The Creep culture
THE BRIEF RANT
You are born a man in this world or you are born unlucky. Quite a controversial sentence to start off, I know, but before you come down with your feministic torches blazing, let me clarify that I am on your side. Although I don’t identify myself as a feminist (more on that later), but I really think it's the men who have through the ages tried to tip the balance in their favor, mostly resorting to despicable means. Today being a girl doesn’t only pose the problems like blatant sexism at work but they have to deal with the prevalent creep culture that runs through our society and surprisingly the society has made it pretty quotidian!
THE STORY
You must wonder why the sudden rage and concern from someone who doesn’t even identifies himself as a feminist. Well, recently I encountered a first-hand experience with one such situation which ran shivers down my spine. It was just another evening walk to my PG from the office with my colleagues. Tired and exhausted all we were looking forward to were our beds. The four of us were taking our usual route which, mind you, is a very busy street. So while I and a friend of mine was walking a bit ahead of the rest two of my female friends I suddenly saw a complete stranger trying to be way too friendly with the two friends who were lagging behind. I didn’t give it much thought as I thought it might be just another guy making small talk. But when we crossed the road my friends seemed pretty uncomfortable with this guy’s presence. The guy didn’t seem to deter from whatever motive he had as we tried to make excuses to leave his company. The guy followed us to the Mall, where we pretended to wait for a friend of ours. Finally, I ordered an Uber to get out of there. While the guy got a whiff that there was no way he could follow us anymore he asked for my friend’s number to which they refused. But I have a hunch that the guy was using his camera to shoot my friends but with lack of solid evidence and muscle power, we chose not to perturb the guy. When the guy left one of my friends told me that the guy had grabbed her hand while crossing the road, although she had tried to get him off her hand he had held onto it quite adamantly before my friend had successfully jerked his hand off of her. As enraged I was at the creep I was equally mad at my friend for not confronting the guy. The Uber had finally arrived and we didn’t discuss it much, although I could sense that all my friends were clearly affected by the incident.
THE CONCERN
Although me being a guy shouldn’t have been perturbed by the incident much, it did surely got me thinking about the blatant creep culture that has made its way to the pedestrian events of our society. I do accept that lack of muscle power wasn’t a good enough reason to not confront the guy if we suspected that he was filming my friend, but since this was the first time I had encountered such a lamentable event I was taken by surprise and didn’t handle the situation the way it should have been handled. The other concern that I have is that girls have kind of accepted these sordid events as a part of the struggles they have to face. Girls not confronting and staying quite is what gives these creeps the confidence to misbehave the next time. Maybe it gives them the courage to try something worse the next time. So the next time you stay quite just remember maybe you are making it worse for that creep’s next victim. Although our country can’t handle people kissing with consent they have quietly accepted that molestation and eve-teasing is something inevitable as “Boys will be boys”.
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
This is the worst argument one can pitch while defending their reason to overlook these events occurring almost everyday with a lot more women and girls than you think. While I think these behaviours take roots from ones childhood and lack of proper education, many people may choose to differ with my thought. But, I stick firmly to my belief that if given proper education and the eradication of opposite genders being friends a taboo our society can come a long way to achieve a blissful place to be.
MAYBE THE SOLUTION?
If the guys start seeing the opposite gender as not a trophy to be won or a princess to be impressed, but rather just another friend/colleague of theirs, they will stop being a creep and turn into a bit more human. This can help in quashing the sexism that runs through our society too.
Maybe the time has come for us and our parents to stop being shy and talk about consent and getting it through to our children too that its not okay to ignore a NO.
Also girls please start speaking up! Every-time you don’t there is some dumb guy thinking that maybe singing a song like they show in those Bollywood movies may do the job for them. Also Bollywood for f**k’s sake start showing that consent gets you a girl and not pursuing someone who clearly is disinterested in you.
SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER
You might remember me mentioning that I do not identifying as a feminist, well I don’t because I find it quite ridiculous that a super smart species like us needs to be pointed out that two genders of the same species need to be treated equally. Where have we come as a species that we need a bunch of people shouting on the roads that it is not okay to touch someone inappropriately. We need to be given day long orientations about what constitutes as harassment.
Maybe our species has run to hastily towards inventions and discoveries that we have forgotten common sense and the human in humanity is dying slowly.
THE SILVER LINING
Maybe as a guy I feel I might have been a tad bit harsh on my fellow gender-mate, but fret not cause I am as much responsible for this condition of our society as any of the others. But brothers on the brighter side we as men have started giving a more serious thoughts to these kinds of events. We have realised that in a world which shouldn’t have needed feminists, there is a dire need for us men to not bow down to women rather, just to not look down on the other gender.
I know a lot of you might not have liked the content of this article, but these thoughts had been in my mind since that contemptible event happened to me and my friends. I don’t want you to give me a clap for this article if you don’t feel like but I would like girls to start speaking up and guys to start understanding that by doing so, a girl isn’t looking for attention.
Cheers!
