Saturday, March 8, 2014

How Many Iphigenia, What Price Troy


Wealth And Well-Being


 Everyone has heard of The Troyan horse, which is misnamed actually - it was a Greek horse used to deceive Troy. And while they believed in the gift of the wooden horse from Greeks, and celebrated a much needed respite believing it to be end of the siege and restoring of honour with friendly hand extended, and slept exhausted - instead of being suspicious of an enemy and hacking away at the gift before allowing it to enter the premises, and keeping a vigil until the Greeks left, armada and all - they got massacred. 

 Troyans were massacred in their sleep, by those who won victory with a leader who had a young daughter "sacrificed" - he had her literally killed ritually for the purpose - for the ultimate objective, which was the acquisition of all that gold that Troy was famous for. I wonder if the Troyans knew about the sacrifice, or was it a secret - and if they knew would they have been vigilant? It certainly would be stupid to trust someone who murders his own daughter for acquisition of gold that belongs to others. 

 But then again it would depend on if they thought it was normal to sacrifice what was only a daughter and that too by the male who had helped conceive her (those were not the days of fathers who would feed or diaper, especially not men who had others do it for them; but then again that has changed a little, not very much) so it was his right to use one for profit of victory and make another one if he wanted one at all. 

 If there is record of Troyans sacrificing daughters or other women it is not as well known as Iphigenia. But then again, sacrificing daughters is neither limited by geography nor by ages of prosperity - Greeks were not poor then - and it is not unknown in its various forms in the supposedly progressed, modern countries today either.
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 Troyans made another mistake though, which was not so criminal to the extent of the mistake but horrendous in the event, considering what consequences it brought about. 

 They ignored the wise woman in their midst who could see what would happen - the consequences of actions, the coming events, et al. She did warn them more than once and was ignored - not the first time, but the second and third important times, when she stated Troy would be destroyed due to the presence of the eloped couple. They need not have harmed the couple, but if the wise men of Troy had paid attention and got together surely some way would have been found to have the couple escape, live safely elsewhere while a war was avoided some way. 

 But obviously this page is not about ancient mistakes or crimes - it is about today, perhaps about not so distant past and the future we ought to care about. Troy and Greece are mentioned because the attitudes and mindsets are not gone - they are very much present.
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 I don't know when it started here - this whole horrible war against mothers of our future. For that is what women are, and should be understood to be, majority anyway. Most societies put the burden of nurturing the future solely on the mothers - this is not to say there aren't men who are good fathers and good husbands, only that they do it with their own sweet free will, which is good when they do do it; but mothers are punished severely for any other option - in fact women are punished socially in various ways for considering any other options than nurturing their own children and everyone else as well - while males are not only socially required to leave it to mothers they can be socially and even professionally punished for other options. 

 There are of course historical reasons for this divide and attitude and social rewards for one and punishment for other - where women are supposed to be happy they have anyone to serve and expect no other rewards, and men are rewarded more and more for external achievements and looked down upon if they forgo even a little for the sake of their own home and caring responsibilities. Historically women did not have an option to having as many children as their own biological and social situation permitted or forced, and in fact many died in childbirth as well, so childcare and nurture was a more than enough industry that needed to be taken care of and managed. Women were more suited to it since they needed to be at home - being "indisposed" one way or another much of the time, even apart from being not required to be harsh natured as men were. 

 It is not that all men are harsh any more than all women are caring and gentle and loving by nature - people come in all colours of spirit, mind, heart and generally nature and character - irrespective of gender or race or other physical characteristics. It is only that the social training bent them towards those qualities or characteristics due to needs of spheres of occupation or of where each was going to be, home with children or out there fighting it out with other men. So what roughness or harshness existed generally was further required and rewarded in males, and the opposite in females, because their work spheres made it necessary. There was little possibility of actually exchanging the work spheres then. Professions or spheres of occupations do mold people, it is only natural. 

 (If that sounds like Indian caste system it is because unlike most other caste systems - those of Europe or other lands that were often based on money and privileges bestowed by rulers and were generally feudal in very basic character - this was based on higher criteria and more thought and ideals. Where else would you have the higher castes often not only poor but very poor, in sheer financial calculations, because they were not allowed to make money for charge for their services, and yet maintaining their ideals of all sorts, because this was the way?) 

