Neither Equal Nor Similar, Just Unique

Woman, a wonder creation has oft been associated with the green eyed monster of jealousy, weaker sex, passiveetc. not and at the same time she is put on the pedestal as a goddess. She has been defined in more than one ways yet can a woman be defined at all and why should she be? In our thousand years of history woman has been repressed and crippled by man. She has not been allowed to compete with man shoulder to shoulder in life. That’s why we don’t know how many Gautam Buddhas on the women’s side did not get the opportunity to blossom or how many Albert Einsteins have simply been denied any possibility for growth.

If all over the world the woman is allowed freedom to grow to her potential, there will be many women enlightened; many women mystics, poets, painters and scientists. They will not only enhance the woman’s part of the world, they will enhance the whole world. They will give man new dimensions because their ways of seeing things are different. Man looks at things in one way; the woman looks from a different perspective. Life will become richer.

If we bar the whole of womankind from education, training, discipline, we are making the whole society and the whole world poor, unnecessarily poor. Unless women are liberated, men will never be liberated. Their liberation is together, because they are two sides of the same coin. For centuries women were denied, they were insulted, they were never accepted as equal to men. It is a family of equal people, with equal dignity.If women had been respected in the past, humanity would not have been in such a mess as it is today – because women are half of humanity. Half of humanity has remained undignified, uneducated, deprived of all freedom, all movement. We have hampered, handicapped ourselves. We have destroyed half of ourselves, and we are to be blamed. Any movement as a reactionary attitude is not a real revolution. It is trying to imitate man and imitation never makes one equal; imitation at the most will make us a carbon copy but the original is original.Men and women are neither equal nor similar but unique.

There has been severe discrimination against woman still seen across the planet.Man has done everything wrong that can be done, everything inhuman that can be done to repress the woman. It is a part of the male psychology, in the unconscious he knows that the woman is capable of producing life; he is not. In that way he is inferior, and that inferiority has played a great role in the domination of women by men. The inferiority complex works in this way: it pretends to be superior, to deceive oneself and to deceive the whole world. So man down the ages has been destroying the woman’s genius, talents, capacities, so that he can prove himself superior, to himself and to the world.

All the societies of the world, all the cultures, all the religions in different ways have been doing the same: reducing the woman to a secondary category of humanity not equal to man. Even religions have denied women the possibility of entering into paradise from the body of a woman. Her husband is her god. She should serve the husband with total commitment and devotion. This is the only religion as far as the woman is concerned. This will bring her into the body of a man in her next life, and then the doors open. Then she can strive for spiritual heights. Then she can become an enlightened master.There are religions which don’t allow women to read the religious scriptures. There are religions which don’t allow the women to enter their temples. The woman has been enslaved. She has been reduced into producing children, taking care of them her whole life. She has not to be respected as a human being. She is just a reproductive mechanism.The psychology of the woman is corrupted by man telling her things which are not true, making her a slave to man, reducing her to a secondary citizen of the world. Men have always created freedom for themselves, but obstructed women. Men have imprisoned women within the four walls of the house and have allowed themselves freedom.

In a better world with better understanding, a man will be both, a woman will be both. Man has been taught to be just a man: never to show any feminine traits, never to show any softness of the heart, never to show any receptivity, always be aggressive. Man has been taught never to cry, never weep, because tears are feminine.Women have been taught never to be in any way like the male: never to show aggression, never show expression, to always remain passive, receptive. This has crippled both.There are moments when he needs to be soft – tender moments, love-moments. And there are moments when a woman needs to be expressive and aggressive – in anger, in defence, in rebellion. If a woman is simply passive, then she will turn into a slave automatically and an aggressive man, emphatically aggressive and never tender, is bound to create wars, neurosis in the world, violence.

Man and woman are neither equal or unequal, they are simply unique. We have to create a world where there is no question of somebody being superior and the other inferior. Beyond equality, women will also have to keep their uniqueness. It would be insulting to have second hand men. Then only we will have an enriched world of man and woman existing as complementaries and not contradictories; the woman becoming strong and the man becoming more sensitive. The redefining of feminism, therefore, depends not only on women rediscovering themselves; men will also need to redefine their role and restructure their attitude vis a vis women.

“The freedom of women is going to be the freedom of men too. The day the woman is accepted as equal, given equal opportunity to grow, man will find himself suddenly free from the bitchiness that he used to feel from the woman. It is time....We can create a world together, with men and women sharing their insights, their visions, their dreams. Because they are different, their dreams are different; their contributions to the society will be different. And if a society can be created in which men and women have participated equally, that will be for the first time the richest society in the world”-Osho.

Ma Naina