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It’s important to honour and promote Women's Month. However, it is also important to stop forwarding stereotypical notions and over-simplistic generalizations.
March is a very busy month for most of us – exams, annual reports, wedding season, planning for the upcoming summer vacations, and the list goes on. Amidst all this, finding innovative ways to beat the heat keeps our neurons occupied (as if they were idle, to begin with)!
Just when you think that you are all caught up, your phone lights up with a new message, ‘Happy Women’s Day!’ You quickly scoot off a reply too (you’re in the zone, remember?),
‘Oh, to you too! Women rock!’
By the time you see the actual video/meme that was sent in the message addressed to you, it is too late to come to terms with the fact that you too, unwittingly, have contributed to the stereotyping of women.
Here are a few common messages that still get propagated, every woman’s day.
Women and their rights have been on the back burner of history for a while now. It’s important to honour and promote their rights. However, it is also important to stop forwarding stereotypical notions and over-simplistic generalizations.
I would be happy to read an article on women who have changed the world, or even one about a woman who tried something ridiculously foolish and failed.
But if it’s another image of a woman as Ma Kali with various arms holding a baby, a pen, a laptop, a ladle, and everything else you can imagine, it’s a hard pass.
Sorry, not sorry.
Image source: rvimages, via Getty Images free and edited on CanvaPro
Vaidehi is a teacher and mentor who is extremely passionate about pedagogy, writing and the arts. read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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