Bible says:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission.  I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

If God only blamed the woman for opening the pandora’s box then why should humans be any different?

• A woman gets raped – she must have worn revealing clothes
• A wife is beaten at home – she must have done something really bad to anger the husband
• A child becomes insolent – the mother must be ill-mannered herself so how would she teach discipline to the child
• A marriage gets broken – the wife’s nature must be really bad for the husband to stay together
• A girl gets groped on the street – why was she walking alone
• A husband has an affair – the wife must not be letting him fuck so what other choice did the husband have
• A child gets less marks – mother is always busy in office so she doesn’t have time to help teach the kid
• A colleague gets promotion – she seduced the boss to climb the ladder

The list is endless, it goes on and on, judgment, stares, comments – everything always ends at one line, “the woman was wrong”.

Women and girls are the repository of blame for almost everything that goes wrong in our society. How often, when a man fails, do we hear it turned back on a woman?

Why this is still happening in 2021 when the world has gone so progressive?

Growing up with no brothers, I always wondered why I’m treated differently than boys at school. I never played with dolls and most of my life lived like a tomboy and yet when I was groped for the first time while riding a bike alone, it hit me hard mentally. I felt ashamed of myself and inherently somehow I blamed myself for going alone at 6 AM for morning tuition. I was innocent, naive and kept the incident to myself for many years but could never really shrug it off my memory.

I kept thinking, who taught men to do whatever they wanted to do without getting the blame and for women to easily take the blame for it even though they were the real victims? One day, I saw an ad by Seagram liquor brand – It shows a man walking into a jewelry store to buy a small jewelry for his wife. Salesman asks, what’s the occasion and the man says that he forgot the anniversary. So, the salesman keeps the small jewelry back and takes out a solitaire ring. Ad ends with a caption “men will be men” and the ad hit home run. Suddenly I realized that it’s not women but the society who is selling this label that “men will be men” and woman are supposed to be ok with it always.

The endless chain of gossip that shapes and molds a narrative of any incident, eventually transfers the blame for any man’s failings on to his wife, sister or even ex-wife. The whispers that you hear in corridors of your office blaming you for doing something bad to attract harassment, or maybe it was just that your skirt was 2 inches extra short. And what the hell were you thinking by bringing it up with management, don’t you have any self-respect?

The family shaming, social blaming, it affects not just you but all the women, making them insecure, guilty and timid. The crying behind the closed doors is lot more common today, but women need to ensure that their cries are stifled behind a pillow so that the menfolk don’t get disturbed while watching their sports.

God never forgave Eve and made men in charge of all the eves of the world, and so, women keep bearing the burden of the failings that were hardly ever theirs to begin with. Never mind 2021, this trend shall continue until the entire humanity is wiped off from this earth and a new race free of gender bias emerges.