Gendered Rant

 How common a sight it is of men loitering around in their vest? At times vest rolled all up only to cover the chest and making their hairy paunch a sight for not everyone to behold. 

How common it is for one to witness men scratching their balls while they hold engaging conversations around cricket, country politics and world around?  

Oh and yeah has any one ever counted the number of yellowed walls in the city dousing the entire area in thr stench of men’s piss?

I have witnessed these episodes n-number of times in last twenty years of my life when I believe I could make sense of the world around me, yet every time I see them it bothers me to the same extent if not more. 

Do I get offended seeing those ballsy men blotching my view with their protruding bellies? 

Does it make me uncomfortable seeing them address that itch so casually out in the public?

Or is it the stench that makes my nostrils bleed? 

Or is it the rage, that seethes within me every time I am subjected to the double standards, the hypocrisy that forces me to cower in the public lest I put myself to the risk of getting ‘dishonoured’ at the hands of the so called honourable men. 

I can feel the anger palpitating within me when I have to be conscious of my hairy underarms. No matter how much I rationalise the apprehensions around my body, my clothes, my conduct, my personality et al. put together. But what I see is this men strolling at 2 in the night as calmly as a cat purring at the corner wall enjoying the night sky and the moonlit streets. 

Why am I voicing this out? These thoughts that have shared hundreds of times by thousands of women? 

This is to document these upsetting thoughts being experienced by a thirty year old woman (unmarried but a woman nonetheless) in 2021; thoughts which aren’t new and have been bothering her for years now just a bit more every other time now. 

Do I see a way out of these thoughts? These wayward ways of the society? Is there any change that I anticipate? I don’t know. May be hundred years from now another thirty year old woman would feel safe enough to take a stroll on roads out there at two in the night not trying to cover her hairy underarms or cower under the ogling gaze. 

May hundred years from now this rant would seem too strange to be true and that is when the agonising angst would calm down to think of something else to pen down.