it in the boy that girls are inferior to boys in many ways, and who made him think so, not his parents, but the girl's parents. He is growing up with this thought at the back of his mind, which becomes the breeding ground for further gender-based abuse.
The other day a female friend of mine was telling me that women and men were created different for a purpose, and as long as we live our lives respecting each other the way we are, that would make our society a better place to live in. I completely agree to this point of view. But to respect women, men need to understand women better, and for men to understand women better women need to start expressing themselves more. This way they will bring to the society lot of novel thoughts and a completely different perspective which could bring about a real revolution, definitely for the better, in the way we live our lives.
Today we teach kids right from kinder-garden days about good touch and bad touch. We are letting them know that there are these bad things that happen in society and you need to act immediately if something like that happens to you. I definitely agree it is a good and necessary thing to do. But then equally or more important is to let kids, especially girls, express themselves more freely at home first and then outside in the society. So it is the responsibility of each and every parent to ensure that their children, especially girls, express themselves more freely at home and in the society. Will this lead to a complete stoppage of gender-based abuses, definitely not. But then there is definitely going to be a drastic reduction in the number of boys (who will grow up to be the men of tomorrow) who believe that they are superior to their opposite sex and that abusing women is their birth right, or something close to that. We will have more men who understand and respect human beings belonging to their opposite sex. For that reason we will have more men who will join hands to fight against the injustice that occurs against women. When this happens along with more stringent legislative rules against gender-based abuse, it will make our society a better place for she and for he, thereby building a completely gender-neutral society.