 But one fact that is forgotten in this rough memory of old days is that male and female spheres of work were not quite as divided as it sounds.
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 Until industrial revolution the spheres of work were not quite so divided between men and women - or even after that for a while, in fact soon after that it was not divided at all to the extent possible, as far as work goes. 

 During the days prior to industrial revolution women worked hard enough in all sorts of agrarian works as well as some others - weaving and knitting and sewing, for example - and were involved in selling as well. There was more equity of assets though then because assets were not entirely on paper (or internet) in banks and stocks and so forth - assets then included lands and cattle and sheep, houses and furniture and china, jewellery and clothes and servants. All this needed management and protection - and those two were equally important, so while women managed a lot men managed protection - but women were needed to produce men and to nurture them and to care for them at all stages, and so it all balanced, perhaps not equal but equitable enough. 

 Industrial revolution changed all that - not immediately but inevitably, in a direction that was against women, and ultimately against humanity itself.
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 Women in fact went to work in factories as soon as they were given the possibility - there were enough poor in industrial nations and in fact women and children worked in horrible conditions to begin with, and it is all quite well documented too. But the one subtle change that is not documented so well is how the balance changed around this time from being perhaps a little more equitable to being more and more not so. This had more to do with unfair rewards that could not be countered and less with any justice or fairness. 

 A lot of that had to do with capitalism - but it is not that women were unable to work in industrial or corporate set-ups, on the contrary. That part of it was easy. What was also easy was to be cheated by the corporates and the banking and generally the changed economic systems - in one important way. 

 Women were robbed of the economic assets that had always been understood as joint property of a married couple and had been managed jointly, with even the church ceremony having a groom solemnly promise to endow the bride with all his worldly goods while worshipping her with his body. 

 This now changed in all but the words of the ceremony, and often that too. Employers paid the employees and had no concern at the beginning with their families, unlike the feudal agrarian ways where the families were neighbours and could not be ignored really, and so were looked after by the employers' wives and other ladies of the manor. Now, the families have little to do with each other except perhaps meet at parties and manage a few pretences. 

 No real concern, and that in turn brought about a lot of differences, in concepts and in practices. Payment was now strictly in paper or on paper - and how far are pubs and other such distractions to take away the money that was supposed to belong to the worker, and the worker alone if it was a man? A "working" woman was usually terrorized by any male - father, husband, or any other male - who happened to live in the house, into giving away her earnings into his hands, and was considered to have no moral right to keep it - and had for a long time no legal right either, in many countries, since the lawmakers were male and had no intention of allowing women a share of this rich feeding ground. 

 So the women were reduced to dependent slaves, beggars and non-entities for a long time, good part of two centuries nearly, not because they were not working - usually they worked at least the same amount in homes as before but working outside brought no relief, and industrial growth was taking away all household help so that workload went on increasing while human contact and support reduced until a wife in a western country was entirely at the mercy of a man as never before.
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 In addition to all this as if it were not enough women were told they were incapable of entering the realm of mind and therefore inferior. This was only true to the extent that if you lose a significant amount of strength and blood - the blood your body has worked to make, and your strength has gone into - every now and then, you have that much less strength to give to an endeavour that needs all that strength. And yet the assertion had not been true - women had been writers and musicians and painters of art even into nineteenth century, apart from all other management works that had been traditional. But even in science they were not missing - including in Astronomy or even the Queen of Sciences, Mathematics - and so they were simply told they were incapable of doing it because they were inferior, and they were inferior because because they were incapable of doing it - so women took up that challenge and went to prove they could indeed do it all, not realising that the real issue was the guilt of the new male institutions in robbing them. 

 And so then they were robbed further - for one thing industries sprung up one after another to take up the work women had done, and so the traditional roles of women began to be considered superfluous - if a man did not need a wife to provide him with food he needed very little from a wife, since few men care about a clean and well managed home and can live in and with a greater deal of mess than women can imagine, until there is a woman in the house and then they can do well in instructing and demanding. 

