Eve Teasing: The Man-Flu

There’s nothing new to redefine eve teasing to the people of Bangladesh. People, here in our country, who don’t even know whether eve teasing is a Bengali or an English term, at least, know it is something related to treating girls as a gross product of sex outdoor. The feminists explicitly call it little-rape.

From the time immemorial, in nature, men have luckily found themselves physically stronger than women. And most probably, this priceless discovery of men helped much lead them, over years, to attain a platform which provided them with a conceptual license to think themselves superior to and worth ruling on women. I suppose, this was the starting point since when women had been blessed with thousands of ways including being sexual harassed. Long later in 1960s, this treatment, with the name eve teasing, broke into media and brought public to attention in India. In the following years, eve teasing grew faster in the Indian subcontinent and unfolded many different virtues like acid throwing, rapes, and even enforcement of girls’ committing suicide.

The term eve teasing, if closely observed, is formulated with EVE and TEASE, where eves (females) are though to tempt males for nasty comments, which ironically means - women are the main cause of their sufferings, and males, on the other hand, performs their duty only. I suppose, he who named abusing women as eve-teasing was an eve-teaser, too.

Now here’s a situation (not real though): Sabbir and his younger sister live with their dad and mom somewhere around Mirpure. He studies at a private university and his sister is an HSC candidate. Sabbir has some friends who are currently engaged in finding themselves worm when girls pass by them at streets. One day in an evening, those friends came to Sabbir’s and were gossiping, and the younger sister was studding in the room adjacent to Sabbir’s. At the middle of gossips, there were dialogues like

A friend: boss…Sabbir, you just don’t know what you missed today!!! When coming to your house, we crossed a so hot girl, yer….we couldn’t keep ourselves cool….ha ha ha…
Sabbir: did I, mama?!? Where did she head to? You followed her? I’m gonna give you a pack of Benson if you guys can show her some other day! You saw her in our lane, but who that cutie would be (worryingly)?!?

Another friend: ewwwwh…just love the curves on her!!! When I flew a kiss to her, she just got red and walked past me faster into the dark and couldn’t follow her. L 
Sabbir: she must be delicious, nah!?! ;)  (The gossip went on…)

The dinner end that night, Sabbir’s sister walked straight into his room and stood before him. He was reading a book in bed.

His Sister: look at me, vaiya.
Sabbir: for what?

His sister: I just told you to look at me (calmly).
Sabbir: say what…(a bit angrily)?

His sister: watch me the way I am, vaiya. You told your friends to give them Bensons, in case they could identify the girl for you to watch her curves. The very girl they talked about then is me.

In this situation, Sabbir has to make a choice from exactly three options. 1. Avoiding the whole situation 2. Taking this fact as an accident like tons others and 3. Finding himself terrible guilty of having joined the venture with his friends to tease his own sister.

If he chooses the first option to take, he equates himself to a domestic animal, for both he and it cannot think. If he heads for the second one, he stands for the amazing fun of eve-teasing, and belittles the very existence of his won sister. And if he goes for the third one, he finds himself against him, and coward and ashamed of putting himself into a practicing eve teaser group. And most properly, most eve teasers in that situation would go for the third one admitting that they are losers to their sisters.

Now let’s turn on our girls in society. With the arrival of the negative forms of western cultures, girls, especially in Dhaka city, have deviated much from our own culture. This deviation has caused their get-ups deviate. This is very much alarming and stimulus to the growth of eve teasing in males in dhaka city. In this context, a progressive girl may argue – I do have the freedom to decide what to wear except practicing public nudity. Dress karo baper taka diya kini na j karo moter dhar-dhari hoy select korbo. Why boys have to tease us on that?

To handle such arguments, I’d say – yes, girls have the freedom to select their dresses, because they buy them with their own money.  But what if the freedom of dress selection hampers their freedom of going to schools, universities, job sectors and the lot outer-worlds with more fear of being sexually harassed? Why to ignore the fact that girls are naturally beautiful and wearing traditional and decent dresses would give them an equally beautiful and modern look? Won’t it take girls’ bad philosophy to think eve teasing has just started yesterday and can be stopped by tomorrow?

I call eve teasing THE MAN-FLU, as for the last couple of thousands of decades, men have been ruling women on a mere conceptual license that they are superior to women and have the ability to abuse them every which way they find comfortable. This tendency among men has, later on, genetically and environmentally transformed from generations to generations like epidemics and kept our sisters and daughters severely victimizing. the fact the eve teasing is like flues and spreads among men of different decades through genetic and environmental transmigration might be one of the major reasons behind why lots of government initiatives in the Indian subcontinent failed to attain complete success against eve teasing.

There’s a proverb in the countryside – emni te e nuchni buri, tar upor abar dhuler bari. Bothers are the flu bearers.  If our sisters can’t show the courage to beat them, they can (if not fully, at least partially) save them by resorting to decency in get-ups and movements. Even ethics and religion speak the same thing – decency is the key to escape many social diseases.

In 2009, I was reading an article on eve teasing written by a female student from Chittagong University in Prothom Alo. I know, it’s quite idiotic and unauthentic to refer to any information without the name of the writer/speaker and the published date of the information, but being true to me, the girl wrote – I’ve grown up in Chittagong. Since my school life, I had a lot of male friends. Some are still with me at university. My friends always wished me Salam and did never make a wrong move on me. We made it possible, because I went through decency both in get-ups and attitudes.

When it comes to speak against eve-teasing, we frequently talk of boys’ filthiness. Of course, boys have to be accused roughly by 90% of these crimes. I think, even girls would be agreed with me on the fact that the remaining 10% is in girls’ lack of decency which stimulates practicing eve teasers to harass them.

In order to decrease the percentage of causes-and-affects of eve teasing, there’s no alternative of educating our new generation more ethically. If we can make them understand the simple equation that man+women = human as it’s in ½+½ = 1 and deviation in either part causes the sum always less than human  for the former and 1 for the later, our next generation would succeed in erasing the term eve-teasing for their next generation.