What if Cinders was a boy with one glass sandal, waiting for Princess Charming to rescue him?
“Boys are strong and brave; they don’t cry,” said my grandmother consoling my brother, wiping his tears when he was hit hard by the tennis ball. I asked her about girls. “They are fragile and naive so should be polite,” she uttered.
Struggling to comply with my Dadi’s words I could never understand why my brother cried more than I did. Was he more sensitive?
These gendered messages are familiar to all of us, and we often come across provocative situations which raise only one question: why?
It was difficult then to comply with those cultural expectations. Now it’s even more heart rending with all the claims of belonging to the educated, modern society. Recently I witnessed an incident where a young girl age was refused more rice on her plate. “You will get fat,” a middle-aged woman told her, “Girls with slim bodies look nice.” Nobody else said anything in the young girl’s support. Her focus soon diverted to a smartphone, thankfully!
We live in a society where women have never been in a strong position to lead, though it is very wrong to generalise that physically all men are strong and all women are weak. “Men and women are different, everybody knows that,” says Nasim Mughal, a psychologist. “But these differences are related to the brain processing information, emotions and cognition.”