Less than Divine: To Worship a Goddess, To Restrict a Woman

(Art courtesy of @shuruteaparatha on instagram)

As the year begins to wane, the country begins to change colour. Not all at once, and not in any way that can quite be traced back to any particular morning, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, as though the country itself has begun preparing for something long before anyone has thought to announce it. The air begins to carry different yet familiar smells. Flowers appear in places where flowers had not been yesterday. Strings of lights begin to find their way across balconies and shopfronts, through narrow streets and enormous buildings, into windows and temples and places that remain ordinary for the other half of the year. The evenings become crowded with music, incense, food, movement, and the peculiar restlessness of people who have somewhere to be and several reasons to celebrate being there.

There is something beautiful yet overwhelming about it, this particular kind of abundance, the feeling that an entire country can collectively decide that the ordinary world is insufficient for a few weeks and must therefore be decorated, illuminated, dressed differently, given stories and gods and colours and reasons to stay awake a little longer. Navratri arrives with its nights of colour, Dussehra with its fire and spectacle, Diwali with its diyas and noise and brilliance of light, each festival carrying its own history while somehow becoming part of the same great seasonal atmosphere, a country repeatedly finding new ways to make the darkness less dark.

And amongst all of this will arrive goddesses.

They will be painted, sculpted, dressed in elaborate fabrics, adorned with flowers and gold, given weapons and crowns and expressions of impossible serenity. They will be carried through streets and placed inside temples and raised above crowds. Their stories will be told again, as they have been told for generations, stories in which the feminine can become immense, terrifying, beautiful, protective, destructive, divine. For a few days, perhaps, the woman becomes the most powerful thing in the room.

And somewhere beneath the same lights, the ordinary woman remains ordinary.

Somewhere beneath the same lights, the ordinary woman remains ordinary. There is somewhere to be and a way home to find, roads that feel safer than others, an awareness of the hour growing later and the streets growing emptier, the quiet calculation of whether there will be enough people around when the streets begin to empty. Even the stranger walking a few steps behind can become something to wonder about, whether he has simply happened upon the same route or has noticed that she is alone. The goddess can stand in the centre of the city with weapons in her hands while the woman walking home is left to carry the much less glamorous weapons of caution, suspicion and preparedness. A strange contradictions hidden inside the worship itself.

The goddess is allowed to be powerful because she is no longer required to be human. She can be fierce without being called difficult, angry without being called hysterical, independent without being called selfish, dangerous without being feared as inconvenient. She can destroy demons and still be worshipped for it because the story has already made room for her power. Her anger has been given a purpose, her violence a mythology, her strength a place within the order of things. Nobody asks whether she should be a little more agreeable. Nobody wonders whether perhaps she ought to soften her voice, lower her gaze, make herself smaller for the comfort of the people around her. Her power is beautiful precisely because it belongs to a figure who exists outside the ordinary rules imposed upon women.

The ordinary woman does not receive quite the same generosity. Her anger can become an attitude, her independence a threat, her refusal a rebellion, her ambition an inconvenience. Strength is admired until it begins to interfere with somebody else’s expectations of what she should be. Even sacrifice becomes a peculiar kind of requirement, because the woman who gives everything is praised as virtuous while the woman who asks what might be left for herself is suddenly required to explain why she deserves it.

Perhaps the goddess is easier to love because she asks nothing of the people worshipping her except worship. The woman asks to be allowed to exist as a person. She has desires that do not serve anyone else, boundaries that cannot always be negotiated away, anger that may not have a noble purpose, mistakes that cannot be turned into mythology. She can be selfish sometimes. She can be unreasonable. She can be frightened and loud and tired and ambitious and entirely uninterested in being an ideal. And perhaps this is where the divinity begins to become inconvenient, because a goddess can be made into whatever the story requires of her, while a woman remains stubbornly capable of being herself

The ordinary woman is praised instead for sacrifice.

For patience and endurance and her choice to remain silent. For placing the needs of everyone else somewhere above her own. For being the kind of woman who gives and gives and gives until the giving itself becomes evidence of goodness and virtue. The ideal woman is so often constructed around what she can endure for others that eventually the ability to endure becomes indistinguishable from the expectation that she should. A goddess can have ten arms but a woman is expected to manage with two. And perhaps that would almost be funny if the consequences were not so often unbearable.

