The Rebelle blog

http://theladiesfinger.com/2015-is-ending-where-are-the-women/ And while we read this article, I am also reading about the murder of Allison Baden-Clay, 43, a Brisbane resident who was killed by her husband in April 2012 and now the court verdict is out wherein he won the appeal against his murder conviction instead being accused of manslaughter. So yes, such judgements get passed not only in India but everywhere in the world. A woman is murdered and all the court does is convicts her husband of manslaughter, not murder. How convenient for the judiciary! The Reeva Steenkamp murder verdict proved how blinded the legal system is! Her cold blooded murderer got away with an 'accidental self-defence' argument. He'll live the rest of his life, alive and doing things while that young woman will lay forgotten. That is what is happening with women! We don't exist- we don't matter, unless we speak up. At least a voice is a reminder to the other gender to look around and s...

Sometimes I wish I'd documented all my thoughts about dismantling patriarchy in a diary or a journal when I was younger. I wish this now, because I recently read some letters I'd written to a distant friend on role of women in workplaces and this uneven household/work system. And I realised my thoughts on certain books like Wuthering Heights or Virginia Woolf's writings and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar have undergone a slight change. Maybe I was young, back when I first read these books. I was disappointed by the portrayal of women and it marred my understanding about the quality of life 19th century women lived in. SO, the thoughts on tramping patriarchy also arose from two recent incidents seen in India. One, the Happy to Bleed project which started as a reaction to some Temple Trustee's atrocious remarks against menstruating women in Kerala, by women of all age groups on Twitter and other social media. The other is the story of a woman breaking a 400 year old t...

So I read a very interesting article today that showed a cerebrum divided into two parts- the left and right. The article was decoding women's skills based on their brain parts. Accordingly, a woman's left brain functions include number & math/scientific skills, written & spoken language, analytical & logical reasoning, objectivity and right side of body control, whereas, her right brain functions include music/art awareness, intuition, creativity & imagination, Face recognition, emotions, subjectivity and left side of body control. It almost made me laugh because it seemed absurd to imagine one side of my brain trying to work difficult math problems and failing at it while scaling through a foreign language smoothly without any difficulties. Having studied anatomy in school, I was always even then very curious as to why the brain shows different usage in men & women. Is it because men rule the roost and really put in a good use of their brains while wom...

We mustn't judge harshly- after all, we must always remember that many times our own actions may be misconstrued. One of my most favorite things to do on an idle day at home is to go through book shelves and leaf through passages from some beloved books. I laid my hands on "On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women" edited by Martha Rainbolt and Janet Fleetwood. This book has the finest articles contributed by social and political thinkers like Aristotle, Maya Angelou, Eldridge Cleaver, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Lillian Hellman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, John Stuart Mill, Susan Sontag, E.B.White, Virginia Woolf..and many more. Adrienne Rich in an article titled "Taking Women Students Seriously" writes: Suppose we were to ask ourselves, simply: What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self-defining human being, need a knowledge of her own history, her much-politicized biology, an awareness of th...