Why him

About this poem

I chose Anita Hill because she was a woman who had no interest in the pursuit of romantic interest with a man at work, she was interested in working and having a career. Even when women are not permissively letting themselves be domesticated, they are still hunted, preyed on and treated like possessions that don’t possess minds that think freely from men and their motives. I chose Garima Bakshi because she was a med student who had dreams of creating a bright future for herself and was just trying to use public transportation to get to school. She did not welcome the advances of the predators that attacked her on the bus, they didn’t see her as a person who had hopes and dreams, they saw a body they wanted to use and discard like garbage, to hell with what happens to her when we are done with her, we fulfilled our needs. To what extent of time does one place an expiration on the fulfillment of these needs not consensually or even consensually. Relying on the road of patriarchy does not work for women. Men cannot own women as pets, the expiration of their inadequate conception of fulfillment can be one moment, one day, twenty years. They could decide at any given point that they don’t want or need their pet anymore and discard them. If they are not educated and able to make it on their own they could likely be, without a family safety net, homeless and/or struggling to survive, what is their life worth, when beauty fades and a man loses interest. Consent is everything. A woman has her own mind that belongs to only her. There is no excuse for what happens to women with male privilege. This idea that they own the world has gone to their heads. Men writing about women being unheard by God in India is absurd. It segregates and isolates women from the world and perpetuates a caste system. By switching pronouns throughout most of the poem I hoped to achieve a challenging of the gender norms the reader would immediately place on the stories by considering these things happening to a man to allow for a personal challenge of how an individual perceives reacting to a man’s treatment or a woman’s treatment. The more the gender norms blur women could be seen as humans rather than numb to the train wreck of women falling through the cracks all around us. If the protestors did not stand up for Garima Bakshi, the government systemically would have done nothing to the convicted of her death. If a man was raped in India he would not be stoned, the man who did it would be. If a man sexually assaulted his male assistant, he would not be elected as Senator by the same conservatives who would justify sexual comments as common place and brush off abuse as acceptable. Women are not inferior and there is nothing natural about rape and harassment, it is predatory and predators never stop. I doubt my poem will make any great change, but maybe it will get people to think a little differently. more »