Housewives, prostitutes and beggars

I recently participated in a TV discussion on why prostitution is on the rise in the country. I shared the panel with a closet feminist and a radical feminist, both of whom were of the opinion that prostitution was better than marriage since the house is unsafe for a woman, and she would at least get paid for her services if she were a prostitute.

I returned home thinking about their wise utterances and went to bed discussing the same with my husband.

I said, “For decades, feminists have claimed that one out of three women is unsafe in her own house. They have told us horrendous tales about how it was daily grind for men in the country to abuse, assault, set afire and murder their wives. They lobbied for laws which would facilitate a woman breaking her shackles and barging out of the “tyrannical household” or throwing her alleged oppressors out, whichever is convenient. They ensured that every woman who had a problem “clearly understood” that all her problems were because of men, marriage and the household.”

“By the same token,” I continued, “feminists have also been shouting off of rooftops that streets are terribly unsafe for women. They claim that everyday nine out of ten women are subject to manhandling, rape, sexual assault, acid attacks and what not. While they believe that, ideally, a woman should able to walk safely on the street at midnight, they are constantly scaring themselves and the rest of us in the society about how women are unsafe on the street even during the day.”

“What then, is the solution for women? Where do they go? What can they do?” I wondered loudly.

All of a sudden my husband had an epiphany and said, “A WHOREHOUSE!”

“YES,” I agreed, “This is brilliant! It is neither the house nor the street. It is something in between – the utopia that my feminist friends on TV spoke so highly of. They have to be right. That’s where they think our women would be safest, well paid and properly fed, and that’s why prostitution, with the more fashionable label of ‘commercial sex’, is on the rise.”

I then thought of how far we have come thanks to the feminist movement from pre-independence days.

We had a time when prostitution was a recognized profession and we had the Devadasi system. The system was severely condemned by communists as the handmaid of patriarchy. Their unrelenting crusade against the oldest profession resulted in a legislation for the “prevention of immoral trafficking” in 1956.

While this “prohibitive” legislation decriminalized prostitution, a few decades later, the Government went a step ahead and tacitly legalized commercial sex and sex tourism, recognizing how it can financially empower women and thereby boost the economy.

Today, we are at a point where we are talking about prostitute rights. While we have women’s rights champions like Brinda Karat who proclaim that “Society should have no right to control what women wear or do”, we have others who say, “If you respect a woman’s right to say “no” to sex, you should also respect her right to say “yes” to sex.”

Simultaneously, all heterosexual relationships have been prostitutionalized so that a woman can claim compensation for all sexual or non-sexual, real or imaginary interactions at any time during or after the relationship.

A woman who chooses her hearth and home is not left behind either. She is tagged with the honorary title of “prostitute” as feminists believe that she is unaware that she is only trading sex for social and financial security, and they will not take “no” for an answer.

We surely have come a long way, baby!

While I was still marvelling at this astounding progress, I saw a news item which said that the recent Government Census clubbed housewives, prostitutes and beggars into a group. What a timely gesture by the Government!

While housewives have already been clubbed with prostitutes, would it not be unfair to ignore the scores of women who have taken to a glorified form of begging by standing before the Courts of Law for maintenance and alimony from their estranged husbands?

Feminists have not only taught women to shun all the age-old encumbrances imposed by marriage and family but also to shed all inhibitions associated with parasitic living. Accordingly, there is no trace of shame in these modern liberated women, but it is with a sense of pride and entitlement that they artfully exact money, thus claiming their rightful inclusion by the Government in the club.

The feminists have reduced housewives into prostitutes and beggars long ago. The Government has just made it official by grouping them in the Census.

Why, then, is the Supreme Court cross about it? Beats me!

Copyright ©Uma Challa, 2010