Words that Numb

Language is a well-known tool for shaping a new reality, and compliant media are happy to push the agenda

- Peggy Mohan

TODAY, on a Facebook thread about patriarchy, a friend asked me a bitter question: “Are all women saints?”

I paused, readying myself for the magnitude of the response I had to write, about how it was not about individual men or women being ‘saints’, but about a system that depended on the support of its constituency, which was mostly (though not exclusively) adult men.

The word ‘patriarchy’ brings a swift defensive response from men who think of themselves as liberal. What they miss is that patriarchy is actually just a political ideology that has ruled the world for only a few thousand years out of the one-or-two lakh years that humanity has been in existence. One that has grown in its sweep and power as the age of capitalism spreads its tentacles into more and more of our lives.

It is in this context that terms like ‘underage women’, ‘sex with a child’, or referring to girls as ‘women’ in the Epstein files—rationalising the sexualisation of young children—have begun to hit a nerve. All of a sudden, as women come out from under a raincloud, the interest has shifted to the ones who are still weaker, more dependent, and less clear about their rights: children. The beauty industry is at pains to convince women that we are less useful, less desirable as we age and become wiser. And just as we begin to ask ourselves the all-important question of whether we even want to be ‘desirable’, the gaze shifts to the ones who are too young to think such heretical thoughts. A beautiful ‘woman’ is now, actually, a child. The standard of beauty now prioritises youth, thinness, hairlessness, obedience, and the wide-eyed look of the eternal babe in the woods.