By Thulasi Muttulingam
A few weeks ago some female university students were in the news, or rather male student leaders were in the news, talking about the women and what’s best for them. Typical.
What’s best for the women (as stipulated and enforced by the men) is to be back within their hostel premises within the strict curfew time of 8.30 p.m. apparently. “For their own safety”. Or so the male student leaders said.
Why? What’s leading to their lack of safety? The men? So why not have a strict curfew time for the male students instead, if they can’t keep themselves from assaulting their fellow women students at night? Solve the problem at the source. I am not just talking out of my hat here. Seriously, why not?
Some universities in the so-called developed world implemented this strategy actually – quite successfully too. That’s why they are considered “developed” and we are not. They allowed young women as well as men to be out and about as they pleased, yet it soon became clear that men were assaulting women in dark corners of the campuses. The men’s smug solution to this was to rein the women in after a certain time. Those universities’ solution however was to impose a curfew on the men. “If you can’t keep yourselves from assaulting women at night, then lock yourselves in after 8.30 p.m.”
You can imagine how that went down.
Double standards
Men who smugly tell us women, “stay in after nightfall for your own safety. Why do you need to be out anyway?” are typically outraged when they are similarly curtailed.
Sorry, the days of women having to pay the price for men’s seeming inability to behave themselves are turning the tide. No, if you think you have the inherent right to a life beyond bedtime after 8.30 p.m., the same basic human right is also due to women. Stop getting outraged about it.
And to all the slut shamers out there whose minds typically jump to the gutter, no, this is not about the women’s sexual rights alone. People can have sex in the morning, noon, and evening – and they do – so stop hanging on to a mythical timeline on which you can keep your daughters “pure”.
What’s happening with this arbitrary curfew period now is that young women are kept infantilised still, cut off from various extracurricular activities (get your mind out of the gutter, I didn’t mean in the bedroom) after their day long studies. They can’t work part time at night. They can’t visit relations just a few kilometres out of town and have dinner with them. They can’t watch movies or plays. They can’t hang out at various cultural events and imbibe from them. They can’t even visit the library to study. All to what purpose? Why do we keep infantilising young adult women like this?
The main thrust of the argument, when it comes right down to it, is sexual policing – by parents, university administrators, society at large, as well as fellow male students. The male students can be out at any time unhindered, but the female students should be back in their hostels, lights off and in bed by 8.30 p.m. Citing their safety is just a convenient excuse. They aren’t any safer in the day time than in the night time. Although in cultures like ours, certain males feel it’s their inherent right to assault women if they see them out at night – because “they were asking for it”.
It is this toxic culture that we need to change, police the men, not the women. What is so hard to understand about this?
Get the male students who dictate terms to women students on the times they should retire at night to do likewise themselves. See how they like it; and if their continued protest is for women’s safety, then curtail the men instead of the women.
Notice I deliberately use the terms “men” and “women” here? They are all adults at university and can act like it, no need to infantilise them as “girls” and “boys” with the added cultural hyperbole of “girls need to be curtailed” and “boys will be boys” thrown in. That’s just patriarchal brainwashing and we need to strip ourselves of that archaic mentality harming our women under the guise of “protecting” them. They are not flower buds and you are not a thorn. Act like basic, decent humans.
Slut shaming
The immediate reflex by society at large appears to be to slut shame women who claim a right to a life after 8.30 p.m. “Why do they need to stay out after 8.30 p.m.? They just want to get up to ‘mischief’. Mischief being a euphemism for sexual proclivities.
So if your daughter returns home at 9 p.m. or later, it means she has just taken part in a sexual orgy does it?
A number of parents and if not parents, the neighbours and society at large, act like this is obscene. Even when they are perfectly aware the young women concerned were out on above board activities, they feel the need to slut shame women. Call them shameless hussies and whores. Do you have any idea how traumatising it is to live as a woman within this toxic system?
I too grew up in this system where the parents are bad enough to begin with, but hostel authorities much, much worse. The way they enforce rules upon women through shame is a downright human rights violation. I stayed in hostels in Colombo for nearly a decade in the 2000s. I used to think I was uniquely unlucky in coming across toxic hostel authorities who slut shamed at the drop of a hat. Then I moved hostels across Colombo three-four times to escape and found the same toxic pattern repeating itself everywhere.
“You came back at 7.15 p.m. when the hostel curfew is 7 p.m. How dare you? What have you been up to? Don’t lie.”
“You stepped out for two minutes to buy bread at the convenience store directly opposite the hostel without telling the warden first. How dare you? I am going to file a complaint on what an uncontrollable hussy you are” – by the security guard.
“You are wearing stylish clothes. Stop being a slut. Are you here to study or attract men?”