Because unlike the divine femininity that we worship, the ordinary women continue to inhabit the same streets as everyone else. They move through the same parks, the same trains, the same roads, the same classrooms and offices and homes. They exist in the same country that can spend an evening celebrating feminine divinity and then spend the next morning teaching its daughters how to avoid becoming victims of ordinary human beings.

A while ago, one such ordinary woman walked into a park.

A woman entered a public space. She existed there, for some period of time, as ordinary people are supposed to be able to exist in ordinary places. There was no grand act of defiance in it, no extraordinary decision, no reckless expedition into some forbidden corner of the world. There was simply a park, and a woman who walked into it. It should have been so ordinary as to be almost mundane. And yet here it sits, another ordinary act that has somehow acquired the weight of something women are expected to remember before they step outside.

Perhaps that is why the anger that followed could not remain contained. It moved from one person to another, from screens into streets, from private horror into public voice. And then came the voices.

Along with it came the anger and the slogans and the photographs and the arguments and the people asking why women are still having to explain that they should be able to exist in public without having to calculate the cost of doing so. And almost immediately, as though summoned by some ancient reflex, comes the response.

Not all men.

Unfortunately a woman does not receive a little revelation telling her which man is safe. There is no visible distinction between the person who will walk past without noticing her and the person who will notice her precisely because she is alone. There is no practical way to know in advance which stranger is harmless and which one is not. The uncertainty itself is the problem.

But men understand this perfectly well when it comes to the women they love. Every time they tell a woman they love to not go alone, to call when she reaches, to not trust that boy or stay out too late. Everytime they aske her to ‘Be careful’ they know exactly who it is that she ought to be careful of.

The very people who insist that women should not generalise about men often teach the women closest to them to behave as though they must account for the possibility that any unfamiliar man might be dangerous. Because the consequences of being wrong are too large to make the distinction casually.

But there is still an instinct to separate the men who were responsible from the men who were not, to draw a line through the crowd and place the word misogynist on one side and not me on the other. If only it could be that simple.

Misogyny does not require a hatred of women. It does not always arrive loudly enough to announce itself. Sometimes it is an assumption so small that it barely registers as an assumption at all, a joke repeated without thought, a woman interrupted, a daughter warned about the world while a son is allowed to move through it freely, a judgement about what she wore or how late she stayed out or who she chose to trust. Sometimes it is something said with no particular malice behind it, inherited so completely from the world around us that it can feel less like a belief than like common sense.

And there is no particular moment at which a person becomes immune to any of this simply because he considers himself one of the good ones. The same culture that produces the most obvious forms of misogyny also produces the quieter assumptions that make those forms possible, and it would be comforting, perhaps too comforting, to imagine that none of them have ever found their way into the minds of the men who believe themselves opposed to it. But there really is no escaping it.

They have found their way into mine too.

Not because there is some secret hatred waiting to be uncovered, but because there is hardly anyone who has grown up entirely outside of it. The media consumed, the conversations overheard, the jokes laughed at, the roles assigned, the things taken for granted, the tiny differences in what boys are permitted to do and what girls are taught to fear, all of it accumulates somewhere. Some of it is noticed. Much of it isn’t. And so undoing it cannot be a matter of declaring oneself innocent and moving on. It has to involve noticing.

Noticing the assumption before it becomes a conclusion. Noticing the joke before it becomes normal. Noticing the small instinct to judge a woman differently from a man for doing the same thing. Noticing the ways in which the world has made certain freedoms feel naturally available to one and naturally dangerous to the other. And also noticing how a man can move through the world without ever having to notice any of this at all.

Perhaps that is part of what it means to be conscious of privilege. Not to carry it around as a moral badge, and certainly not to imagine that awareness somehow places a person outside the system, but to understand that the system can continue moving through a person even when he does not intend for it to. Because intention is not always enough. A culture does not survive because everyone inside it consciously agrees with everything it teaches. It survives because so much of what it teaches eventually becomes invisible.

Oh but we cannot forget about the atrocities men suffer, can we?

What about the men who are killed? What about the men who are falsely accused? What about the men in the army, the police, the factories, the dangerous jobs, the difficult jobs, the men who work themselves into exhaustion so that somebody else can live comfortably? What about the pressure placed upon men to provide, protect, endure, suppress, succeed?

Men suffer. Men are killed. Men are exploited. Men are expected to become providers and protectors and machines capable of absorbing pain without complaint. There is nothing particularly progressive about pretending otherwise.

