FROM VANITY TO SANITY

I found it difficult to believe when three women I know well, said that the most traumatic part of cancer for them was losing their head hair. I have to specify head hair because women not only have no problems but they spend their life time removing hair from all other parts of their body. The pain of chemotherapy, the nausea after chemo, the fear of death etc. were less traumatic for them than losing head hair. Can this feeling be for any other reason than vanity and women’s obsession with looks?

May be I am not quite a woman, because I have never removed my body hair. In fact I cannot imagine how women go through the pain of peeling off their body hair every few weeks, or removing hair from their eyebrows to make them of a desired shape.

Women’s hair is truly a political issue:

Which hair has to be removed, which one should never be removed; when women are forced to remove their hair etc. In many communities in South Asia women’s hair was forcibly removed when their husband died. All signs of beauty were removed from the bodies of widows so that their widowhood was always visible to them and to others.

In my community, mundan or tonsure is a ritual only for boys. Girls are not given the honour of mundan

Nuns in many Christian, Jain and Buddhist traditions have to shave their heads. No attachment to the perishable body and no vanity for them.

For some reason I had always wanted to shave my head. I finally did it in 2013 at the ripe age of 67. I called a barber home and as he removed my hair my friends and relations sang totally inappropriate Hindi film songs like - teri zulfon se judaayee to naheen maangee thee and udain jab jab zulfain teri. Someone brought sweets to celebrate my mundane and several friends and relations took photos.

I felt quite liberated without hair. Finally I could feel rain drops and cool breeze on my head. Being under the shower was also quite a new and thrilling experience. However, it was pretty awful when a fly sat on my head.

There were other liberating aspects too. For almost three decades I had been going to a parlour for a haircut. Each time it was quite an exercise. Driving there, waiting, paying quite a lot etc. Since I had my head shaved, I just walk to the road side barber outside my colony in Delhi for a haircut. Somehow it makes little difference now what my hair looks like. I am certain that the shape of my hair has made no difference to my relationships and popularity since no one liked me because of my hair. I called this hairy journey of mine: From Vanity to Sanity.

Women’s Obsession with Looks is Damaging:

The obsession with our looks is a huge trap laid by patriarchy for us women and a large percentage of us have fallen for it. I wish girls and women would spend more energy on making up our minds than on making up our bodies. The foot binding for upper class women in China, the high heels all over the world, have debilitated girls and women. In my childhood I saw girls sitting for hours with mehndi (henna) in their hands while the boys strengthened and beautified their bodies through games. With these kinds of views you can guess that I was playing with the boys. My father, a medical doctor, pierced my ears despite protests from me when I was six or seven. Even at that age I felt Nature had made the required number of holes in my body and I needed no extra holes to artificially beautify myself. I promptly took out the small rings from my ears and the holes disappeared. Fortunately, my father and mother got the message and did not bother me again.

The July/August 2014 issue of the New Internationalist, London, reports that 9.1 million women got cosmetic procedures, surgical and non-surgical, done in 2011; 3.1 million of these, or 21% were got done by women in the U.S. One in five women in South Korea undergoes cosmetic surgery-the highest ratio in the world. It is also reported that 80% of all 10-year-old girls in the U.S. have dieted!!

In some societies patriarchy is imposed, in the others, women have internalized patriarchy. Under the power and spell of capitalist patriarchy we voluntarily follow the norms of patriarchy.

The more women are obsessed about their looks, the more sexual violence seems to be there against them. The New Internationalist quotes a report that 1 in 5 teenage girls in the U.S. has been asked to send nude or suggestive pictures online.

Fed up of sexual violence, the British actor Laura Bates launched the Every Day Sexism Project two years ago. Within a short span of time she has collected 60,000 stories of sexism in the U.K. and they are all on line.

Will there ever be an end to violence against women, the biggest war ever?