 And then for another thing, since the whole infrastructure of those industries changed around them, the women could not only not do those things any more they had to pay for them to be done or obtained. Just think dressmaking for one example. What inquisition had done to take medicine out of women's hands in the older era now industries did to take away much of the remaining traditional women's works - sewing, knitting, and more - and women were left with drudgery of cleaning and diapering, with cooking still a responsibility but with the proviso that if they did not do it, it was no deprivation - men could eat out more easily, there were take-outs and ready food in the supermarkets.
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 So women were reduced to objects of mere physical need and told - by various industries that sprang up to do just that, magazines and designers and cosmetics and so forth - that their only hope was to be as attractive as the industries showed them, and the definitions of attractive changed. Now it was no longer the colour of good health and emotion but instead the painted doll look of a fixed face, and even fixed hair, now curled with great pain of sleeping on curlers or going through the day with them, now straightened with an iron, now short, now long. And what was worse, soon to give way to an epidemic, was that concepts of a beautiful figure changed too. 

 It was no longer a maternal figure who looked like she had plenty of life to offer in various forms. Now it was someone who looked like she had refused to eat since she was walking, and had no intention - or capability - of reproduction, much less breastfeeding or carrying anyone in her arms. The model of beauty - pared down from the infinite varieties - had changed. 

 The stereotype had changed, but for a strong - not good, just strongly pushed - reason. She might not be any use to the future but she was excellent use for industries that had sprung up and needed to make ever escalating profit with ever reducing costs. She could not do much other than pose, but she could fit the mass produced clothes - that were cheaper to produce for someone who look like a shape and figure of one rather than an eight, considered natural for a woman in every culture because it is so, since for ever.

 Soon that became the actual size to optimally look like if you were to avoid social abuses. Clothes hangers, rather than natural figures of women in all their infinite variety, were prescribed - and worse, any options were really frowned upon. Drugs, drinks, swinging, whatever, anything else is excusable and even hip, just be thin. 

 And so girls - young, impressionable girls, seeking approval of peers and looking at magazines and trying to fit into the more attractive of the available clothes at malls - learned to starve, literally, starving themselves to comply with the ubiquitous one and only stereotype pushed at them through all the images. - 

 Now they are beginning to die of starvation - this is apart from all the other stresses they saw over the decades, and a couple of generations of women coping - with earning, being divorced and having to earn, as well as care for the children, having to go back to school to be able to earn, trying to prove they could do any work and take up challenges of any mental and intellectual domain, and so on. 
 
 Now, girls are starving to death in the very nations where there is a general epidemic of obesity.
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 Often men of those lands wonder why an Asian would bother with women of "their" lands, that someone from India should bother only with their own problems. This is of course a racist outlook - if that attitude were genuine they would have the same outlook for all missionaries (though concern for others' problems is a very small proportion of their work and even less of their purpose) and of other western meddling in affairs of others. 

 But the fact is in case of women and the relation of the genders and the roles and fields nations are not insular especially after the colonial and industrial era. What happens in one end of the earth soon reverberates and begins to repeat everywhere in same, or slightly different, sometimes not so bad and sometimes worse forms. 

 There has been no analysis that I know of about why there were suddenly so many "dowry deaths" or other murders of brides and even older wives (- one involved a mother of a friend's classmate, a doctor couple, where he had her murdered by two goons he employed; they soon told all - he had wanted to marry his employee!-) - an epidemic over a couple of decades or more that increased exponentially. 

 But the dowry deaths began when west was going through the divorce epidemic, which was conveniently blamed on women and their quest for freedom and independence by everyone while the truth was that it was men who had thrown out wives and children (from early marriages that happened before they were successful, so the men had unsuitable families out of sync with new status at work), and acquired new, younger ones, as soon as they were doing well and could get rid of the first wives who had not only seen them through struggling days but often even supported them by working while the young husbands went to college and wives paid for their college expenses, including tuition fees. 