“You are wearing nightdresses in the hostel. Men with binoculars in far off buildings can see you for heaven’s sake. Stop being sluts. Be buttoned up and bra-ed up at all times.”
“OMG! You came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around you. What if some far off man saw you? The whole building is about to fall about our ears.”
I am not kidding. I wish I was. Many of my contemporaries in hostels were severely slut shamed using hysterical language by university authorities for everyday basic things that the rest of the populace, especially men take for granted. I was kicked out of a hostel once because their curfew was 8.15 p.m. – and the CIMA classes I was taking at the time finished at 8.30 p.m. I could race back to the hostel by 8.45 p.m. but when my mother and I begged the hostel authorities to take this into consideration, the both of us were heavily slut shamed and then dismissed. It was a hostel run in Colombo by the Hindu Board of Governors.
One of those main slut shamers, who so heavily humiliated me that I remained traumatised by the experience for years, died recently and had many paeans sung to him on media and social media over what a paragon of virtue he apparently was. He wasn’t. He was a known abuser in his own household, and a bully on the various Hindu charities he inveigled himself on the board for the sake of name and fame. I had to clench my palms till they almost bled to keep myself from lashing out at all the eulogies praising him sky high and set the record straight about the kind of person he really was – something I knew firsthand as a direct victim. Not only I, but various other young women living in that hostel, as well as orphanages and various other charities run by that board have suffered at his hands through such active bullying and slut shaming. All for what?
At the end of the day, (some) young women continue to have boyfriends, continue to have sex – just not after 8.30 p.m., including from that hostel I was kicked out of. Gasp, the horror! Oh, and if you are going to piously maintain it’s all about safety not about sex (we see the lie, we do, we do) all of us get abused at all times of the day anyway. So quit with the lie.
In the meantime, men’s hostels have curfew times too but they are not enforced for the most part. Male students feel free to come in and go out as they please. Slut shaming does not apply to them. They are studs. The only effect of this strict arbitrary policing of women is that they are kept from developing into full-fledged adults via the exploration of various avenues of development outside class times in the early to late evenings. They are expected to keep their noses to the books like “good little girls” and nothing more.
Watching a movie, going to a play, joining clubs and associations, having dinner out with friends – all these simple pleasures are denied them at a crucial time in their educational period, “for their safety”.
Yeah right! Lock up the abusers, not the abused.
(Thulasi Muttulingam is a freelance journalist based in Jaffna. All views expressed are her own and not of any organisations affiliated to her)
A few weeks ago some female university students were in the news, or rather male student leaders were in the news, talking about the women and what’s best for them. Typical.
What’s best for the women (as stipulated and enforced by the men) is to be back within their hostel premises within the strict curfew time of 8.30 p.m. apparently. “For their own safety”. Or so the male student leaders said.
Why? What’s leading to their lack of safety? The men? So why not have a strict curfew time for the male students instead, if they can’t keep themselves from assaulting their fellow women students at night? Solve the problem at the source. I am not just talking out of my hat here. Seriously, why not?
Some universities in the so-called developed world implemented this strategy actually – quite successfully too. That’s why they are considered “developed” and we are not. They allowed young women as well as men to be out and about as they pleased, yet it soon became clear that men were assaulting women in dark corners of the campuses. The men’s smug solution to this was to rein the women in after a certain time. Those universities’ solution however was to impose a curfew on the men. “If you can’t keep yourselves from assaulting women at night, then lock yourselves in after 8.30 p.m.”
You can imagine how that went down.
Double standards
Men who smugly tell us women, “stay in after nightfall for your own safety. Why do you need to be out anyway?” are typically outraged when they are similarly curtailed.
Sorry, the days of women having to pay the price for men’s seeming inability to behave themselves are turning the tide. No, if you think you have the inherent right to a life beyond bedtime after 8.30 p.m., the same basic human right is also due to women. Stop getting outraged about it.
And to all the slut shamers out there whose minds typically jump to the gutter, no, this is not about the women’s sexual rights alone. People can have sex in the morning, noon, and evening – and they do – so stop hanging on to a mythical timeline on which you can keep your daughters “pure”.
What’s happening with this arbitrary curfew period now is that young women are kept infantilised still, cut off from various extracurricular activities (get your mind out of the gutter, I didn’t mean in the bedroom) after their day long studies. They can’t work part time at night. They can’t visit relations just a few kilometres out of town and have dinner with them. They can’t watch movies or plays. They can’t hang out at various cultural events and imbibe from them. They can’t even visit the library to study. All to what purpose? Why do we keep infantilising young adult women like this?
The main thrust of the argument, when it comes right down to it, is sexual policing – by parents, university administrators, society at large, as well as fellow male students. The male students can be out at any time unhindered, but the female students should be back in their hostels, lights off and in bed by 8.30 p.m. Citing their safety is just a convenient excuse. They aren’t any safer in the day time than in the night time. Although in cultures like ours, certain males feel it’s their inherent right to assault women if they see them out at night – because “they were asking for it”.