It is strange however, how these realities are so often brought into conversations about women’s suffering, as though one person’s pain must first make room for another person’s pain before it is allowed to exist.

Speaking about the suffering men face only as a rebuttal to the voices raised towards the suffering of women is a particularly pathetic kind of disingenuousness, because it reduces the very real suffering of men into nothing more than a convenient weapon with which to silence someone else’s. It takes something that could and should to be spoken about in its own right and drags it into a conversation only to make another person’s suffering seem less worthy of being heard. In doing so, it manages to disrespect both.

And perhaps the irony goes further than that, because many of the expectations now used to demonstrate the supposed suffering of men are themselves products of the same machinery of gender that people are so reluctant to question. The idea that a man must be strong, must provide, must work dangerous jobs, must protect women, must not complain, must endure whatever is placed in front of him, is not some immutable law of nature. It is taught and repeated and admired and handed from one generation to the next, often by men themselves.

A system teaches men that their worth lies in how much hardship they can absorb, teaches women that their worth lies in how much of themselves they can sacrifice, and then the suffering produced by those expectations becomes evidence that the system itself must be defended.

These things are not born fully formed in adulthood. They are rehearsed much earlier, in the smallest rooms where nobody thinks of themselves as participating in anything political at all. In the warnings given to daughters and the freedoms casually given to sons, in the things girls are taught to fear and boys are taught to dismiss, in schools and colleges and families where certain behaviours are quietly normalised long before anyone has the vocabulary to call them misogyny.

And then there is the machinery built above all of this, the machinery that is supposed to intervene somewhere between the warning whispered to a daughter before she leaves the house and the terrible moment when that warning proves insufficient. There are schemes and helplines and centres and committees and announcements, there are cameras promised and lights installed and patrols increased, there are statements about safety and empowerment and the protection of women, all of which matter in their own right, and yet there remains something strangely incomplete about a system whose idea of protecting a woman so often begins with teaching her how to accommodate the danger around her.

To fear the darkness, the walk alone, the instinct to trust. To call when reaching, to take the well-lit road, to stay close to the crowd. To be careful and careful and careful some more. The instructions accumulate until caution begins to resemble a second skin, something worn so continuously that it becomes difficult to remember what ordinary freedom was supposed to feel like.

The state does not exist merely to arrive after the violence. It exists somewhere before it too, in the lighting of a road and the maintenance of a public space, in the functioning of a police station and the responsiveness of an institution, in whether a woman can occupy a park after sunset without having to calculate the probability of something happening to her, in whether the burden of avoiding violence belongs entirely to the person most vulnerable to it. A government can condemn an assault after it happens and still leave untouched some of the conditions that made the assault possible. It can build machinery for responding to women while the society surrounding that machinery continues teaching women to shrink themselves in anticipation of what might happen.

And perhaps that is the more difficult failure to see, because it does not always look like hatred. Sometimes it is simply administration. A warning, a restriction, a closed gate, an advisory, a recommendation, all perfectly well-intentioned and sometimes it is even necessary. But when the answer to an unsafe world repeatedly becomes a smaller world for the people who are unsafe within it, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere along the way.

Because there is a difference between securing a public space and teaching women that the public space belongs to them only under certain conditions. There is a difference between telling someone how to survive a dangerous environment and changing the environment so that survival does not require constant vigilance.

Because the state is not some distant thing floating above society, untouched by its contradictions. It is made of the same society. The people writing the rules, enforcing them, interpreting them and carrying them into ordinary life have been raised in the same homes, taught the same fears, inherited many of the same assumptions. So when a culture quietly teaches that women must accommodate danger, institutions reproduce that lesson even while their official language speaks of empowerment.

And perhaps that is why the question cannot end with whether enough laws exist, or whether enough schemes have been announced, or whether enough people have been told to be careful. The more uncomfortable question is whether the machinery surrounding women is actually making their world larger or merely becoming more elaborate at explaining why it must remain small. At some point the world itself has to become different.

Perhaps the lights can remain beautiful. Perhaps the goddess can remain beautiful. Perhaps the stories can remain. But somewhere beneath all that beauty sits a question that becomes increasingly difficult to bury beneath flowers and incense and music and festivity:

What does it mean to worship a woman as a goddess when the women themselves are still being asked to live as though they are less than human?