Saturday 8 April, 2006

Final Blogworld

'Where are you going?' sounds like an innocuous question. 'You are not looking decent, I mean you are looking fat, you are not looking very nice, I think you should change,' is more distressing. Both are examples of 'Eve Teasing'. The name is cute, but the reality isn't: Eve Teasing is slang for the sexual harassment of Indian women when they walk around the streets. Last month the India-based Blank Noise Project had a 'blogathon' to draw attention to this widely accepted practice. 'I don't expect anyone to think of me as their sister or mother, but to really look at women as citizens who have every right to be out on the streets, without any explanation.' More then 240 bloggers, female and male, wrote blogs on the subject. Penmark thinks the problem occurs because men, 'don't have the opportunity to engage in normal relationships with women at an age where they have active hormones - and they [sic] socio-psychological conditioning is so strong.' Pillar of Life tells us that for most women, 'public spaces have become areas which we need to run through quickly, avoiding any form of eye contact with weird strangers... my life came to a stage where I never left home without a car, and stopped taking public transport, because I just could not deal with the situation.' Twilight Fairy spells out in harrowing detail what happens when she just tries to catch public transport or walk down the street:'boys aiming small paper pellets at my butt or men hitting my butt by driving too close to me while I am walking my dog or guys speeding on a bike hitting my chest so hard that I almost fall with the sheer force.'

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