Source: IMPHAL FREE PRESS
Posted: 2009-11-25

The international campaign against gender violence has had a local launch. Jointly sponsored by a number of women’s rights NGOs, the local cable television network, ISTV, is doing a series of panel discussions involving people in different walks of life. No prizes for guessing that one of these discussions would be amongst media professionals. Is the media portrayal of gender ameliorating in any way the deeply entrenched oppressive social structures for women in patriarchal societies? It is needless to remind anyone that the modern world has been subsumed by the patriarchal order totally. Many talk of the Khasi and Garo societies as exceptions to this rule, but this assumption is false, as Khasi and Garo intelligentsia have time and again pointed out. These societies are matrilineal no doubt, but hardly matriarchal anymore. The patriarch is the authority in the family as well as well as in the government. Important decision makers who can change the way the society conducts itself are predominantly men, as in any other society. They are in this sense, matrilineal patriarchies.
Is the media doing enough to offset the oppressive patriarchal order to give women their rightful due? At face value the question seems simple but anybody trying to answer it honestly would discover how complex the matter is. For one thing, what is the media expected to do other than be a mirror of the society? Is it expected to take a morally self-righteous stand and sermon on how things should be and how society should think and behave? As a member of the enlightened citizenry, media professionals are expected to indeed take a pro-active stance in making positive interventions but in this situation what exactly should be constitute proactive stance? It is not always easy to think differently from what the larger society thinks, and moreover there is never a guarantee the different thinking is superior to the time tested traditional ways of looking at things. For tradition, as Topol said in the Broadway classic of the 1970s, subsequently made into a Hollywood blockbuster, “Fiddler on the Roof�, keeps a society’s balance intact. Without tradition, he said everybody would become as vulnerable and rootless as a fiddler on a roof. The movie incidentally is about the inevitability of both tradition and change. Keeping the right balance, or even deciding where the right balance might be, is where the difficulty is.
This dilemma is what is evident even in the question of gender equation when it comes to the crux. Since the patriarchal hierarchy has suppressed the woman so totally, so much so that even women see in terms of patriarchal values, perhaps there is a need to break free the oppressive shackles consciously. That often it is women who oppress and undermine other women most is testimony of how patriarchy has grown into and mutated not just men but women as well. This mutation is most tragic in the case of women for while it only makes men into different men, it makes women into men. Metaphorically speaking, this is a greater “femicide� than even the act of physically killing women, as in female infanticide. It is a greater tragedy because it amounts to killing the female in the female. The media’s role in the current campaign against gender violence hence can begin by not endorsing the acts of patriarchal moral police forces, of which the state has a wide variety ranging from so called students to so called women vigilantes, imposing their stunted moral standards on women of the society, sometimes violently. But beyond the mission of offsetting obvious gender injustices, what needs to be considered is, how far can gender equality be pushed meaningfully and profitably? Men and women cannot be equal in absolute terms ever, despite what some extremist feminists think. They can have rights parity but can never be absolutely equal. They are differently abled with different aptitudes for different things. As for instance men cannot justifiably demand maternity leave, but it is also equally a fact that while a man broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954, and that today most top middle distance runners do the mile in about three and a half minutes, the four-minute mile barrier still remains a barrier for women. These differences should be taken into account and a just social order formulated accordingly. To borrow a Marxist maxim: “To each according to his need and from each according to his ability�.


 

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