 When divorced, the same wives retained custody (and responsibility) of children, with right to stay in the jointly owned house (but not the right to keep out the husband who could enter at will and be abusive physically as well as intrude in every other way too), and just about enough alimony and child support to feed but not have any security - the husbands frequently did not pay at all, not even child support, and some either changed states to escape or were vengeful enough to be unemployed for a while too. In all this the children suffered and girls learned not to trust either men or laws or anyone other than themselves - and not to risk having children without being sure they were safe from the fate of the earlier generation.
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 India did have a divorce law but the society was not ready in any way then to cope with it - daughters went to live with families of the husband, were not welcomed back except on a temporary visitor basis, and there were no possibilities for most to live anywhere else, which meant women were unwilling to leave husbands no matter how far they were persuaded with abuse of every possible sort, and so while the west wind arriving east now made husbands want more in financial terms and look at old marriages as expendable, wives were not leaving unless by death, and there was the new law in India that forbade a second marriage for majority.

 So there began the killings - suicides, accidents, murders - since only these dire measures could have brought husbands' freedom from an earlier contract in order to make a new and more profitable alliance, unlike in more fashionable west where divorces did it. 

 Every kitchen had a stove and when a daughter dies the question of social prestige stops parents and relatives from seeking justice, and so the groom could go on to have a second, a third bride and dowry - any rumours were scotched easily, with tales of a crazy girl being fraudulently foisted on them. 

 It did not stop until women marched and demanded justice and a few murdering husbands and his relatives were punished. But then it was already beginning of another epidemic.
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 Now, people don't wait for the whole trauma of it all - the educating and protecting a daughter while worrying about her dowry and looking for a good match for her and then worrying if she will live, much less be happy and fulfilled. It is easier to do without it all - by avoiding having daughters. Gender determination is illegal, but it is the easiest to circumvent, and there need be no proofs of anyone having told anyone anything really. For a few decades now the populations of girls is going down steadily. 

 This is not entirely due to abortions - some of it is due to the sustained campaign for delaying and restricting children, so couples with a son or two often choose not to have another child, and those with a first daughter "try for" a son. When we were young that meant often six or more daughters; now, good people stop with one or two daughters; and those more "practical" make sure they have only a son next, however many attempts (abortions) later it might have to be. 

 Those who might accept or even want daughters don't always have them; but those who wish for a son at any cost do go to any length to make it happen - there have even been instances of of more than one marriage of the man for the purpose, admitted in a debate on television. That this could not guarantee him a son, that having a son or a daughter was up to the father biologically, and the mother could only provide humanity (and good health if she had it in the first place), was known but still new knowledge then; it was an extent of science the man was unwilling to be aware of and this being television no one told him then and there. 

 Women still have no recourse without husbands and families, not on a large scale, so they do as ordered - and the doctors fraternity is quick to push the blame on them, since a guilty doctor is more guilty than the helpless women who are forced to abort the daughters, but a complying one has a good trade so guilt is profitable - but they don't want to admit it of course. 

 Fraternity, because about half of all doctors are women in India, and they do not blame the women who are forced to abort. They understand the plight of the women - so do the blaming male doctors but they are scot-free if the mothers get blamed conveniently, as are their brother males the fathers and grandfathers of female fetus specific abortions.
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 All this is even without taking into account the hidden sacrifices of daughters by families - giving them less food and spending less on them as they grow up, for the various needs of education and sports and other needs of growth, and inculcating them with the idea that women must sacrifice for sake of families and everyone else, mostly for men, brothers, fathers, and later husbands and other males; this is doctrine in perpetuity - if a woman learns it she starves her own daughter and other women in the house she has rule over, and tortures them in other ways. She is human and has to take out the pain and frustration somewhere, and any woman who has ideas of liberation is then a collective prey since she won't buckle down to the usual feudal system and torture. 

 But it can go further - and there are ways daughters are sacrificed for the prosperity and profits (I cannot say wealth of course is, has to be, more than money and what it can buy) of the father and brothers. Their lives are ceremoniously thrown down the drain, and in turn their progeny is considered to have a right over the progeny - only daughters, naturally - of the son who profited from the sacrifice of a sister. If the son's wife refuses and he does not comply by providing money instead, his daughters in turn are sacrificed, as punishment. 

 None of the concerned end up happy of course - such a sacrifice of a young soul left to live a life sucked out of her life has grief rising to heaven and it can only bring destruction to those that were instrumental and those that were to profit. She loses, they profit but do not gain wealth. 

