I am ever dissatisfied with the plight of women in contemporary fictions. It seems a fashion now to depict women as victims, of a few terms. Those terms includes, but are not restricted to, misogyny, patriarchy, gender discrimination.
Thanks to the invention of seventy two genders, women now seem less discriminated.
However, fiction discriminates against them everyday. By their skin tone, by their body mass index, by density of their hair, by the shape of their teeth, by size of their eyes, by degree of deprivation they have suffered as per current media perception.
I am sore and sick of this derogatory view point.
In real world, I always find women protecting themselves and fighting their struggle by themselves successfully, every moment, everywhere.
Then, instead of telling the story of a winner, why do fictions project wimpy, wary women?
It is not that I heard only stories of strength in women and that has nothing happened to me ever.
My treads were tangled in the crowd. In railway junctions or suffocating buses, I have endured rampant groping since I was nine years old. Yet I never found that to be a general issue of misogyny. Instead, I took them as personal assaults by crooked individuals.
Since eighteen, I started retaliating against them. I wrenched the wrist with advancing palms to grope. I planted my fist on the back of the individual approaching to touch my breasts by shoulder or elbow. I bit people hard for attempted groping as I grabbed their sleazy palm crawling down from my shoulder. I returned every ogle with a straight undetterant gaze and made the ogler resign.
I prevented them from violating my body. I made them feel hurt instead of myself getting hurt.
Even then, I was sexually harassed, in my very early twenties and realized that the harassing person’s only intention was to subdue my fast learning abilities to cover up the person’s own inabilities. I resisted this manifestation of power. I suffered through hormonal imbalances and clinical depression. Yet I emerged stronger than ever by arranging myriad reprimands for the person and the person’s patronizing cohort.
Ever since, any cabal of incompetence, irrespective of gender, racial makeup and everything else constituting hubris of its individual members, whenever attempted to attack my person, I simply twisted them into an entanglement of nothing.
I, a female since birth, have been doing these all alone. Hence, my female characters are brainy, brawny, brave.
Now tell me why would I take the fiction that portray women as vulnerables and victims?