It is this toxic culture that we need to change, police the men, not the women. What is so hard to understand about this?
Get the male students who dictate terms to women students on the times they should retire at night to do likewise themselves. See how they like it; and if their continued protest is for women’s safety, then curtail the men instead of the women.
Notice I deliberately use the terms “men” and “women” here? They are all adults at university and can act like it, no need to infantilise them as “girls” and “boys” with the added cultural hyperbole of “girls need to be curtailed” and “boys will be boys” thrown in. That’s just patriarchal brainwashing and we need to strip ourselves of that archaic mentality harming our women under the guise of “protecting” them. They are not flower buds and you are not a thorn. Act like basic, decent humans.
Slut shaming
The immediate reflex by society at large appears to be to slut shame women who claim a right to a life after 8.30 p.m. “Why do they need to stay out after 8.30 p.m.? They just want to get up to ‘mischief’. Mischief being a euphemism for sexual proclivities.
So if your daughter returns home at 9 p.m. or later, it means she has just taken part in a sexual orgy does it?
A number of parents and if not parents, the neighbours and society at large, act like this is obscene. Even when they are perfectly aware the young women concerned were out on above board activities, they feel the need to slut shame women. Call them shameless hussies and whores. Do you have any idea how traumatising it is to live as a woman within this toxic system?
I too grew up in this system where the parents are bad enough to begin with, but hostel authorities much, much worse. The way they enforce rules upon women through shame is a downright human rights violation. I stayed in hostels in Colombo for nearly a decade in the 2000s. I used to think I was uniquely unlucky in coming across toxic hostel authorities who slut shamed at the drop of a hat. Then I moved hostels across Colombo three-four times to escape and found the same toxic pattern repeating itself everywhere.
“You came back at 7.15 p.m. when the hostel curfew is 7 p.m. How dare you? What have you been up to? Don’t lie.”
“You stepped out for two minutes to buy bread at the convenience store directly opposite the hostel without telling the warden first. How dare you? I am going to file a complaint on what an uncontrollable hussy you are” – by the security guard.
“You are wearing stylish clothes. Stop being a slut. Are you here to study or attract men?”
“You are wearing nightdresses in the hostel. Men with binoculars in far off buildings can see you for heaven’s sake. Stop being sluts. Be buttoned up and bra-ed up at all times.”
“OMG! You came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around you. What if some far off man saw you? The whole building is about to fall about our ears.”
I am not kidding. I wish I was. Many of my contemporaries in hostels were severely slut shamed using hysterical language by university authorities for everyday basic things that the rest of the populace, especially men take for granted. I was kicked out of a hostel once because their curfew was 8.15 p.m. – and the CIMA classes I was taking at the time finished at 8.30 p.m. I could race back to the hostel by 8.45 p.m. but when my mother and I begged the hostel authorities to take this into consideration, the both of us were heavily slut shamed and then dismissed. It was a hostel run in Colombo by the Hindu Board of Governors.
One of those main slut shamers, who so heavily humiliated me that I remained traumatised by the experience for years, died recently and had many paeans sung to him on media and social media over what a paragon of virtue he apparently was. He wasn’t. He was a known abuser in his own household, and a bully on the various Hindu charities he inveigled himself on the board for the sake of name and fame. I had to clench my palms till they almost bled to keep myself from lashing out at all the eulogies praising him sky high and set the record straight about the kind of person he really was – something I knew firsthand as a direct victim. Not only I, but various other young women living in that hostel, as well as orphanages and various other charities run by that board have suffered at his hands through such active bullying and slut shaming. All for what?
At the end of the day, (some) young women continue to have boyfriends, continue to have sex – just not after 8.30 p.m., including from that hostel I was kicked out of. Gasp, the horror! Oh, and if you are going to piously maintain it’s all about safety not about sex (we see the lie, we do, we do) all of us get abused at all times of the day anyway. So quit with the lie.
In the meantime, men’s hostels have curfew times too but they are not enforced for the most part. Male students feel free to come in and go out as they please. Slut shaming does not apply to them. They are studs. The only effect of this strict arbitrary policing of women is that they are kept from developing into full-fledged adults via the exploration of various avenues of development outside class times in the early to late evenings. They are expected to keep their noses to the books like “good little girls” and nothing more.
Watching a movie, going to a play, joining clubs and associations, having dinner out with friends – all these simple pleasures are denied them at a crucial time in their educational period, “for their safety”.
Yeah right! Lock up the abusers, not the abused.
(Thulasi Muttulingam is a freelance journalist based in Jaffna. All views expressed are her own and not of any organisations affiliated to her)