IMPACT OF SEXUAL POLICY ON WOMEN

 

IMPACT OF SEXUAL POLICING ON WOMEN

I interpret sexual policing in terms of women as enforcing supposed norms on women about their bodies, where most of what they do is constantly under scrutiny and their bodies are constantly sexualized based on how much skin we show or how outspoken we are or whether we drink or smoke these factors are taken as signals of our willingness to attract male attention.

Women are constantly under scrutiny, their clothes, their behaviour, their makeup whether its at home or in public places, which creates binds that constraint movement and access for women, so much of the way women’s sexuality is policed is done in the name of keeping us out of harm’s way. Victim-blamers love telling women to keep our knees closed and our hemlines long if we don’t want to be raped and in my mere 20 years of existence this has always lead to increased anxiety and frustration for me, feeling this constant judgement and fear whenever I walk down the road irrespective of how I behave or what I wear has already frustrated me to a level that I sometimes fear that I would never want to have girls of my own, why would I want my own kids are subjected to this constant objectification.

Instead of talking and discussing the problems and stigmas in society, young women right from school are taught ways to avoid the problem or ignore it altogether, in my own school, teachers used to open the hemlines of our skirts if they found them too short, told not to wear lip-gloss, wear white vests underneath our shirts so that our bras wouldn’t be visible and at one point the reason was given behind enforcing these rules were that these things could be a “distraction to boys”, can you imagine how humiliating it could be for a fifth-grader when a teacher opens the hemline of your skirt in school, and let’s not forget the omnipresent aunties and the nosy relatives giving you the “discreet” side-eye whenever you wear something that’s supposedly “revealing” and when you go through these situations as a teenager they shape up your thinking in a way that makes you believe that the society and other people are not at fault but rather it's you that needs to change.

When it comes to a typical Indian household, topics like sexuality, sex and dating are usually considered taboos and problems are dealt with by enforcing curfews and putting on restrictions and guidelines about what’s safe and what’s not, while I have always known that Indian parents always have the best intentions at heart and they’re just concerned about our safety, what they don’t realize is that without really talking about these issues with their kids, they further raise their curiosity and their sources of information become pop-culture, movies and the internet, which obviously give you a skewed version of reality and might lead to bad decisions in the name of freedom, so instead of ensuring their safety, they might endanger it further

Maybe in today’s culture doing stuff that’s supposedly considered sexual or portraying my sexuality might be dangerous and come with risks but I’ve never really seen boys being warned against it, in the name of something bad might happen. In a culture like ours, it’s important to equip young people with all the information they need when it comes to making the right decisions, right from the start, both boys and girls should have the means of having these conversations in our own homes and schools, where they can openly ask questions without any hesitations as these are the times where we really mould our personalities. So, the next time you see someone question you about your safety, about what you wear, about how you should behave or act and then label it as “I am asking for your own good”, do ask them that “Instead of trying to save me, shouldn’t you be working towards making the world safer for me?”

- Aastha Verma

Girl Up Neev