@ Kool,
I'm writing this here because for some reason I stopped getting e-mails when people posted here and I want to restart that.
I read your long Women's Day post and as you know I'm in general agreement, except of course on the Shravani issue. (Not that I think she's "shameless", just selfcentred and spoilt, but we've gone through that discussion so let's not rehash it.)
Yes, we should definitely never encourage or even tolerate abuse. But I'm writing merely to also point out that every woman, at least every married woman, unless she has been incredibly and exceptionally lucky, has had to make terms at some point not just with male chauvinism, but also with male foolishness/ shortsightedness, selfishness, and mother-worship. If we've chosen sensibly we have perhaps escaped violence and infidelity. To some extent then as members of this sex we have all been, whether we like to face the fact or not, in lesser or greater measure complicit with and thus responsible by implication for the structural defects of marriage as a social institution. It's a question of where one draws the line; some people have a low tolerance threshold and some people have a high one, and the height of that threshold is based on a multiplicity of factors including but not limited to education, financial status, family habits, role models as a child, urban or rural orientation, individual self-confidence/ assertiveness etc.
There is no doubt that PR is an unfortunately regressive serial in this respect and that it presents a very extreme case of both criminal abuse and destructive self-abnegation. But independent of PR, I get a little anxious when I hear you on your soapbox because you seem to imply that women who don't have exactly the same uncompromising views as the ones you express are necessarily just wimps. I do feel that there are shades and shades of compromise and every woman has to work / think / live/ feel her way to the right combination of acceptance / compromise and rejection / protest / defiance based on a) her understanding of her own limits and abilities and b) what's good for her at that point in time. Not everybody's a crusader and not every crusader is able to live her own life in the crusading mode.
C
Edited by commentator - 15 years ago