 For wealth consists of well-being, in every way, and the two are not apart anywhere in any language or culture, they cannot be apart. And wealth and woman cannot be separated - a daughter, a bride, a wife brings wealth, in every form not counted in numerical terms alone, and when robbed of peace and well-being she cannot do so any more, nor do the cries of grief of her spirit let any peace or wealth remain with those that either were instrumental and culprits or beneficiaries. 

 When your sons suffer or abandon you for their petty pleasures, when your old age is lonely and no one to care for your pains, think of the daughters who could have given love freely and instead by you sacrificed, and beat your head on the floor - not that it will help, since you cannot give her life back to her.
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 Ironically in India the eras of dowries and then dowry deaths were accompanied silently and parallely by women making steady and hard earned advances into various professional and intellectual fields - advances in terms of degrees, positions, and also proving that they could do it (which was never in doubt here really) and be good on all fronts, for which there were no options. And ironically it was age old institutions of arranged marriages and living in joint families that helped most women to do it all and stay sane and healthy to the extent they did. 

It all comes to individual families, ultimately, here. So there is always option to be good, better, further. 

 So families educated daughters and they were encouraged to go be doctors (always good to have a doctor in the house) and teachers and so on, but they went further and went on to be engineers and scientists as well; and the more recent era of abortions is followed by the sudden liberation of the country from the former public industry (and left leaning policies of the government) shackles, precisely when IT related industry came in seeking more competent workforce around the globe - and women here were more than ready to take it up with no question that they could. 

 Which is again ironical since most of the world is dominated by wasp males and there has been a deliberate - needless to say false - propaganda about lesser intelligence of women there, and very conscious put down of India on various fronts until now and often even now. 

 So now on one hand the young women are earning very well in IT, that is in intelligence industry, while on the other hand various boors are still aborting daughters under the impression that sons will support them in old age and daughters are a liability - but women are earning very well, and even the former is not true any more. 

 Sons have been exporting themselves for a while now and in any case how does a man look after his parents except by marrying someone who is expected to do it? If there is no one left - since they are being aborted - he is not going to do it by himself, not most of the sons. Moreover he is going to have it difficult to reproduce himself too, so there goes his chance of having a son. 

 Already demographics are changing in various parts of the country where women are at a premium, and it is so hard to get a bride for villagers, either they are importing (and often paying for, and heftily so, too,) tribal brides from forest areas, or women of distant poor, people who have daughters because they have not yet learned to abort daughters, but they have to pay for those brides and their proud races are changing to the looks that are devoid of the characteristic features. 

Today poor villagers, tomorrow your own sons.
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 If women are allowed to live their natural lives with freedom to partake in the age they live in and all possible opportunities for developing of faculties and talents, without impositions of special yokes with overlooking male (- or much worse, corporate and other vested interest sorts of -) authority, the society and future can only benefit; for their natural life will include nurture and care of those around and of future generations. But it will be done as naturally as blooming of a flower, and have you ever seen the alternative - flowers opened by human fingers? That is as pathetic and ugly as it can get - and so is the state of the women over the past century or two, told they have to do z and w, told they are good for nothing else, and told they are worse than criminal if they in fact prove they can do more or other than z and w. 

 Let flowers bloom and open naturally and let women live as naturally as all humanity should - this is not particularly to say without social and family structure, either, because those are natural too, as are friendships and love and so on - without a whip cracked over them by vested interests pretending to be authority "for their own good" while in reality it is for the good of those vested interests.
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 Iphigenia was sacrificed by Agamemnon for the gold of Troy he wanted, and while Troy went on to be robbed and looted and massacred, and Cassandra had been effectively shut up due to being unheeded so her warnings of a prescient wisdom were no use and her kin and her state were devastated, Agamemnon did not live to enjoy his wealth. If he had not been murdered he would have lived a far more just punishment in many ways and had a horrible life he deserved, but he was punished more appropriately. And the Greeks who had allowed the sacrifice, witnessed it, lost at their zenith and began the long precipitous descent into obscurity and subsequent loss of wealth. 

 When Cassandra is unheeded you are risking your civilisation foolishly in not heeding a wise woman, by wrong attitude about gender. 

 When Iphigenia is sacrificed, you are descending into hell, and you deserve it.
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