Misconceptions regarding women

[parakhi]

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2012/03/16/misconceptions-regarding-women

March 16, 2012 By: sewa

It took me a long long time to get out of society’s damning perceptions of a woman and make up my own mind about what a woman is. These stereotypical notions include such nonsense as “women gossip” (as if men never talk to each other and share information), “women are jealous” (and men are not?), “women are weepy” (as if men never feel the urge to shed tears) and “women are their own enemies” (right, and men’s enemies are aliens!).

It took me a very long time to realize that these ideas are just that, ideas, and they are not set in stone. The problem is that they are so deeply entrenched in our society that we all end up inculcating them right from our childhood. We end up questioning ourselves. We end up attributing our healthy amount of gossip, jealousy and normal human emotions to “womanly vices”. I assume that this phenomenon also affects men at the other end of the scale. They may question themselves when they engage in supposedly feminine activities like gossiping (aka talking), and crying (aka having normal human feelings).

It took me a very long time to realize that there is no need to embrace any of these traditional qualities just to fit into the mold of womanhood. But then again, there is no need to discard anything that makes you happy just to prove anyone wrong. I will continue to gossip, shop, cook, and sew, because I enjoy them. But I will also continue to read, write, and make cartoons, whether or not women are supposed to. A woman, with any permutation of feminine and unfeminine qualities, is fine as she is.

Sewa recently won the “nerdiest” competition by claiming that her favorite Saturday night hobby is reading, and she would like to know what pure math is all about. Though she is working at becoming the jack of all nerdiness, she mainly likes to write about the issues of Nepali students abroad, the issues of Nepali women everywhere, and frequently goes off on tangents of myths and fables.

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2012/03/16/misconceptions-regarding-women

[Author]

Posts