They were engaging his services because they wanted to work. They lived 10 miles away, in a small settlement where, for generations, begging had been the main source of income. A few weeks earlier, the male elders of their caste had decreed that village women working at nearby meat-processing factories should leave their jobs. The reason they gave was that women at home would be better protected from the sexual advances of outside men. A bigger issue lay beneath the surface: The women’s earnings had begun to undermine the old order.
.. In the tradition of their caste, the Nats, a person challenging a community punishment could offer a defense at trial by picking up a red-hot piece of iron and walking five steps toward the temple. If her hands burned, she was guilty, and would be placed in a hole in the ground until she confessed.
.. She tended to alienate women — maybe it was the way she called them fat buffaloes — but Premwati calmly allowed Geeta’s insults to bubble over her. Geeta repaid this kindness by stomping over and intervening whenever Premwati’s husband beat her.
.. The women of their community live by rules: If an older man approaches, they cannot sit on any surface above the ground, so it is not unusual to see them suddenly slither down off cots and chairs. They are forbidden to have physical contact with men from outside the community, with the exception of physicians or bangle sellers.
.. A hollow-eyed woman named Pooja announced, with some surprise, that her husband and mother-in-law had stopped beating her. “When you earn money,” she said, “you are of some use to them.” As for Geeta, it became clear to her that the men swarming around the factory grounds were not making sexual advances.
“When you start working, your heart opens up,” she said. “Then you’re not scared anymore.”
.. He forbade the women in his own family to work at the factories, but watched with distaste as his neighbors left in the morning. He looked back with nostalgia at the time when the Nats supported themselves by begging.
“Life was much better 20 years back,” he said. “It was a nice society. Now women are going out and meeting strange men.”
.. Their work, he said, had a whiff of immorality.
“They have everything: Clothes to wear. Enough to eat,” he said. “Why would they need to work? They still have husbands. It’s not just insulting to them, it’s insulting to the whole village.”
.. The old, patriarchal order was dying in rural India, dying slowly, and releasing toxic bursts as it did.
“That may be the cause of this whole trouble, that they are losing control,” he shrugged. “These old practices are going away.”
.. The women, too, were in uncharted territory. Every two weeks, they made a trip to the magistrate’s court in Meerut to renew a restraining order that the police had recommended, which would impose a 50,000-rupee fine on anyone who resorted to violence.
.. “They know nothing about court procedure,” he said. “They never ask me questions. They just say one thing: ‘We are not wrong. We are not wrong. We are not wrong.’”
.. Roshan had followed the sequence of events with satisfaction. These women, he said, were trying to show that they could exist without the community. When he heard that the girl was gone, he smiled.
“Slowly, slowly, they will understand our power,” he said.
.. Mr. Mewati assembled the villagers and informed them that the Indian Constitution guaranteed equality under the law. Women could not be prevented from working, and Geeta and her friends should be forgiven. Then he withdrew 3,000 rupees in folded bills from his pocket, enough to cover the fine for Geeta’s disobedience, and handed it to Roshan.
“Take care of this mess,” he said.
The machinery of compromise cranked into motion.
.. Mr. Siddiqui, their defense lawyer, saw no need to report the incident to the magistrate who had issued the restraining order.
.. “Anyone who has beaten you in the night can do it again,” he said.
Geeta, too, had lost her swagger. When people asked about Sanjay, she told them that he had fallen off the roof. She denied that she had been trapped in the house with the other women.
.. All told, it had been an expensive night, Roshan said. To avoid criminal charges, he had had to pay 3,000 rupees for Sanjay’s medical care and an additional 4,000 to ensure there would be no investigation. But it was worth it, they all agreed.
“Gender is not a Binary, it’s a Spectrum”: Some Problems
But even the most conventionally masculine person will demonstrate some characteristics we associate with femininity, and vice versa.
.. The idea that gender is a spectrum, not a binary, negates the experiences of transsexual people who choose to move from one gender role to another, and renders their efforts at transition unintelligible. If gender is a spectrum, and your gender identity can be anywhere along that spectrum, why modify your body to make it more closely resemble that of the opposite sex?
.. Gender is the value system that ties certain desirable behaviours and characteristics to reproductive function. Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function (which we should), and once we’ve rejected the idea that there are just two types of personality and that one is superior to the other (which we should), what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff “gender”? What meaning does the word “gender” have here, that the word “personality” cannot capture?
.. Some people will find it relatively easier and more painless to conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, while others find the gender roles associated with their sex so oppressive and limiting that they cannot tolerably live under them, and choose to transition to live in accordance with the opposite gender role.
.. So if you want to call yourself a genderqueer femme presenting demigirl, you go for it. Express that identity however you like. Have fun with it. A problem only emerges when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cis, because you require there to be a bunch of boring binary cis people for you to define yourself in reference to; and when you insist that these cis women have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the women they know themselves to be, while nobody really understands just how complex and interesting your gender identity is.
.. if you’re male, then the best way to do that – the most radical, revolutionary, genuinely non-masculine conforming thing you can do – has nothing to do with your dress or your hair or your makeup or your choice of pronouns. As a male person, the most gender non-conforming thing you can do is to stop making demands of women – of their time, of their resources, of their domestic, emotional and sexual labour.
Obama: Hillary had a harder campaign in 2008 because she is a women
“We had as competitive and lengthy and expensive and tough a primary fight as there has been in modern American politics, and she had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” Mr. Obama said. “She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did.”
Sarah Palin Saves Feminism
But Palin has done us a favor by proving that a woman can stumble, babble incoherently on stage and spew snide garbage, and it isn’t a blot on the female copybook.