When a woman expresses comfort with her body, society undertakes the most desperate and ludicrous actions to shatter her belief. So, when numerous, qualified ‘educators’ and ‘concerned’ parents decide to replace skirts with salwar-kameezes for the newly liberated teenage girls, it wasn’t surprising at all.
Gender equality has yet to cross hundreds of milestones, all of which are related to society’s stubborn refusal to allow a woman to feel confident of herself. Patriarchy condones the era of stick-thin actresses who serve as sex symbols in order to force us to submit to the hormone-crazed fantasies of men. Conversely, when a young teenage girl decides that she loves her body not for the use of a man but because she thinks she’s beautiful, our hypocritical society shuts her up, accuses her of blasphemy, and orders her to cover up. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the wary world has kept a watchful eye on female emancipation and annihilated it every time it’s born. This male monopoly is shockingly reminiscent of the Big Brother era, and it would be wise for us to urgently sound the tocsins.
The arguments put forward by the proponents of the ban on skirts are moot since all of them are fighting not for a ‘more conducive educational environment’ but for the continued growth of sexism in our apparently egalitarian society. The students must stand steadfast against this blatant misogyny to send out a strong message against the discrimination meted out to them; something akin to the SlutWalk, perhaps? It will alarm society, but as the aphorism goes, ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’.